Agile in Atlanta

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

Agile Atlanta on May 13th: Delivering Quality Software

2008-05-12T11:20:00.004-04:00

May's Agile Atlanta meeting is coming up tomorrow night!

Delivering Quality Software Using Agile Development Practices

Speaker: Jann Thomas, a Development Manager for DataPath, Inc. in Duluth
Date: May 13th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Delivering quality software on time is an art. Using development methods where weeks of testing follows weeks of development may have the following issues: The software team does not know when it is done, there is no list of what works only what does not, it is hard to determine what is in a build, the highest priority thing today may not be the highest priority thing tomorrow, there is tension between the software developers and software testers, the focus of team members can be on proving they are right instead of delivering software.

This presentation will give an Agile method for delivering software that is currently in practice in which, for every week of development there is a week of testing. Using this process, a team of developers and testing analyst have successfully delivered quarterly releases of management and control software for satellite communications with higher quality. By focusing on delivering our customer's highest priority features and fixes, this team has improved customer satisfaction.

One of the key elements to delivering software on time is to know when a unit of work is done. By integrating the software testers into the development team, the team can insure that each element delivered can be verified as complete. Furthermore, by creating a regression team that can test intermediate deliveries of software before the final release very focused functional testing can be per-formed and the quality of the product as a whole can be elevated.

Many methodologies describe the benefits of having the test team working on the software as early as possible. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate an Agile method of delivering on that expectation.

Upcoming Meetings:
June 10th: Introduction to Domain Driven Design, presented by Barry Hawkins

Upcoming Training:
May 29th - 30th: Certified ScrumMaster, delivered by Innovel, LLC
June 19th: Agile Roadmapping , delivered by Peter Hodgkins with Agile University

An elephant never forgets?... but Exchange does

2008-04-30T20:45:00.003-04:00

Yet another article on how migrating from Lotus Notes to Exchange destroyed the White House's ability to properly archive their email, as required by law.

An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush's lost e-mails

Maybe the headlines should be something about how using Exchange can lead you to criminal behavior ...

MilkSync: Remember the Milk for Blackberry

2008-04-24T16:30:00.004-04:00

Remember the Milk is a wonderful service for managing my to do lists, for home and for work. I am not quite up to full GTD speed, but RTM is helping me get closer. Until now, I have been using the Blackberry's browser (or Opera Mini) to manage my lists while I am mobile or otherwise can't get to the nice AJAX UI on the main site.

Yesterday, MilkSync for Blackberry was released which synchronizes my online tasks into the Blackberry Tasks application. Previously, I found Tasks to be not very useful and had even deleted it to save memory. Now that I can use it as a mobile extension of RTM, I may be using it all the time!

Here is my initial experience:

First, MilkSync did not want to download because it did not recognize the 4.5 beta OS I am testing. I sent a support email to the RTM folks and 5 minutes later, they had a new point release published that allowed the download to 4.5. (Now that's some top notch service!)

Once that was done, downloading and installing the application OTA went smoothly. After a brief pause to reinstall Tasks, MilkSync was up and running fine.

The sync to the Blackberry and update back to Remember the Milk worked exactly as described on the product page. Time to get that "Sign up for RTM Pro" task completed and support these folks!

One feature idea: I don't use Lists at all as Tags are much more flexible for my needs. It would be cool if the application had a switch to load Tags into the Blackberry categories instead of the Lists. (Tags are a better semantic match to Categories anyway.)

Impact 2008 vs Lotusphere: Opening Session smackdown

2008-04-07T20:00:00.002-04:00

I know that the various IBM brands are always trying to out do each other. Here's my observations of the opening sessions at Impact 2008 happening this week at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas vs Lotusphere which was at Disney in Orlando back in January.

Round One: Room

Lotusphere: Lotus did not have a room available big enough for everyone and had to run the opening session twice.

Impact: The MGM Grand arena comfortable fit all 6,500 attendees.

Winner: Impact. The arena was really designed for a stage presentation like this. The ballroom in the Dolphin, not so much.

Round Two: Opening Show

Lotusphere: Orlando Symphony Orchestra playing Zepplin's Kashmir along with a rock band and headlining a very pretty lady playing a sweet electric violin. Go search YouTube for the videos.

Impact: Started with a marching band playing Tusk, followed by the CIO of Harley-Davidson riding in on hog. Next 4 (take that Lotus!) lady violinists came out on stage with Cirque Du Solei acrobats doing tricks on ribbons over their heads.

Winner: Tie. Impact's overall show was bigger (hey, we're in Vegas!) and really good, but the shear quality of the OSO brings Lotus back in the race. I think people at both events would have been happy for the show to just continue for the whole keynote!

Round Three: Guest Speaker

Lotusphere: Bob Costas. Many blog posts went out saying 'who?'. I actually liked Bob's speech pretty well, but it was a little dry and forgettable.

Impact 2008: Drew Carey. Not only did Drew tie in many of his jokes to IBM/SOA (and his lack of knowledge of them), he brought on the Whose Line is it Anyway? crew and continued to host the event until it wrapped up with him and the WebSphere executive walking blindfolded through a field of armed mousetraps.

Winner: Impact. This one was a little unfair as a decent comedian is probably always going to be a sportscaster. I especially liked that Drew acted as the actual host for the event and was not just an inserted entertainment.

Round Four: Content

Lotusphere: Lotusphere had a lot of live demos on new and improved products and gave a clear roadmap for the future. I know several people who walked into the session fairly apathetic to Lotus' future and who came out with renewed excitement.

Impact: IBM had a lot of statistics, 'we love partners', and talk of how SOA is great, but you sell it through talking about business value. Most of these segments were tedious and the only reason I didn't fall asleep was the breaks with Drew Carey and the Whose Line crew. The only highlight was the Harley-Davidson CIO demonstrating his online 'SOA' app, but most of us were left thinking that it looked basically like a Google Maps mashup.

Winner: Lotusphere. Live demos and real products will beat vague statistics and cheerleading every time.

Round Five: News and Product Announcements

Lotusphere: New versions of Domino, Connections, Quickr, Sametime, and more were announced along with new product surprises like Lotus Foundations server and BlueHouse.

Impact: WebSphere Business Events and the SmartSOA Social Network. One is just a rename of existing functionality and one is not available yet and is really just an install of a Lotus Connections 2.0 install, with a few customizations.

Winner: Lotusphere by a landslide. Lotus does a great job of building the excitement in the community every year to look for cool new products and annoucements in their opening session. Impact had no major annoucements and strangely has delayed the real product annoucements for sessions and for keynotes later in the week.

Grand Prize

It's a tie on rounds. Impact was more entertaining, but that was when IBM was not talking. I think we have to give Lotusphere the overall win because everyone left the room very excited about learning more about the new products during the conference. At Impact, we were just glad to move on to the next session.

Agile Atlanta: Project Steerage, Sliced Icebergs and Boiled Frogs

2008-04-07T14:41:00.001-04:00

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

Project Steerage, Sliced Icebergs and Boiled Frogs: How you can introduce Scrum and save your ship

Speaker: Ken Ritchie
Date: April 8th, 6:45 PM
Location: IBM-ISS (6303 Barfield Rd NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30328)

Did you ever find yourself working on a company internal project? Were there any risks or issues concerning requirements, scope, budget, tools, expertise, team turnover, progress, or expectations? Was the project ever re-scoped, re-launched, re-started...or canceled?

Ken Ritchie will present an experience report from his past few years as an agile trainer and coach -- with some success stories emerging from troubled projects. We will include an open discussion, so you can ask questions and share insights from your own "war stories" of good, bad, and ugly projects!

Upcoming Meetings:
May 13th: How to implement Agile development practices integrated with testing, presented by Jann Thomas

Heading to Impact 2008, getting started with Twitter

2008-04-05T12:52:00.003-04:00

I am packing this afternoon to go to IBM's Impact 2008 conference in Las Vegas. After a few slow years of too much marketing hype, this year's conference is packed full of good technical content. Using the online scheduling tool, I have 3 - 4 conflicts on almost every presentation slot.

Even better, they have great keynote speakers, Drew Carey is hosting the whole week, and the B52's are playing the party as one of the first shows after their new album release.

During the conference I will be moderating the SOA JAM to help keep the online discussion rolling.

Finally, to keep myself connected, I have finally set myself up with Twitter. I am in the process of signing up to follow people. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/handly