Community – Sandra's Blog

Engage: Here we come

Engage is only a few days away, and it’s high time to prepare and rehearse our session. This year I have the pleasure to talk together with Jörg Rafflenbeul from Heitkamp & Thumann. We will share how we did split their Connections environment in two parts to match the management decision of a spin-off. The break-up project last autumn was the successful starting point of our business collaboration and we will share the insights and the learnings.

This years’ Engage will take part in Arnhem (Netherlands) at the Burgers’ Zoo March 3rd/4th, 2020 and it is for sure worth your time. Already 400 people have registered and only a few seats are left, so hurry to register, if you haven’t already.
https://engage.ug/engage2.nsf/Pages/attend2020

Our session will be on Wednesday, March 4th, 2020 from 09-10 am at the Mount Kenia Lodge
https://engage.ug/engage2.nsf/Pages/session2020

I am looking forward to see a lot of familiar faces and to meet new ones.

Enhancement Requests for Domino and Connections – A Preliminary Report

About a year ago IBM Offering Management launched their tracking portal for new ideas and enhancements requests around IBM Domino and IBM Connections. On both sites you can add more ideas and comment and upvote on existing ideas. There’s an easy overview of what is under consideration or what had been delivered.

https://domino.ideas.aha.io/

https://connections.ideas.aha.io/

Both platforms hold a huge amount of great ideas. For many surprisingly IBM Connections has much more ideas stored in the platform than Domino. Once an idea is available, everyone can vote up. The originator of the idea and all who voted up do receive status updates when an idea gets promoted.

While the amount of ideas under consideration is much bigger than the planned or delivered ideas, recently the interactions distinctly picked up and more and more ideas got an update and were worked on by IBM.

Call to action for all customers and business partners: Use the platform, fill in new ideas and vote or comment on existing ones, help making better the solutions we use and love.

Last but not least: A huge thanks to the offering managers who are working on it and report back to use through the system.

Engage in Antwerp – What I’m up to

I’m on my way to Antwerp in Belgium. The next two days an impressive crowd of over 400 attendees will gather around the Elisabeth Center in Antwerp for over 60 sessions in 5 tracks. Again, Theo Heselmans organized an event that will amaze us and bring together IBMers, business partners and customers all interested in solutions, products and projects of the IBM Collaboration stack. Thank you Theo, for all your hard work, I’m sure the event will go smoothly due to your organizational skills and will be a huge success. As always, you’ll be the perfect host!

Mostly I will attend presentations and will learn new stuff, interact with other attendees and talk about projects, issues, roadmaps, the past we all share and the future that lays ahead.

On Tuesday, May 9th, I am going to be co-presenting together with Roberto Mazzoni from the University of Zurich in the very last slot, just before the closing session. I hope there will still be a lot of people around – you will hear about how the University is going forward with their collaboration projects and how 40’000 users do interact and communicate.

To all attendees new in the crowd or a bit shy, even if many of us have known each other for a long time and are friends, we still are eager to get to know new faces as well. Don’t be shy, introduce yourself and be sure to be in the middle of friendly people from all over the world!

A glimpse back to a Pink Wednesday

Sitting at the airport in San Francisco to head home, I finally found some time to write the blogpost I wanted to write since Wednesday. Wednesday was the busiest day for me at IBM Connect and I attended session after session and had a broad grin on my face by the end of the day. The sessions that I attended were around IBM Connections and the colour pink was not only a eye catcher on the podium, but is nothing less than the future of IBM Connections.

As both Jason Gary and Baan Slavens mentioned several times, Pink is a journey and this journey just started, I was nevertheless amazed that a first “Pink” part will already be delivered with IBM Connections 6 that is more or less just around the corner. Orient Me (the new homepage) is the first pink infused part that will be introduced to Connections with the next (On Prem) version and will help the users to get a much better overview of the content and will be a big step regarding ease of use.

What got me really excited is the technical concept of “Pink” and the fact that there will be only one code stream in the future and it’s absolutely up to the customers where they want to run IBM Connections. It will run on premises, in the IBM cloud or also as a hybrid setup (like profiles need to be in the own data center, blogs can run in the cloud). What that means is that on-premises customer do not need to wait for a version to be published after a few months that the functions were introduced to the cloud environment. All customers can immediately benefit from the new stuff.

During technical and design sessions we learned that the now existing middleware for IBM Connections will be totally dismissed. So no more IBM Websphere, DB2 or Cognos. Instead all admins should be ready and happy to learn new things like Docker or React.js

The connections pink future is fueled with Watson (AI) capabilities and the development team in charge confirmed that this will also work on-premises. But not only the technical message was well received, the Business Partners and customers should be happy that Jason Gary don’t want to develop “Pink” for us, but with us. And one more thing that will make the developers happy: “will we ship without API’s? “without API’s we will not ship it”.

Regarding the header picture featuring Jason Gary and Baan Slavens: I’ve asked for permission to make it public and permission was granted. Thank you Baan 😉

The next Major Event scheduled – Engage in Eindhoven (NL)

Engage, the biggest ICS user group event in Europe will take place from March 23rd, 2016 to March 24th, 2016 in Eindhoven. Theo Heselmans, is organizing a two day event in a very special location and I am really looking forward to be inside a spaceship for the first time in my life 😉

Continue reading The next Major Event scheduled – Engage in Eindhoven (NL)

SNoUG – A home match

I will attend and speak next week at SNoUG in Zurich and I am looking forward to it. I will present and share a customer story around IBM Connections, IBM Sametime and a XPages integration of a platform for several insurance companies that went live this January. I will co-present together with Andreas Ponte and I am looking forward to this session already.

I will enjoy the discussions and am looking forward to meet many people I know and looking forward to meeting new people as well. Have a look at the great agenda with sessions of 8 current and 1 former IBM Champion. There will be a lot of expertise around and knowing my fellow IBM Champions they will be around the venue for the whole day and open for interactions. So, if you are near to Zurich next week, make sure to attend and register!

Agenda SNoUG 2015

And after studying the agenda again, I just found another session that I really need to attend, not only because of the session title

Back to the Future – Warum Unternehmen zurück kommen

My Session Slides are up / ICON UK, London

Yesterday I spoke at ICON UK in London and gave my presentation regarding a customer story of a conglomerate of European mutual insurance companies and a platform using IBM Connections, IBM Sametime and XPages applications to collaborate and to communicate.

Please find my slides on Slideshare
European Collaboration with a Swiss twist

ICON UK in London was just a blast! The two day event was full of great presentations and dedicated speakers. The attendees could not only profit from the sessions they attended, but also from the networking opportunities during lunch and coffee breaks. A “thanks” goes out to all the sponsors that made this event happen and of course to the team around Tim Clark who dedicated his free time for the last few months to this event.

Thank you all for a great event, save journeys and hope to see you soon on another opportunity!

Next stop London – Speaking at ICON UK

Looking forward to pack and fly to London over the weekend to attend and to speak at ICON UK, that will take place next Monday and Tuesday in London. A big “Thank you” goes out to Tim Clark and his team as they were working hard to make this event possible. They put together a very interesting agenda and I’m happy to present on Monday morning.

European Collaboration with a Swiss Twist

Last year we started a challenging project consisting of renewing and enhancing the collaboration platform for a European insurance conglomerate. We moved from an antiquate chat server and different IBM Notes databases to a fully integrated platform with IBM Sametime, IBM Connections and IBM Notes/Domino (XPages) applications. To top it all up, we customised the user experience with a design partner to create a unique collaboration platform. We’ll talk about the starting point, the pitfalls, the successful results and a lot of PMRs and how the platform is used now and what are the plans for the next phase.
Sandra Bühler / Management/Strategy

As there are still a few seats available you still can register and attend! There is a registration fee, but all profits will go to the Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity

Full Agenda
Register now – a few seats are still available

… and don’t forget to thank Tim Clark for his effort – he will be hard to miss – he promised to wear the “loudest” shirt of the crowd.