Category Archives: IBM

Lotusphere 2008

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Lotusphere 2008 Beach Party 2

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

Attending Lotusphere 2008

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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.

Lotus Connections team blog

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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!

First day

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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!

Farewell Hursley

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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!

Explaining my work

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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 ;-)

I’ve resigned…

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Yes. I’m leaving IBM UK.

To join IBM in Ireland ;-)

I’m taking up a Development Lead role working on Lotus Connections. Due to the way that IBM is structured, moving from one country to another means resigning from the UK company to join another IBM company, which is a bit bizarre, but no big deal. Needless to say my management have been involved in this process from the beginning and it is really not much different from an internal job move. That is apart from the change of salary currency, pension, benefits… ;-)

Whilst I’ll be sad to leave Hursley and the WebSphere family, I am very excited about joining the WPLC part of IBM Software Group, and super-duper excited to be working on a product which really ties in with my growing interest in all things around web 2.0 / social networking. Middleware is great stuff to work on, but I’m looking forward to getting a bit closer to the end-user.

Technically, I’m still awaiting the paperwork from the Dublin side to arrive, but my manager has assured me the resignation can be withdrawn should it need to be. All things being well however Lana and I will be over in Dublin from the start of June to begin a new chapter in our personal and work lives, and I can’t wait!

Dublin move ramping up

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Well, since we returned from our recent visit to Dublin, things regarding our move over there have been proceeding nicely. The most important thing is that I appear to have found what is probably pretty close to my dream job over there. It’s not quite at the point where I can let the world know, but suffice to say I am very happy with how it is panning out. What’s certain is that it will provide me with a great new challenge and some really cool technologies to work on.

We are very much on track for moving over around the start of June, so lots of practical considerations are coming to bear. Things like getting a PRSI (social security) number, getting banking sorted out and not least working out how we are going to get the rest of our stuff over there.

Accommodation-wise we will probably stay with Lana’s parents to begin with whilst we search for a rental place in the first instance. The housing market in Ireland is probably in a more precarious state than in the UK at the moment so we aren’t immediately going to get ourselves on the ladder over there.

So, watch this space for more news!

SCA 1.0 specifications released

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The Open SOA organisation have released Version 1.0 of the Service Component Architecture specifications. OSOA is a collaboration of a number of vendors, including IBM, who are aiming to produce a language neutral programming language for SOA infrastructures. The initial seed for the work was based on work done at IBM to produce the programming model we have today in WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB, and which was then made public in collaboration with BEA and then the now 18 strong OSOA group. The work to produce 1.0 specifications represents a significant evolution of the SCA architecture in a number of areas, not least of which is the introduction of additional language/component implementations for not only Java but Spring, BPEL and C++ as well .

There have been a fair few people at Hursley working on various parts of the specifications, especially around the JMS Bindings, C++ implementation and the policy framework, so congratulations to them especially.

An important and very encouraging aspect of the news today is that the SCA specifications will be contributed to OASIS for future development. Formalising them through such a standards body will help to drive their adoption. If SCA is a programming model for SOA, then SDO is the data model, and that too has been given an (old) new home in the JCP.

More coverage at TSS, eWeek, and Dana Gardner (ZDNet).

Coming to a close in Rochester

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I’ve one morning of meetings left before I head back home on Friday, landing back in England on Saturday morning. It’s been a very good week. Most of it has been spent in a room with three of us, including a guy from our research lab in Haifa, Israel. We’ve been having lots of discussions about how we might want to integrate some research technology into WESB/WPS, pulling in various other people along the way to offer advice and answers to our questions, including Billy. Unfortunately, I had to be elsewhere during that meeting, so didn’t get the chance to get introduced. Things went so well that we managed to produce a pretty functional prototype.

Today I drove up Highway 52 to Minneapolis to visit a couple of customers. First up was a customer currently in the process of evaluating their needs for an ESB. I took them through a technically-biased introduction to WebSphere ESB, and some good discussion ensued. One refreshing thing about this meeting was that there was no projector, meaning I spent an hour and a half talking with them rather than presenting to them. It is surprising how much more interesting this makes the session, and certainly promotes two-way interactions. We did duck out with some of the developers in the audience at the end to another room so I could show them the WebSphere Integration Developer tooling.

The second meeting was slightly different in that the customer has another vendor incumbent, and it was more of a level-set on our SOA and ESB strategy, covering what we see as being the necessary capabilities of an ESB. For this one I did use a deck purely because there was so much more to cover in terms of introducing WebSphere ESB, Message Broker, Datapower and supporting products such as Datastage TX, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA. This meeting was very, very interactive – probably a result of the audience having a greater business and architecture bias. We had some good discussions about some of their explicit requirements around issues such as how batch and file transfer fits into the bus, if at all.

On a lighter note, I spent a couple of hours after the meetings wandering around the Mall of America by Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. MOA is the largest shopping mall in the USA, and it’s certainly impressive. I was surprised to find a mini-theme park inside complete with a couple of rollercoasters. It also has an underground aquarium along with more restaurants than you could hope to eat in. The usual array of shops were present, including an Apple Store ;-) I resisted the temptation to buy anything, after all, I’ve got a wedding coming up!

The weather today has warmed up a bit from earlier in the week when it was colder than I’ve ever experienced before. Listening to one weather report on Tuesday morning it was -13C, which is probably not that cold, but it felt like it to me! Places in the far North of the state were -18F (-25C), which doesn’t even bear thinking about! I’m surprised at how quickly I got used to the cold though, and I suspect it is just one of those things you get used to out here.