Month: January 2006

Best Bikist
Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo.

Some how this years race snuck up on me and I didn’t even know about it until last Wednesday when I was enjoying 80+ degree weather in Orlando, Florida. As it turned out I had some previous commitments on the day, so I was only able to drop down to the Forks and take some pictures of this year’s event. Woodcock Cycle was again the key sponsor and organizer and it sure looked like the event was a great success. With the warm weather this years course did not go on the river due to dangerous ice conditions. But, there was plenty of ice on the trail and as it turns out a little danger as well. This racer, whom I spoke to after the race, was sliding down one section of the course and got too close to the bike in front and made face to rear wheel contact resulting in a bit of a nasty cut. One of the surprises was the unicyclist who navigated the course in approximately one hour, a great time for this type of riding and course. Some riders had quite the attentive fan club cheering them on!

Information about the Winnipeg Icebike race, history and results can be viewed on their site.

Next year, be there, I will!

Meet the Developers
Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo.

Just the General Closing session left to go now. This session is where attendees can ask the really interesting and sometimes difficult questions of the assembled Lotus Development team. Lots of great questions and some folks are getting commitments to hve their issues addressed immediatly and of course other, bigger issues will take some time. The phrase “Coming in a future release, which doesn’t yet have a date.” comes to mind. People are generally really pleased with the new announcements and the R7 releases and happy with the commitment from IBM to the Lotus brand. The Developers are a great team and they really want to resolve and address everyone’s issues.

Winding Down
Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo.

It’s the last day of Lotusphere 2006 and things are winding down. There is a bit of a bigger break between lunch and the last couple of group sessions, and with the nice weather people are taking a little extra time to relax and soak up some sun. But, almost everybody is still connected with a cell, laptop, blackberry or something. We just can’t seem to totally disconnect and relax.

Shamu Rocks America
Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo.

Last nights Lotusphere 2006 party saw 6,000 attendees make their way to Sea World for an night of food, drinks and shows. This is quite a logistics exercise in moving all the attendees from various hotels, to the park and back, requiring a large fleet of buses. For the final show with Shamu, I opted for a seat in the “splash zone” which is the first 14 rows! Fortunatly, most of the soaking took place to either side of center, but I did get a little wet at one point.

After getting back to the hotel, I got engaged in a tv movie and stayed up way too late and I’m dragging a little bit this morning. Well, the first session was excellent, and there is Starbucks awaiting in the foyer.

Presence Everywhere
In the browser, website, mobile device, application. Sametime on the Blackberry. Goal: Federated Model, multiple protocols,

Enhanced User Experience
Integrated collaboration – awareness in email & calendar, collaboration in context.

Voice/Telephone/Video/IM Interoperability
Click-to-call using existing telephony system or VOIP or whatever. ST 7.5 Click-to-talk. Reduction of voicemail. Presence ? Text chat ? Voice call ? Web conference make this flow and transition easy.

Activity:Social Network:Organizational Collaboration
Activity centric computing, social networking, expertise location. SkillTap, FreeJam, Question Search, Instant Pools, Alerts. This is stuff that grew up internally with the IBM Community Tools over the last couple of years. Talked about SkillTap and about saving the response to the question, rateing the response and rating the user who provided the response, like eBay buyer/seller rating.

Architecture changes on the Roadmap

Themes: ST 7.5, RTC Gateway, WCS, ST Future, Converging Architectures.
There is only one RT Collaboration strategy. ST is part of Workplace, ST and Workplace will converge in a managable and seemless way. Some dates on the next steps in the delivery of products on the roadmap.

Theme 1: Web Conferencing connectivity – major improvements in connecting and managing the session, automatic re-connect. JVM 1.1 was limiting, going to more current JVM (1.4?).

Theme 2: Competitive client experience – modernize, unified IM client, managed eclipse-based, plugin architecture, voice chat, rich text, emoticons,

Theme 3: IM Federation – connect to remote IM communities to Sametime & other vendors via SIP Gateway

Theme 4: Integrated Voice – signal over ST, five way calling – one user is hub, Voice only to St7.5 client now (others in future)

RTC Gateway Themes

Theme 1: Federation of IM Domains – connect your community to other external companies communities.

Theme 2: Co-existence of multiple IM servers – Sametime community connected to Workplace community replication of presence between communities.

Theme 3: Management of extranet traffic – privacy enforcement, content filtering, access control. Gateway level controls.

Theme 4: Open Programming Model – Ability to plug in new/evolving protocols.

Gateway diagram

There is a hint at an Ms-SIP protocol translator for future connection to MSN?

Workplace: WCS 3.0 will have the ST 7.5 client capabilities and SIP will scale. Web conference in WMC client as opposed to browser. Workplace will use the same technology that is currently being released in ST 7.5, same gateway, same client etc.Instant meeting (ala ST) in WCS. Open programming model to use RTC capabilities.

ST Future
2007 – Emphasis on RTC as a Platform, open it up and allow the creative creation of new solutions. java-less ajax-style web clients. Move to javascript only, requires extensions to Websphere. Make it protocol agnostic (conceptual architecture diagram)

Converging architectures
Build as general purpose extensions to WAS to support SIP. WAS 6.1 will have SIP technology
SIP Stack with RFC 3261 and others. Full stack @ WAS. Stateless SIP Proxy developed as an extension to the Websphere Proxy. (picture)
SIP Container preprocessor – extension of web container to handle SIP
Handles clustering just like WAS to give redundancy & capacity to SIP/IM as well as WAS

So, I’m sitting in a session all about the buzz technology and what IBM is doing in this space, so what better time to do a little bloggin’.

The session provided a brief and quick overview of the three technologies, blogs, wikis & feeds.

Blogs

• On the CIO radar and being adopted bottom up, like the way IM hit the company, which shows their importance but also has issues with security and management. The goal is to make them “Fit for Business”
• Security, content management (blog content re-use), community (integration with groups and directory), policy (big brother), all without messing up the capabilities and usefulness.
• Movement from ego centric ( opinion/thoughts of blog owner) to business use and value.
• Example: Ford “blog”, controled point of view, marketing, multiple authors
• IBM internal blogs: high adoption rate, team collaboration “lite”,
• Alpha blog tool in Workplace on alphWorks

Wikis

• Internally used, some work in portal and quickplace, not too far along
• Editting is a “little ugly” (my opinion)
• Need good versioning to roll-back messed up content since everyone is an editor
• Adopting faster than blogs internally, managing editors

Feeds

• Various use of feed: summaries, file sharing (e.g. flickr feed), calendar, and the biggie podcasts
• Feed types: RSS, Atom OPML, RDF
• Subscribing to a feed via: Buttons, auto-discovery
• Read feeds in an agregator (one way), Plugins (Sage in Firefox), plus……
• RSS 2.0 format frozen and Atom is the successor (IETF standard) and addresses RSS shortcomings.
• Nothing new, feed have been around for 8 years!

Feeds @ IBM

• IBM goal: an orange button everywhere to subscribe. Feed XML as input to other applications. Atom Publication Protocol support, content publishing to Websphere Portal
• Teamspace/Quickplace to produce feeds.
• WCM content to be feed sources
• Portal document Manager – syndicate folders & files
• Workplace Forms, Domino.Doc, Quickplace (there are demos!) Domino (database to produce feed), Activity centric computing feeds.

Demos

• WCS doing a blog.
• Release this year, searchable (via portal search), multiple skins, RSS & Atom support, permalinks, (OK, so far basic stuff), creating content via the rich text editor, post to “external blog” as an option (Blog Central (IBM Internal), Blogger, TypePad and QUICKPLACE!).
• Portal
• Feed support from Portal Document Manager (document store of Portal). feeds by each level of folder hierarchy, link and download enclosure tag, looking at podcast integrated into PDM and using PDM for the feed – this would give discussion forum attached to a podcast.
• Feed Readers / Agregator
• Discussion on Sage as Firefox extension.
• In IBM public sites, most support areas have feeds (i.e. Quickplace etc.)

Customer Example about Feeds

• Lab services guy talks about a real life customer experience. Content Feed Service to take content from other CM systems to Portal via IBM WCM.
• Consuming feeds, (currently manual, will be automated) to take feeds from any source to pull content into portal
• Can also create taxonomy, security settings, and categorization in WCM
• WCM RSS Connector

A little plug that the presentation was given using the open source productivity editors and the document was in the ODF standard.

Great opening session with a strong emphasis on the Lotus Notes/Domino product having a long and strong future and that IBm is committed to the technology and that it’s an integral part of the overarching SOA strategy.

Man, I’m so glad to be outa’ here! Las Vegas is just too much and I’m so looking forward to a couple of days with friends in a more “normal” city. The hotel had been quite quiet all week, at least up on our 23rd floor location. But, last night some party neighbors checked in next door. Their room seemed to be party central with loud music, people hollering in the hall and doors slamming most of the evening. This is Vegas, why don’t they go somewhere (else!). My flight is at 7am and the departure schedule says I should catch the 4am or 4:30am bus to the airport. These people were in and out of the party room all night and when I left two of them were carrying on a conversation in the hallway and I had to step over them. In the casino, one guy is yelling and screeming at somebody on his cell phone, security is trying to politly evict a young lady who’s had to much to drink, and of course the gambling has barely slowed down at all an this is 4am! The party at the Jet night club is still going strong with a dozen security guys out front and the young and the beautiful rocking it out. The bass beat is strong and I realize that’s what I was hearing in my room 23 floors away.

The conference organizers at the bus are great. The greet me with a cheery hello, take my bag and put it on the bus and point me back to the coffee and breakfast table curbside and tell me the bus will roll on out to the airport when I’ve got my coffee, how very nice and civilized especially at this hour.

This is the check-in line for my US Airways flight to Phoenix connecting on to Orlando. What you can’t quite see is there is more line behind the pillar and almost out the door. And this line isn’t all that bad! You should see the one at Delta! Some 14,000 IBMers are making their way home this morning and causing a little bit of a backlog in with all the normal Vegas traffic. After a tip from a guy passing by and checking with the onsite conference helpers I determine that I can use the SkyCap check-in which has a line of only 5 people. In under 5 minutes I’ve got my boarding pass and through a very short line at security. Last year, because I was flying international back to Canada, I had to wait in that line for over two hours, only to be pulled out at the last minute to catch the flight. Now I’m sipping another coffee at the Burger King and enjoying the free wireless courtesy of the airport. All other airports should follow McCarren’s lead and make the access free as a service to travelers.

Well, there is a 4 hour layover in Phoenix, and I’ve never been in their airport, so we’ll see what that’s like. I’m so glad to be getting out this town. 

Last session of the week and I’m tired. So many people, so many packed days. All in all the conference has been great and I’ve learned a little bit more about several new areas. These new insights will be useful for the year ahead. Insights into products, strategies and directions for the company. I’ll be on my own tonight as my roomie has gone home, so I’m thinking about a quiet evening. Tomorrow will be the exodus to the airport with 10,000+ others to travel over to Orlando for Lotusphere. I’m beginning to wonder about the wisdom of two back to back conferences. It seemed to make sense when I arranged for all this. The nice break will be to see Paul & Rachael, old friends who are now located just a two hour drive from Orlando. So, after a weekend off, it’s back into conference mode – too much good food, lots of sitting and thinking. The other good thing is it will be even warmer. Here in Las Vegas a long sleeve shirt have been good for most outside activities and in Orlando it should be in the 70s. Going back to snow in Winnipeg will be a shock.

TechFest Logo Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo.

My first TechFest at SWU! Just me and 1,200+ friends all hooking up our laptops on a network to a zSeries mainframe for some hands on enablement. [Picture] We explored Websphere Portal, HATS, MQ, RSA and other software on a single 18 CPU zSeries running multiple LPARS. [Picture of specs] One LPAR is zOS and the other three are Redhat Linux. as you use the same software on each of the partitions you can’t tell the difference between the middleware running on zOS and Linux, which is very impressive. The mainframe is truly impressive, gone are the days of manditory raised floor and huge space requirements. This thing is sitting on a carpeted floor in the conference room. No special environment is required, just a big power cable going in. As the TechFest progresses with all the participants using the single mainframe server, they are monitoring performance of each of the LPARS to see what kind of load is hitting the system. Each if the partitiions are using under 3% of the CPU resources available, quite impressive.