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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 😉

 

IBM Connect in San Francisco – A comeback

During the next few days IBM Connect 2017 will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. While the subject of many sessions, solutions, products and most of the speakers are familiar or known for many years, the venue and location is brand new.

So, for the first time it’s not sunny Florida end of January it is (actually rainy) San Francisco and the community is gathering around the Moscone Center and will try to make San Francisco their home for a week.

I am looking forward to many great sessions and I am very interested in hearing how IBM will want to integrate new AI capatabilities aka Watson into their products and solutions. I want to learn more about the roadmap and the next releases of the software our customers built their collaboration solutions on.

For me it will be a totally special comeback to the city we “almost” wanted call our home for the rest of our lives. Instead, we decided to go back to Switzerland and start with our project and Belsoft as a company for IT services. A decision we never regretted, but still San Francisco will always be a city I called close to home and because of this IBM Connect in San Francisco is a very special one for me.

So, I’m back home and looking forward to seeing my 2nd family that is spread all over the world and meets once a year.

What we were up to the last few weeks – Let me introduce the “Community Manager for IBM Connections” toolset

This summer we were quite busy working at the Belsoft Collaboration headquarters and I was much less in the mountain home office than I had wished. But…

A positive side effect of working during summer is that our developers were able to finalize a tool set for IBM Connections that we were using already to support our customers during IBM Connections projects. I’d like to introduce you to our Community Manager for IBM Connections toolset that will help your organization when running IBM Connections and will make the adoption process easier for sure.

We learned during our projects that many customer are looking for a solution that ensure that all or a certain subset of users are members (and are following) certain communities that are used for official communication means within an organization. With our easy to use tool you can ensure that. Authorized community managers have an overview of the settings and the communities that are managed.

ScreenShot_ConnectionsManager_CommunitySettings

The Community Manager toolset is an add-on to IBM Connections and runs on top of the existing IBM Websphere stack.

Not all functionality that we will add in the future is already integrated in the toolset, but some very handy features are already there and ready to install and use. Let me know if we can help you to make better use of your IBM Connections environment and get in contact. More insights, news and details will follow within the next few days.

Huge thanks goes to Urs Meli and Frédéric Dehédin, the brains behind the toolset

Blogpost of Urs Meli

Slides and Reality – Update on an IBM Connections Project

Last week a tweet from my fellow IBM Champion Roberto Mazzoni reminded me that until now I never published our session slides from this years’ Engage in Eindhoven. Our presentation was all around the IBM Connections rollout and the journey of the University of Zurich. The story starts with a daring let’s try this “social stuff” and is now a full production environment with 12’oo0 people working at the University (no students yet). Often customers are quite keen to share a success-story; but not all are willing to share also the lessons learned or talk freely about failures during the implementation phase.

As I personally think that there is more to learn from the latter, I can only recommend our presentation for any organization that is planning or ready to go live with IBM Connections or a collaboration platform in general.

Perfectly in synch with the slides, last week the targeted 12’000 users have now access and can use the system. Congratulations and thank you Roberto for sharing your success-story and I am crossing my fingers for the next steps to come. Discussions and requests to open up the environment for the students were heard, which means efforts on the infrastructure side as well as efforts regarding the administrative side.

 

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)

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!

 

That was not my best vacation – and why

When I took this photo out of my window earlier this year, I was unaware that it would be our last winter up there.

For those of you who know me (even from afar), you are aware that I stay up in the Swiss mountains as often as I can. I even had a short part of the SparkIdeas Nerdgirls Session at ConnectED this year, regarding our mountain life and why that house is my favorite spot for working efficiently. We were renting half of a very old house on a long-term lease, never intending to move out. It was the home where our three kids literally grew up and learned a lot not only how to ski. During autumn and winter, we spent almost all of our family time in this home.

Because of bad luck, lies, unkept promises and an ordinance that we (as non-farmers) could not buy the house, we are essentially being evicted. The entire situation affects my family emotionally much more than I could imagine.

When we were told to vacate the premises without prior notice and with the expectation that we would be gone in a few weeks, we contacted our attorney. There was the option to fight and stay up in the house two more years, but as we would have to share one roof with the new owners, we decided to try and find another solution for our family within the immediate vicinity.

With the support of many close friends we made over the last 15 years in our mountain community, we finally found a solution. We moved out of our beloved mountain house during this summer vacation and moved into another house that is even older (it’s from the 11th century), even though it will be on a much lower altitude (“only” 1’2oo m), the slopes are farther away and more difficult to reach. To us, it is not a mountain house feeling for sure, but we all need to just try to let go and make a new start.

So, all combined my summer vacation was terrible. But I am sure that in a year, I will be able to look back without being angry. So, stay tuned for a new view and new pictures out of our new house and I hope that I will soon find the right spot in that house to work and that it will also feel like home again soon.