Agile in Atlanta

Live Blog content fixed and a tip on CoverItLive

2009-10-15T12:42:00.000-04:00

I did my first live blog yesterday covering Luis Benitez and David Rosenfeld's session on Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal integration at the Portal Excellence Conference.

My experience with CoverItLive was very good, with one issue: During the session Luis talked about using an iFrame tag to embed Lotus Connections. When I typed the tag, including the HTML brackets < >, CoverItLive did not encode the tag as text, sending it back as a real HTML tag. This had the effect of starting, but not ending an iFrame in the middle of my session notes, and cutting off all notes after that point. The iFrame tag also broke the edit capabilities in CoverItLive, so I was not able to correct the issue my self.

I emailed the support people at CoverItLive and they were able to resolve my issue quickly.

Here's the tip: When live blogging with CoverItLive, be very careful of typing in text that would resolve as HTML.

Side note for Blogger users: I just found out Blogger has the same issue in their rich text editor. :-)

Live Blog: Luis Benitez on Integrating Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal

2009-10-14T17:29:00.001-04:00

I am at the Portal Excellence Conference this week and will be live blogging Luis Benitez and David Rosenfeld's session on Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal integration.

Luis Benitez: Integrating Lotus Connections 2.5 and WebSphere Portal 6.1

Collaboration University 2009 Day 3 wrap up

2009-09-16T13:46:00.001-04:00

Collaboration University 2009 just wrapped up today with three sessions:

The Future of Lotus Sametime (Rob Ingram, Senior Product manager, IBM Lotus Sametime)
The Future of Lotus Quickr & Connections (David Kajmo, Senior Product manager, IBM Lotus Quickr)
Bringing it All Together - Quick recaps from all of the CU speakers

The good news is that the CU crew had gotten permission to show us all of the latest Sametime features and news during the week. Unfortunately, IBM is keeping other news on Quickr and Connections under wraps so they can make bigger announcements at Lotusphere 2010. This meant that the two "Future" sessions this morning were more of a summary of the new features from sessions earlier in the week.

Probably the main bit of news was that there is a specific plan to release Sametime client updates for the Notes client which can be installed separately or using integration with the Notes Install Kit.

Two Collaboration University announcements on additional value:

There will be ongoing education through the year available to sign up for, free for this year's students and discounted for older alumni.
There is an online Collaboration University Campus providing a community of past students coming soon

Some folks are staying around for the extra hands on labs for Quickr Administration and Quickr Development, but I am off to catch a flight home.

My sophomore year at Collaboration University has been a great experience. I have learned a lot, not just from the sessions, but from the ability to network with people and learn from their own experiences with the Lotus collaboration products in various deployment situations. I look forward to coming again next year and hope to see you there!

Collaboration University 2009 Day 2

2009-09-15T18:47:00.000-04:00

Day 2 of Collaboration University was a sprint of 8 back to back sessions. Here is a summary of what I attended:

Quickr Performance Tips: Getting more from your Server (Warren Elsmore)

Warren gave us lots of good tuning tips, many of which can be found on the SNAPPS team blogs. I was also on the Lotus Connections beta call going over detailed deployment and performance options and did not take detailed notes during this session.

Quickr Data: In, Out, Everywhere! A Wide Array of Approaches and Tools (Troy Reimer)

Many issues to consider, including file and folder names and folder level access control
Documents are easy to move, meta data is not
Quick and easy: Quickr Connectors or PandaBear
Use a migration tool such as Casahl ecKnowledge, Lotus Quickr Content Integrator, or DDM migration tool from IIUI/IBM
Mid-level: ATOM, REST, SOAP, API calls, Feed parsing, Web Services - SOAP calls
Harder: Native Notes Database Access

Customizing and Extending Sametime Meeting Centers: 8.0 and 8.5 (Carl Tyler)

The 8.5 Meeting Center is much more extensible than the current version
8.0 customization tip: Just use a static HTML page to wrap the STCenter.nsf links
Avoid direct customization of the STCenter.nsf design
Sametime Online Meeting Toolkit supports a RESTful interface to create/delete/update meetings
Meeting Room Client Accessibility Toolkit is a javascript client that allows adding menu items to the Meeting Center and to Sametime Activities
Sametime 8.5 is based on Websphere/DB2 and meetings are reservationless and not scheduled
There is a simple web client and a rich client plug in to the Sametime Connect client
Rich client is required for advanced features like audio/video
The REST APIs and JSON allow for many ways to do customization and integration of meetings

Going Mobile with Rob Novack

As an extra session over lunch, Rob Novack led a discussion on the Top 5 things users want to do w/Quickr and Connections on mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones. The main requests were for:

Approve docs in Quickr
Comment on docs
Read/update a blog
Manage tasks in Quickr and in Connections Activities
Add folders/rooms to Quickr places

Rob also shared some secret information with us at the end of the session. (shhh!)

Your First Lotus Connections 2.5 Customizations Made Easy (Mitch Cohen)
Mitch delivered Stuart McIntrye's presentation that he will give at the Collaboration University in London next week. Mitch did a good job impersonating Stuart, except for the English accent.

We covered:
Themes - Look and Feel
Profiles - Changing, adding, and editing fields
Widgets - Extending Connections functionality

Key points:

Mitch recommends you only change the header and footer on the look and feel unless you have a solid business reason
Move your theme files to the HTTP server before you modify them
Use Firebug for easy testing of your changes
Additional UI changes can be done through JSP changes and iWidgets
You can now change language resource bundles without rebuilding the internal jar files

Using and Customizing the Sametime 8.5 Web Client (Carl Tyler)

STProxy is a lightweight Websphere based server that provides the web client and the communications proxy to the Sametime Community Server
Set up and maintained through the new Sametime Console
The Browser IM client will use the local Sametime Connect client connection if it is available
Provides a large subset of the Connect Client functionlity, but not A/V or screen sharing/capture
Built using the Web Client Toolkit
Look and feel is easily controlled through CSS files
Functional changes can be implemented through Javascript/Dojo updates

Sametime Telephony: TCSPI Plugins and Unified Telephony Options (Carl Tyler)

In Sametime 8.5, IBM will be providing better hooks for telephony providers for audio/video/calls
Client plug-ins give you click to call, voicemail, and presence awareness
TCSPI is an application layer deployed on the Sametime server can integrate with office integration, Sametime Meetings, and client plug-ins
Drag and drop to add people to a call is a nice feature
SUT does not integrate with Sametime Meetings
SUT is purely a GTS and ISSL play and can not be purchased direct from other partners!!
SUT requires Websphere and an IBM SAN and provides Click to Call, presence, and office integration
SUT provides call transfer to another device. This feature is also provided through client plug-ins from some other vendors.
SUT can also merge active calls to bring together separate calls into a conference
Most SUT integration and features are also available as TCSPI or client plug-ins from other vendors

Deploying Sametime on Linux: The Root of the Problem (Warren Elsmore)

Sametime on Linux is not hard to do
Once it is installed and running, it is exactly the same as any other server
The downside is that many third party tools such as telephony integration are designed for Windows
Warren prefers Linux for deployments, especially for large scale (>1000 users) systems
Linux is more scalable than Windows, has no CALs, and will contain only the components you want (no DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, etc.)

The Other Side
Once again cloning technology failed me and I had to miss 7 great sessions:

Sametime 8.5 Administration: Solutions Console and (gulp) Websphere Admin (Chris Miller)
Alphabet Soup: SSO, LDAP, DNS, LTPA, We Could Go On... (Chris Miller)
Quickr Themes Part 2: Adding Functionality With JavaScript (Viktor Krantz)
Sizing for Quickr Servers: Load Testing and Deployment Planning (Warren Elsmore)
Quickr REST and Web Services APIs for Mere Mortals (Viktor Krantz)
Quickr & Domino Apps Together: Integration Strategies and Concepts (Troy Reimer)
Top Quickr Support Issues 2009 (Rob Novak)

Tomorrow we wrap up with sessions direct from IBM on the future directions for Sametime, Quickr, and Connections.

Collaboration University 2009 Day 1, the other side

2009-09-15T08:08:00.000-04:00

Collaboration University has two sessions going on in any given time slot, plus a hands-on lab open all day. While not as bad as Lotusphere, where this year I had an instance of 5 concurrent sessions I wanted to attend, at CU I still find myself wishing I had a clone.

Luckily I got to see last year's version of most of the sessions I missed in Day 1, because it was some great content.

Here is what I missed:

Installation and Configuration of Quickr 8.2: Best Practices (Chris Miller)
Sametime 8 and 8.5 Toolkit Overview (Carl Tyler)
Development with Quickr: Three Solutions Deconstructed (Troy Reimer)
Quickr Themes Part 1: Server-Wide Extensions and Custom Themes (Viktor Krantz)
Using Forms and Placebot: Three Reusable Examples for Quickr (Troy Reimer)

As you can see there is a ton of value in Collaboration University. These guys go into way more depth than you will see in a typical overview session at Lotusphere and they are available to answer questions or go into a detailed discussion. I saw at least two people get critical issues resolved just by being able to grab an expert between breaks.

Go ahead and start making your CU 2010 plans for next September!

Collaboration University 2009 Day 1

2009-09-14T16:58:00.005-04:00

Today I started my sophomore year at Collaboration University in Chicago. This is a conference focused on the advanced collaboration products from Lotus, including Sametime, Quickr, and Connections.

We started the day with a keynote from Louis Richardson, Worldwide Sales Executive for Lotus. Louis is an excellent presenter and covered the reasons why companies need better collaboration tools.

Some key questions:

How much time can you save with accurate information? (Do you have the current version of the file?)
Who wrote this, and why should you care - are you using credible resources?
Accurate, credible, instantaneous - it's about time. Are you waiting & wasting?

You can watch the full keynote right here!
Live video by Ustream
For the most rest of the day, I attended a series of sessions on Sametime 8.5 with Gabriella Davis. We reviewed the new infrastructure, new meeting center, and the new web based 'zero-download' client.

Key points for Sametime 8.5 are:

Key components are now based on WebSphere, including the all new Meeting Center and the web client proxy.
The standard IM components are still the traditional Domino based server, including the legacy Meeting Center.
Full meeting capabilities will now require the Sametime Connect client or the embedded version in the Notes 8.5.1 client.
Meetings are now persistent and can be used as ongoing team collaboration spaces, with documents, chat, and meeting minutes.
There is also a Sametime Media Center coming (just released into beta this week) that will provide audio and video capabilities.
The zero-download client is an AJAX based web client that provides a chat experience very close to the Sametime Connect client.
Sametime 8.5 is due to ship in Q4, 2009.

I also attended a session with Louis Richardson on Quickr integration with Enterprise Content Management systems such as FileNet or IBM Content Manager. Unlike Sharepoint, where ECM integration is based on using ECM as a one way archiving mechanism, Quickr (for Portal) can be used with ECM documents live in the team places. This feature will be brought to Quickr for Domino next may with Quickr 8.5. Perhaps most exciting is that the Quickr Connectors can be used directly with the ECM system to provide a much cleaner interface for end users to manage their documents, as compared to the native ECM web clients.

Finally, I wrapped up the day with Mitch Cohen covering the install and configuration of Lotus Connections 2.5. Mitch did a great job going through the details you need to follow to install Connections. See his blog for ongoing pointers and details.

Day 1 is ending with a welcome reception and a few beers before diving into the 7 sessions on deck for Day 2. Follow us on Twitter for live updates.

IBM Expands Cloud-based Product Offerings

2009-04-30T13:32:00.002-04:00

In the lead up to the Impact 2009 conference next week in Las Vegas, IBM is announcing several new products for running software in private and public clouds.

WebSphere Cloudburst

An appliance that allows you to host your own, private, cloud environment. This will be GA in 2Q and will provide access to software virtual images and patterns that can be used as is or easily customized, and then securely deployed, managed and maintained in a private cloud. A new version of IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition will be included, optimized to run in virtualized hardware server environments.

Amazon EC2 support expanded

IBM is adding availability of IBM Mashup Center and Lotus Forms Turbo for development and test use in Amazon EC2, and intends to add WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere eXtreme Scale to these offerings.

IBM BPM Blueworks

BPM Blueworks brings strategy and business process modeling tools into the cloud and integrates social collaboration technologies borrowed from LotusLive and Lotus Connections. BlueWorks provides business users with the collateral they need to implement business strategies within their organizations based on industry-proven business process management techniques.

BPM Blueworks builds an entire community around BPM, allowing you to use design tools to build your process models, capacity maps, and strategy maps and to collaborate with people inside your company, with your partners, or with the larger Blueworks community. This will allow you to share insight around a particular process, such as order to cash. IBM SMEs will also be joining the community to add advice and share best practices.

Look for a press release this afternoon from IBM.

My podcast on integrating Lotus Quick, Connections, and Sametime

2009-01-13T10:46:00.000-05:00

In December, I recorded a podcast for Innovations with Collaboration from IBM Lotus software

In the podcast, I discuss some experiences we have had working with clients to integration Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, and Lotus Sametime. The combination of these three products really deliver great business value for collaboration and enterprise social networking.

Click here to download the mp3 file.

Enjoy!

Removing blog themes from Lotus Connections

2008-10-20T13:43:00.000-04:00

Today, Stuart McIntyre and I worked together to solve an issue that is not currently documented for Lotus Connections. We wanted to remove one of the pre-installed blog themes.

The Lotus Connections InfoCenter has instructions on how to make a custom theme available to your users.

While these instructions tell you how to add a page, it does not address how to remove one of the built in themes.

Here is the procedure we worked out to remove an existing theme:

Turn on class reloading for the application on WebSphere

Log in to the WebSphere admin console
Expand Applications on the left
Click on Enterprise Applications
Click on the Blogs application
Click on Class loading and update detection
Check Reload classes when application files are updated
Enter a Polling interval for updated files. (I used 30 sec and then turned reload off when I was done.)
Click OK
Click Save to save your changes to the master configuration

Remove the theme files
Remove the associated theme directory from: /installedApps//Blogs.ear/blogs.war/themes

I suggest you simply move the theme directory to a back up location in case you want to restore it later.

Remove the theme from the Blogs properties files

Find the resource file: /installedApps//Blogs.ear/blogs.war/WEB-INF/classes/ApplicationResources.properties.
Locate the #themes section of the file and enter a # in front of the theme directory name in the format: #ventura.theme.yourThemeDirectoryName. For example, ventura.theme.MyTheme=My Theme.
Repeat for any ApplicationResources.en_properties and any other relevant language files.

Restart the application

Log in to the WebSphere admin console
Expand Applications on the left
Click on Enterprise Applications
Click on the checkbox for the Blogs application
Click Stop
Click on the checkbox for the Blogs application
Click Start

Enjoy!

Atlanta WebSphere on Oct 7th: Smart SOA World Tour

2008-09-25T08:36:00.000-04:00

In celebration of the WebSphere 10th birthday, the Atlanta WebSphere Users Group is hosting the local edition of the Smart SOA World Tour. Come join us on October 7th to learn about exciting new announcements for WebSphere and Smart SOA.

Date:      October 7th, 9 - 11 am.
Location: Optimus Solutions (22 Technology Parkway South, Norcross GA 30092)
Prizes!:   IBM is supplying a variety of door prizes. Learn about SOA and win stuff too!

Speaker: Andrew Sweet, Director of SOA Strategy for IBM

Andrew will be presenting on several topics related to WebSphere, SOA, and key product announcements:

- Connecting your applications in better ways through WebSphere and SOA: We’ll take a look across the entire WebSphere portfolio and dive into how the brand will further its position as the SOA Runtime Platform of Choice looking at the role the hottest new technologies like Web 2.0, Virtualization, and others will play in the future.
- BPM End to End: BPM is a rapidly growing discipline combining software capabilities and business expertise to facilitate business innovation. BPM accelerates process improvement by empowering automated and collaborative interaction between line of business and IT through a flexible architectural style. We'll provide you with a backstage look at IBM’s comprehensive set of collaborative, role-based capabilities that continuously optimize business processes and adapt them to rapidly changing needs.
- Deep Dive of WebSphere Launch Announcements: A focus on some of the key product announcements in the WebSphere portfolio.

Customer Speaker: An local Atlanta customer will discuss their specific WebSphere and SOA implementation experiences

Don't miss this great opportunity to not only learn from industry experts and IBM executives, but also to hear how a customer from your city is implementing WebSphere and SOA!

Please register for the meeting at the following link:   http://www.websphere.org/websphere/Site?page=ugdetail&groupId=12
If are having difficulty registering, please send an email to hcameron@optimussolutions.com indicating that you would like to attend this meeting.

Other upcoming Atlanta WebSphere events:
Dec 18th: AWUG Holiday Party

Improving the Lotus Connections InfoCenter with Twitter

2008-09-23T09:28:00.003-04:00

Here is a short success story of how Twitter has delivered direct business value for me:

Back at the end of July, I was working on an upgrade of a Lotus Connections system to version 2.0. As I walked through the upgrade steps in the InfoCenter, I encountered several typos and procedural issues. I posted some of my issues on Twitter and the resulting conversations on Twitter and email have resulted in a call this Friday with the Connections InfoCenter team and a few others, including Mitch Cohen, Luis Benetez, and Jon Mell.

We will be discussing ideas for improving and updating the InfoCenter to make it a more powerful reference for installing and maintaining Lotus Connections.

If anyone has any feedback on the InfoCenter, including ideas for missing topics, better procedures, or if you have found errors, please comment here, find me on Twitter, or email me at hcameron@optimussolutions.com and I will pass on your ideas.

Thanks!

Agile Atlanta on October 27th: Hyperproductive Distributed Scrum Teams

2008-09-19T14:12:00.001-04:00

Please join us for a special combined meeting of the Agile Atlanta group and the Turner Agile User group. This is a great chance to hear directly from one of the original Agile thought leaders!

Hyperproductive Distributed Scrum Teams
Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum and the Agile Manifesto, will share his experience and insight from helping many companies around the world adopt Scrum and increase the performance of their development teams.

When: Monday, October 27, 6:00PM

Location:
Techwood Campus at Turner
1015 Assembly Room
1050 Techwood Drive N.W.
Atlanta, GA 30318

Pizza and fruit will be provided!

Agenda:
6:00 - 6:30 - Food and networking
6:30 - 6:45 - Announcements
6:45 - 8:00 - Program

IMPORTANT: To attend, we MUST have your name in advance to give to Turner security. Please bring a photo ID (Turner employees bring your badge).

Please visit this link to sign up:
http://www.evite.com/app/publicUrl/SYHFSSKMCQCMQYVFBVWV/TAUG

Sponsored by the VersionOne and the Turner Agile User Group

Agile Atlanta group on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sortCriteria=3&groupFilter=120862

Other upcoming Agile events:
Sept 25-26: The APLN Atlanta Leadership Summit
Oct 27-28: Certified ScrumMaster Training with Jeff Sutherland and Joe Little

Collaboration University Day 3 recap

2008-09-10T10:18:00.002-04:00

Collaboration University day 3 sessions:

The Future of Lotus Sametime (Kim Artlip, Worldwide Sales Leader)
Kim demonstrated the business value of Sametime Advanced, including persistent chat, moderated chats, broadcast tools, instant polls, and more. Next was a review of the 2008/09 roadmap:

Q4 2008: Sametime Advanced initial release, Standard and Entry 8.0.1
H2 2008: Sametime Unified Telephony, Sametime 8.0.2 (Citrix, better codecs, Sharepoint)
H1 2009: Sametime "Next" (Web 2.0 browser integration, enhanced meetings and admin)
H2 2009: Sametime Advanced and SUT "Next"

Sametime Unified Telephony major features include Click-to-call/conference, Embedded softphone, Aggregated telephony/IM presence, Incoming call management, and PBX integration. SUT will integrate with many SIP based and traditional PBX vendors, including support for multiple vendors.

Also look for a new mobile client coming with expanded capabilities including multi-community support. (Yea!)

The Future of Lotus Quickr (Jelan Heidelberg, Lotus Quickr Offering Manager)
Jalan shared some of the ideas and directions for the "Next" versions of Quickr. Look for more solid details in the Lotusphere time frame.

Bringing It All Together (Everyone)
Each presenter gave their best 10 minutes of the conference:

Carl Tyler

IBM is no longer supporting Sametime servers if you use Remote Desktop.
Go get the "Sametime Essentials" database from IBM.
Make sure you change the language version STCenterStrings_EN.properties when changing Sametime static text.
One last demo of live telephony integration

Troy Reimer

A quick review of PlaceBots
Using a c_PlaceBotErrors field to record errors during agent processing
Calling PlaceBots as if they were web services
Don't use PlaceBots for large scale deployments - switch to centralized agents
A review of standard and QuickrTemplates based workflow options

Gab Davis

Choose your Quickr version based on the features you need
Connectors are identical across all versions of Quickr (Entry, Domino, Portal)
Mix and match version deployments as needed (the license allows this)
You can share places across platforms, but they are only visable from the Portal side
Choose Portal if you don't want Domino or if you already have a Portal infrastructure
Sametime Advanced requires a large stack of components, including a Sametime Community server
Do not change the credentials used for the Sametime Advanced services!

Viktor Krantz

Customizing Quickplace redbook is still 78.2% relevant
In Quickr 8.1, you need to be a little more sophisticated with stylesheets
Firebug for Firefox is the best thing since sliced bread
Using JSON and multiple versions of DOJO (0.42 and 1.0) with Quickr
Using &OutputFormat=JSON for view data

Warren Elsmore

Reviewed all of his slides he gave during the conference (which were few as he built a fully clustered LDAP/Sametime/Quickr environment live during the conference)

Overall, this was a great conference. Even though I know a lot about Quickr, Sametime, and Connections, I still learned a lot of good tips and met some great people, both presenters and attendees.

Collaboration University Day 2 recap

2008-09-09T16:43:00.003-04:00

Collaboration University day 2 sessions:

Clustering Lotus Quickr for Domino (Warren Elsmore)
Warren gave a hands on demo of clustering Quickr. This is mostly the same as clustering Domino, so no major revelations for me.

Leveraging the Dojo Toolkit, JavaScript and JSON in Quickr (Viktor Krantz)
Viktor showed us in detail how he does much of the amazing stuff in the SNAPPS Quickr Templates. All of the source code is available as an open source download from the templates site. Firebug was the key tool Viktor uses to develop and test his code.

Quickr Workflow: Choosing the Right Approach (Troy Reimer)
Troy discussed the built in workflow options in Quickr 8.1 and walked through using the workflow engine from the SNAPPS Quickr Templates. He also showed how to customize the workflow further by leveraging the SNAPPS engine with new copies of the key PlaceBot agents and extra fields.

Building Sametime Client Plug-ins (Carl Tyler)
Carl walked through the steps of setting up the Eclipse IDE, building a Sametime plug-in, and deploying the plug-in using an update site.

Managing and Administering the Sametime Advanced Servers (Gab Davis)
Most of this session was focused around performing basic WebSphere administration tasks such as view log files, setting up LDAP, etc.

Tips for Performance Tuning and Maintenance in a Quickr World (Gab Davis)
Gab showed us lots of good tips on managing large scale Quickr for Domino deployments. Key tools are using policies to limit sizes and using powerful qptool utilities for finding large places, managing the PlaceCatalog, and cleaning up unused Places. She then wrapped up with some details on Quickr for J2EE administration and clustering of both versions.

Quickr Placebots and Agents for Automation (Troy Reimer)
Troy demonstrated how to develop PlaceBots, using examples from the SNAPPS Quickr Templates. These agents work a little differently from regular Notes agents since they are uploaded through the web interface and you typically do not have access to work with them directly in the Domino Designer. Troy keeps his agents in a separate Notes database or Java IDE for development and then imports them to Quickr.

Tomorrow is a half day focused on the future of Sametime and Quickr. This should play well to the focus of most of the audience, but I would have liked to have seen some Connections futures in there too.

Quickr feature voting at Collaboration University

2008-09-09T12:44:00.004-04:00

The Quickr product team came to Collaboration University today to discuss new feature ideas with the attendees and get our vote on which features are important. This is a great move to include the community and gather insight to improve the product.

Here are the top features the Quickr team is considering for future versions:

ECM Integration Quickr Domino
Automatic Content Scraping (rules for moving Quickr content to ECM backends)
Lotus Connections integration for Quickr Domino (Activities and Wiki)
Support for Linux (server)
Support for Mac (connectors)
Support for Linux (connectors)
Mobile Support
Simplified Check-in/Check-out
Improved Versioning
Improved Round Trip Editing
Improved Rich Text Editor
Improved Threaded Discussion
Recycle Bin / Soft Deletes
Improved Place Listing/Favorites
Embedded viewers for documents
Single-Sign On
Improved Wiki
API to Monitor Reads/Writes/Deletions in Connectors
Enhanced Lists/Forms
Enhanced Workflow
Hot fix installed (all platforms)
Tools for deploying connectors
Multi-lingual server
Enhanced QPTools
Single Doc Restore

I also asked them to add a catagory for Other, so that people could suggest their own ideas.

If you have votes or ideas, let me know on Twitter or at hcameron@optimussolutions.com and I will pass on your thoughts.

Collaboration University Day 1 recap

2008-09-09T11:42:00.006-04:00

Collaboration University kicked off in Chicago yesterday.

Here is a quick summary of the sessions I attended:

Installing Sametime Advanced (Chris Miller)
Chris (a.k.a. IdoNotes) ran through the complex and detailed Sametime Advanced install. It is nice that there is an easy Linux based appliance install to get things running for demos or small to medium deployments. Unfortunately, as soon as you need to separate a component like the database or spread out the components for scalability, you are thrown in a long process of installing the many components individually.

Installing and Configuring Lotus Connections (Mitch Cohen and Chris Miller)
Mitch (a.k.a. CuriousMitch) showed us the details of installing Lotus Connections, including many good tips on deployment and administration best practices. Chris jumped in with a quick course on social networking when a poll showed that many in the audience had not looked beyond Quickr and Sametime yet.

Installing and Configuring the Sametime Gateway (Chris Miller)
Still more Chris (I highly recommend his sessions when you get the chance!) describing the Sametime Gateway business case and showing tips on how to install, including the need to use the default database and ID names and to leave the server running untouched for 4 - 5 days while you wait for your requests to join services such as Google or Yahoo to be processed.

Using the Sametime Toolkits and APIs (Carl Tyler)
Carl gave us a technical demonstration of the toolkits he has used to build Sametime plugins such as Sametime Wallpaper and the BuddyList Admin Tool. He also covered topics such as extending server side functions, including adding features to the Meeting Center and Gateway.

Top 10 Quickr Support Issues 2008 (Jerald Mahurin)
Jerald covered performance and troubleshooting tips for supporting Quickr on Domino. Some key things to look for are the indexer eating disk I/O and ram and and large numbers of places or concurrent users.

Keynote (Ed Hackett, Colonel, USMC (ret), President, EH Group)
Col. Hackett provided some good insight on the importance of proper information and social connections for teams to be effective. This was an inspiring talk covering his experience leading a fighter squadron, delivering humanitarian aid in Somalia, and running the Joint Chief's planning group. In all cases, social awareness was the critical component for the teams to get their jobs done. (See Julian's post on the keynote here)

The day wrapped up with a nice reception, giving everyone a chance to compare notes and experiences. Day 2 is already shaping up to be a similar set of great sessions.

Agile Atlanta on September 9th: Agile Metrics and Measurement

2008-09-04T11:34:00.001-04:00

What better way to wrap up the Summer by coming to Agile Atlanta to hear Mike Cottmeyer help you learn how to use metrics and measurements with your Agile projects?

Agile Metrics and Measurement

Speaker: Mike Cottmeyer, leader of the APLN Atlanta group
Date: September 9th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Agile delivers value through iteration and inspection. Agile reporting is the key that will unlock that value and make your projects manageable again. This presentation will explore how agile teams estimate and plan, what these teams measure, and how these metrics can be used to manage project performance. The talk will cover four key agile concepts: story points, velocity, defect trend, and burndown and how these measurements can be used to deliver graphically rich, accurate, and timely project reporting.

Agile Atlanta group on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sortCriteria=3&groupFilter=120862

Other upcoming Agile events:
Sept 25-26: The APLN Atlanta Leadership Summit
Oct 14th: Monthly Agile Atlanta meeting (topic TBA)
Oct 27-28: Agile 201: Winning with Scrum with Jeff Sutherland and Joe Little

APLN Leadership Summit is coming to Atlanta!

2008-07-31T12:03:00.003-04:00

"Leading the Agile Transition"
September 25th and 26th
Marriott Atlanta Perimeter Center
summit.aplnatlanta.org

We are proud to announce that the next APLN Leadership Summit is coming to Atlanta!

For the past few years, local APLN chapters have organized and hosted regional Leadership Summits. These events have been very well received and attract fantastic speakers and exceptional local thought leaders.

This is your chance to attend an Agile conference specifically designed to address the needs of the Agile community in Atlanta and the Southeast. Our speakers will discuss topics ranging from Product and Portfolio management to Agile Architecture and Metrics. Each speaker will present two talks, one geared toward the practitioner that is looking for tools and techniques they can use on a daily basis, the other toward leaders considering, or leading, a switch to Agile.

The summit is geared toward new and seasoned Agile leaders at all levels: organizational leaders, product leaders, development leaders, and project leaders. This is your chance to spend a whole day with some of the leading experts in the area of Agile Leadership, to network with with other agile leaders, and to share your experiences and concerns with those who are in the same situation as yourself.

The Dallas and Seattle Summits were a huge success! Next up is Atlanta!

The APLN Leadership Summit format includes:

Networking opportunities throughout the day
Speakers addressing how to lead their organizations to become agile.
"Think Tank" sessions on Agile Leadership with topics addressing advanced leadership tools, experiences, lessons learned, and issues yet to be resolved.
Networking social at the end of the first day to review think tank solutions and suggestions.

The APLN Atlanta planning committee has lined up an all star group of speakers and local Agile leaders. The conference is limited to 120 participants so you need to act now. If you are in the area, or able to make a the trip, the Atlanta Summit will be well worth attending.

For more information (including speaker bios and abstracts) and information on how to register, please visit the APLN Summit home page: http://summit.aplnatlanta.org

(This whole post was copied directly from Mike!)

Agile Atlanta on July 8th: Agile Architecture IS Possible

2008-06-27T14:33:00.002-04:00

Before you start your Independence Day celebrations, don't forget to add the next Agile Atlanta meeting to your calendar! On Tuesday, July 8th, Mark Isham will us a special sneak preview of the presentation he is delivering in August at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto.

Agile Architecture IS Possible - You First Have to Believe!

Speaker: Mark Isham
Date: July 8th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Have you ever been told “Agile works great for UI, but just doesn’t work for large scale systems architecture”? In this experience report, I will review a real world project to redesign a successful large scale ecommerce system that became plagued with growing pains. After the team initially ran to the comfort of a long term waterfall project, cost overruns and escalating problems necessitated a new approach. Enter in Scrum and a focus on iterations and frequent customer feedback, and a once failed project turned into a blazing success.

Process/Mechanics

1. Review of the problems we were hitting
2. Overview of the initial “monolithic” redesign ideas
3. Discuss business pushback on those ideas
4. Discuss push to try agile technics to solve
5. Cultural resistance faced by original architects from #2
6. Talk about the points made and counter-arguments presented
7. Review the revised iterative approach to solving
8. Followup with results on how that approach worked.

Agile Atlanta group on LinkedIn (Thanks Al Snow!!):
http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sortCriteria=3&groupFilter=120862

Upcoming Meetings:
August 12th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 9th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 25th-26th: APLN Leadership Summit, Marriott Perimeter Center

Upcoming Training:
July 31st - August 1st: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Chris Doss, Innovel, LLC
August 13th-14th: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Bryan Stallings, Rally Software Development

Thanks!
Handly Cameron
http://handly.blogspot.com
" type="hidden"> Before you start your Independence Day celebrations, don't forget to add the next Agile Atlanta meeting to your calendar! On Tuesday, July 8th, Mark Isham will us a special sneak preview of the presentation he is delivering in August at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto.

Agile Architecture IS Possible - You First Have to Believe!

Speaker: Mark Isham
Date: July 8th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Have you ever been told “Agile works great for UI, but just doesn’t work for large scale systems architecture”? In this experience report, I will review a real world project to redesign a successful large scale ecommerce system that became plagued with growing pains. After the team initially ran to the comfort of a long term waterfall project, cost overruns and escalating problems necessitated a new approach. Enter in Scrum and a focus on iterations and frequent customer feedback, and a once failed project turned into a blazing success.

Process/Mechanics

1. Review of the problems we were hitting
2. Overview of the initial “monolithic” redesign ideas
3. Discuss business pushback on those ideas
4. Discuss push to try agile technics to solve
5. Cultural resistance faced by original architects from #2
6. Talk about the points made and counter-arguments presented
7. Review the revised iterative approach to solving
8. Followup with results on how that approach worked.

Agile Atlanta group on LinkedIn (Thanks Al Snow!!):

Upcoming Meetings:
August 12th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 9th: Regular monthly meeting, topic TBA
September 25th-26th: APLN Leadership Summit, Marriott Perimeter Center

Upcoming Training:
July 31st - August 1st: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Chris Doss, Innovel, LLC
August 13th-14th: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Bryan Stallings, Rally Software Development

What Twitter is for: Communities of Purpose

2008-06-26T15:49:00.002-04:00

David Cushman has blogged that Twitter Isn't About Conversation - It's About Forming Groups.

This is a great point. Much of the value I get from Twitter is getting a feel for how the community is thinking about various subjects. Many times someone tweats on an idea or links to a new article which triggers a discussion and gets more new ideas flowing.

...
Twitter is for forming groups - communities of purpose. Communities of purpose may be adhoc. They may come together to solve a shared problem for a short period and then disband, often with overlaps, as they evolve toward the next purpose. And Twitter is exceptional at doing this - because of its architecture, because of the
fuzzy-edge nature of the way groups form, reform and evolve.
The open sharing of our metadata, in the form of 'status updates' or 'look at this conversation-starting link' or 'look who I'm talking to' kind of tweets help us find our right-now community of purpose and start a conversation within it.

See David's post to read more.

Cool Enterprise 2.0 chart

2008-06-18T10:29:00.003-04:00

Michael Pincher linked to a cool Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint by R. Todd Stevens.

This chart brings together a model of Business Drivers, Actors, Technology, Methods, and Value-Add for Enterprise 2.0. I have printed a copy for my wall as a great reference of all of the things to consider when bringing organizations up to speed with the latest in social and collaborative technology.

Thanks R. Todd!

New Lotus product wikis encourage a better community

2008-06-16T21:18:00.005-04:00

As Ed Brill just pointed out, the Lotus DeveloperWorks team just changed all of the product wikis from the previous Confluence based engine to a new Domino-based platform. You can read details of all of the new features here.

This is really a great step forward for the Lotus wikis. The previous implementation for the Lotus wikis was locked down pretty tight, did not do much to make the layout pretty or easy to read, and generally seemed pretty disorganized.

In this new platform, Lotus and the community realize several benefits:

The look and feel is very pretty and matches the new Quickr / Connections / Sametime UIs.
Better navigation, tag clouds, RSS feeds, and search capabilities make the content of the wikis much more accessible.
Most importantly, all of the content is now editable using your regular IBM/Lotus web login (assuming you can find the right one). There is even a $25 incentive for the first 50 new, significant articles by external people.
The wiki is using Lotus technology*, which is good considering they sell a product with a wiki.

Perhaps the only drawback I see so far is that the article editing is just a simple rich text field and misses the one key feature that makes a wiki a wiki, which is auto-linking to existing and future content. I'll talk more on that in a future post ...

*Don't get me wrong - I love Confluence. It and its sister product,
JIRA, are two of the best Java applications I have had the pleasure to
work with (and I spent 7 years running Java development teams)
including feature capabilities, deployment, administration, and an easy
to manage plug-in environment with a strong community. Features like
proper forward linking to new documents, auto save, and great
extensions like the charting plug-in make Confluence a great tool to
work in. Quickr, Sharepoint, and many others have a long way to go in
understanding that a wiki is more than just an editable rich text field!

IBM shows Microsoft that social computing is about the people

2008-06-09T13:43:00.006-04:00

This morning, IBM and Microsoft presented Lotus Connections and Sharepoint in a head-to-head demo of social networking platforms. Of course, the play by play got published instantly on the public social networks.

Apparently Microsoft focused on email and document management, which did not wow the crowd. IBM got points for talking about how social networking is about the people. Quotes included "MS failing dismally at showing off Sharepoint collab tools. IBM totally ate their lunch.".

A few blog posts on the session:

IBM wins round 1 against Microsoft!
Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft
Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 1
Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 2

Finally, the conference has a social page devoted to the session:
Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft

Agile Atlanta: Executable Specification and Behavior Driven Development

2008-06-05T15:45:00.001-04:00

June's Agile Atlanta meeting is coming up on Tuesday!

Executable Specification and Behavior Driven Development

Speaker: Bob Vincent
Date: June 10th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Bob will be presenting a paper he is delivering to the IBM Academy of Technology Agile Practices and Methods Conference.

Upcoming Meetings:
July 8th: Agile Architecture IS Possible - You First Have to Believe!, presented by Mark Isham (see http://submissions.agile2008.org/node/2835 for more details)

Upcoming Training:
June 19th: Agile Roadmapping , delivered by Peter Hodgkins with Agile University
August 13th-14th: Certified ScrumMaster, trainer: Bryan Stallings, Rally Software Development

Setting up a WebSphere 6.1 cluster to restart automatically

2008-05-21T08:20:00.004-04:00

Starting with WebSphere 6.1, the node manager and servers are no longer automatically installed as Windows services. This actually can resolve a lot of headaches caused if the services start in the wrong sequence. However, in many situations you do want everything to restart automatically, especially if your production server gets rebooted in the middle of the night!

Here are the instructions to get the servers in a WebSphere cluster to recover automatically. We set these up on a Lotus Connections cluster and now system restarts go much smoother.

Setting up the WebSphere Node Manager as a Windows service

First, you need to set up the Node Manager on each physical server to run as a service and restart after a reboot:

Open a Command Window and go to the ..\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\bin directory
Type in the following command (adjusted for your install paths):

WASService -add "IBM WebSphere Node Agent" -servername nodeagent -profilePath D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01 -wasHome D:\IBM\Websphere\Appserver -logFile D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent\startNode.log -logRoot D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent -restart true -startType automatic

Setting up the member servers to automatically restart

Once the Node Manager is running as a service, you need to set the individual WebSphere servers to automatically restart using the following steps:

Log in to the Integrated Solutions Console
Navigate to Servers > Application servers > servername
Expand Java and Process Management and click on Monitoring Policy
Change the Node restart state to RUNNING
Click Apply
Click Save to save the master configuration
Repeat for each server in the cluster

Resources:

WebSphere InfoCenter: WASService Command
WebSphere InfoCenter: Monitoring Policy Settings
WebSphere World forum post on using WASService