On the weekend we went out to Birds Hill Provinical Park for a bit of an adventure. In addition to the typical walk around a trails, some of us had a little “fire” in mind. After scouting a few locations, we settled on a spot nestled in some trees and sheltered from the wind, which was beginning to pick up. With in a few minutes we managed to get a blaze going and began cooking up a storm. Well, maybe a little more simple than that, just a hot dog on a stick, but a great time with good friends.
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Boats
This picture just makes me want to get out on the water in any boat I can lay my hands on. Preferably, on Lake of the Woods, but what would it be like to cruise the costal waterways in a rugged fishing boat like this. These two were moored at Steveston, just out side of Vancouver on the Fraser River.
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Vancouver Visit
Here is “Medora Man” on the beach in Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC on a recent trip. The main purpose of the trip was company business, but I flew in early to visit my Aunt and do a little sight seeing. On several previous trips to Vancouver I’d kicked my self for not taking and extra day or two to enjoy my favorite Canadian city, especially when Winnipeg is cold and under the snow. So, I arrived Saturday and spent a great afternoon with my Aunt catching up on family events and all kinds of stuff. I was a very special time. On Sunday I planned to go to two tourist activities the Capilano suspension bridge and Steveston, a fishing village just outside of Vancouver on the banks of the Fraser River. I’d seen both before but Capillano had a new suspended walkway and there was some geocaching to be done in the Steveston area, plus a nice seafood lunch was appealing.Capilano was OK, but a little too “touristy” not to mention the $23 admission fee and the $3 parking fee, but there were a few good pictures. After driving back across the Lions Gate Bridge and picking up a Starbuck’s coffee it’s a short cruise to Steveston. The historic shipyard, boat building, and cannery are very interesting. The river bank is set aside as a walkway and I spent the entire afternoon walking around in just a sweater which was quite enjoyable.
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Icebike 8
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!
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Meet the Developers
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.
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Winding Down
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.
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Shamu Rocks America
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.
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Lotusphere: RT Collaboration Roadmap
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 -
Lotusphere – Wiki, Blogs & RSS will change your business
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.
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Lotusphere Opening Session
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.
