I’ll be out and about over the next month and a bit doing a few talks on Lotus Connections:
First up I’ll be at the IBM Lotus Premium Support Seminar in Boston, MA on Wednesday 27th August where I’ll be presenting with Heidi Votaw, Program Director for Social Software. We will be talking about “Leveraging Social Software to Boost Innovation and Productivity Today” with an obvious focus on Lotus Connections 2.0. Unfortunately this is an invite only event.
Next, I’ll be at the IBM Lotus TechJam event being held at IBM in Staines, UK on Wednesday 2nd September where I’ll be doing a dive on Connections 2.0 with a definite technical slant. I’m not entirely sure how people can sign up for this event, but you can try contacting Dave Hay via the blog link above.
Finally (for now I guess) myself and my colleague Karim Heredia will be at the UK WebSphere User Group meeting in Edinburgh on Wednesday (why are they all on Wednesday?) 17th September. This talk will be titled “Lotus Connections - the WebSphere perspective” and will focus on deployment and administration considerations as well as how you can extend the social computing power of Connections out into other applications. You can join the WUG and sign up for the meeting on their web site.
As stated before I don’t tend use this blog to talk about work matters nowadays, but if you want you can head over to the Lotus Connections team blog: Synch.rono.us where I’ve contributed an entry about the new Home Page feature coming in 2.0.
This entry is probably overdue and a little past it’s sell by date by now, but I’ve only just had the time to catch my breath in the last week or so since getting back from Orlando.
My first ever trip to a Lotusphere conference was simply all I expected it to be and more. I had the chance to meet lots of people I’ve worked with for the last six months or so, and also others who I’ve built up a relationship with over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Connections, Beehive and various other social software tools. In addition I got to see work I’ve been leading shown as part of the Lotus Connections 2.0 related announcements, sessions and demos during the week. Staffing the Connections area in the Meet the developers lab gave me the opportunity to talk to a wide variety of customers, either already using Connections or considering doing so.
The reception that the new features of Connections 2.0 got was generally very pleasing, and on a selfish front the Home page appeared to go down well. I’ll be contributing a more detailed blog entry on the Home page to the synch.rono.us blog in the near future.
Aside from all that the conference experience was pretty unique in my experience of these things. There definitely is a great community spirit around Lotus products, and I got the impression that it is stronger than ever. A few other notes:
- Aer Lingus transatlantic Dublin - Orlando was convenient and generally very good. Leg room in economy was on a par with American and the service much better.
- The Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin resort is a great conference facility. I’d put it ahead of anywhere else I’ve experienced including various Vegas venues.
- It was nice to have a chance to exercise the favourable Euro-Dollar exchange rate!
- It helps if you can get by with very little sleep for a whole week.
As ever, my photos from the event are available on flickr
In a couple of weeks I’ll be heading off to Orlando and my first ever Lotusphere conference. I’ll be staffing the Meet the developers lab and showing off some of the new stuff we are doing in the next release of Lotus Connections.
Being a relative Lotus newbie I am looking forward to experiencing Lotusphere. Whilst I’ve been to many WebSphere and Transaction & Messaging/Impact conferences before, they don’t seem to have the same buzz as Lotusphere. I’ve been taking a look at a few photos on flickr and for instance a search for ‘lotusphere2007′ returns 2,940 results compared to a meagre 69 for ‘impact ibm’! I remember walking around an evening reception at T&M Europe 2006 in Salzburg with my camera and getting some strange looks 
Needless to say I’ll have my camera with my in Orlando and will do my best to post up the photos to flickr as I go along, as well as the occasional blog post and twitter update I guess.
If you happen to read this and are attending then drop a comment as it would be great to meet people.
I’ve tended not to use this blog to talk about work much, so I’ll gladly point readers off to a new blog from the Lotus Connections product team: Synch.rono.us
I work with Suzanne, Joe and David on Lotus Connections and they are just the right people to bring you news and insight into where the product is going, and how it may benefit you if you happen to be looking for a social software platform for the enterprise. You never know, I might pop up there now and again with a guest entry!
What do I do all day since I moved to Ireland to work in Lotus development? Here’s a clue…
I and a few of my team have just registered to attend and participate in MashupCamp 5 which is being held at Trinity College Dublin on 12-13th September.
The two days are being run as an open space/unconference with a preceeding Mashup University on the 10-11th. We will be bringing Lotus Connections along to show and play with, with the aim of discovering integration points between social computing within the enterprise and beyond the firewall. There’s already a proposed discussion item about “Mashup Adoption Issues Across the Enterprise” which sounds promising.
So, if you are going be sure to look out for us. I don’t know yet how we will advertise our presence or anything! IBM are a sponsor of the event so maybe we can get some goodies or something. The list of attendees includes Stephen O’ Grady from Redmonk, who I look forward to meeting.
Well, my first day at IBM Ireland has drawn to a close, and so far so good. The team seem great, and certainly full of enthusiasm and no little amount of talent. Given the warnings about traffic I set off quite early and ended up grabbing a paper and a coffee in a nearby village as I arrived at the site way too early. After getting in a little later I sat in on the daily team meeting, and spent the rest of the day in a fairly typical fashion for a new joiner - getting my laptop set up and attending a couple of meetings. Of course, I have the advantage that I know all of the ins and outs of the company and it’s systems, so at least I’m saved that headache and learning curve.
There’s a few noticeable differences between DSL and Hursley - DSL is not a cashless environment in the same way as Hursley, which makes things easier and less hassle as you don’t have to worry about loading money. There are two canteens and a sandwich bar (which was very good) and loads of vending machines. I’m in a large, very open-plan office which is fine. Other than that, things are pretty much the same though I’m sure other differences will become apparent over time.
I’m using a loaned T42 Thinkpad at the moment whilst we wait for a hardware order to come through. I’ve installed the internal Linux client based on RHEL 5 as I had on my old laptop, and am just waiting for the various IDs to come through before I can get going in anger.
Over the next few days I’ll be spending a lot of time getting up to speed with both Lotus Connections and the work the team are doing at the moment. Then starts the job of getting on with helping the team to define and deliver new features and function into the next Connections release. On first impressions, it’s going to be fun!
Today is my final day in the WESB development team, my final day in the Hursley lab, and bar a couple of days holiday my final day in IBM UK.
Thing is, I’m too excited about moving to Ireland and starting my new role in Lotus to get too emotional about leaving. When I started here as a grad I shared the common view that I’d stay for a couple of years, get some good training and a good name on my CV then go off to find something new. The thing is that like most of my peers I found that life was too good in IBM and especially in Hursley. Nearly nine years later and I’m finally off. It’s been a great place to work, and a superb bunch of people to work with. However I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel a little stale in my current job. I’ve spent all of my time in probably the two most interesting types of job in the lab (product development and lab services) and the time is right to try something new. Yes, I’ll still be in a development role, but a fresh product, fresh organization and fresh surroundings will provide new energy. As I’ve stated before, I’m looking forward to thinking about stuff which appears in a browser to an end user rather than designing and writing middleware. The Lotus Connections calls I’ve been on already have proven that I’m making the right move. There’s going to be some exciting stuff happening in the future of the product.
The next time I write an entry in this blog we will be over in Dublin and I’ll be getting ready to start my new role on Wednesday. Can’t wait!
I’ve just had a realisation. I’m listening to IBM VP Jeff Schick talk about Lotus Connections in a podcast. He starts off by talking about how Connections as social software for the enterprise is building on what sites like MySpace and Facebook have done for the general web consumer. I think that my new role might be the first I’ve had which I can easily explain to my family without a glazed expression coming across their faces
