Monthly Archives: March 2017

03.29.17
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A Few Things From Connections 6 System Requirements

Connections 6 is due to be released on Friday but yesterday we had the announcement and the system requirements.  I took a look at them here and there’s a few things to be aware of if you’re an existing Connections customer

Operating Systems

  • Windows 2012 R2 and 2016 are both supported as server platforms but that’s it
    *Connections Content Manager isn’t supported on Windows 2016
  • Linux OS is SLES 12 or RHEL 7 so if you will almost certainly need to upgrade your OS if you’re already on Linux
  • Only 64bit OS are supported for servers
  • Installation Manager remains at 1.8.5 / 6 which can be upgraded in place if necessary
  • WebSphere Application Server is 8.5.5.10 which again can be upgraded in place if necessary
  • DB2 requires 11.1 minimum
  • SQL Server 2016 only
  • IBM HTTP Server 8.5.5 fixpack 10 required
  • Tivoli Directory Integrator 7.1.1 fixpack 6 is a minimum requirement and can be upgraded in place
  • Sametime integration requires Sametime 9.0.1 for chat and meetings

 

So those are the highlights that jumped out at me but the installation documentation isn’t out yet so I’ll find out more on Friday hopefully.  Start your engines…….

 

 

03.28.17
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Session from InterConnect - IoT In The Enterprise

Firstly I’d like to thank Chris Miller from Connectria who wrote and submitted the original abstract then kindly let me have the session when he had a scheduling conflict.  Any issues or problems with the content are down to me not Chris so please don’t hold him responsible 🙂

The original abstract was

Enabling Internet of Things (IoT) so your employees and your customers can have a simplified experience with new services and products sounds exciting. In this session, we will dig into the top ten risks that come with the IoT experience. Due to the rapidly evolving nature of IoT and associated threats, there are risks in allowing access to your enterprise resources. Custom firmware, embedded operating systems and wi-fi connectivity of IoT devices offer many possible areas for exploits and misuse. Come explore current security offerings and get a first look at best practices. Walk away with an immediate checklist to benefit your enterprise as it deploys and offers IoT access.

There are several aspects to IoT in the Enterprise which are important to the world of collaborative working

  1. IoT devices generate a huge amount of data. That data has to be analysed and actioned.  In a presentation at InterConnect IBM made the point that 80% of data analysts’ time is spent on cleanup and scrubbing not analysis.  Although we have had access to big data for many years, most companies simply haven’t gotten their heads around how to work with it.  That’s going to become more and more critical as IoT devices start to appear in companies.
  2. Security is a huge issue with IoT devices that are still primarily designed for consumer use.  Most devices still transfer data over HTTP (even authentication data) and security has not been a priority.  The introduction of blockchain technologies such as the one IBM has developed is the best chance for having secure IoT devices but we’re not there yet.
  3. IoT is really the beginning of Industry 4.0 with 3.0 being “the internet” 2.0 being “the conveyor belt” and 1.0 being “steampower”.  Consider that your company is on the precipice of the beginning of the internet. You’ve heard of it, you wonder where it’s going to take you, you might be considering something called email.  Well IoT is going to change your business and give you the same kind of opportunities to leap ahead of your competitors as the Internet did.  This isn’t something you can choose to ignore.
  4. The technology might not yet be there but now is the time to consider how you would change your business processes if you could access any data and use it in any way.  Again, consider the changes in processes pre Internet and now.
  5. Being able to analyse data , redesign business processes on the fly and take action is all in the DNA of those of us who have worked for years in the ICS community.
    Data Analysis = WATSON
    Business Process Action = WATSON APIs

I will be presenting (hopefully with Chris) on this at Engage in Antwerp on May 9th. You can register for that here

03.28.17
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Fidgets.. taps fingers.. waits for the pinkish hue..

Connections 6 including customisable communities and Orient Me - the first component of Connections Pink is due today.

Or this week.

Or in the next two weeks.

Or very soon at least.

Usually I’m not that desperate to be first in line but I am currently writing a presentation about integrating Verse on Premise with Connections and I really really want to write it using a new Connections 6 install….

C’MON!!!

03.23.17
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My InterConnect & Where To Now

The post is purely my opinion.  It comes from love for my ICS community and excitement about what the future offers.  Your opinion may differ 🙂

InterConnect isn’t quite over, there’s still tomorrow but I feel confident I can write this blog now and I want to share it whilst the ideas are still bouncing around my head. At least some of the ideas. I don’t want to write pages here and I could.

A bit of background.  I went to Orlando as part of the ICS (IBM Collaboration Solution) conference for over 20 years and this year I went to Connect in San Francisco.  Then 4 weeks later three of us flew from London to Las Vegas to attend Interconnect.

I didn’t expect InterConnect to be anything like Connect.  Looking at the website and sessions it was clear this was on a very different scale. The number I heard was 20k people at InterConnect which was held at the Mandalay Bay convention centre.  Much as I enjoy Connect I remember the Lotuspheres of the mid 90s when the numbers of people were overwhelming, when there were more sessions to see than I could possibly fit in, when I would wander the showfloor for an entire afternoon just absorbing what was happening in the industry.  If I’m honest that feeling of excitement, or leaving the conference with my head bursting with things to learn had been missing the past few years.

I will say I left Connect this year more excited by the technology than I have been in years but it didn’t have the energy - the feeling of rushing along at the head of technological innovation and change that I remember from its heyday.  I have missed that.

What did I want from  InterConnect ?

I wanted to be inspired.  And maybe a bit overwhelmed.  I wanted my brain to spark with ideas.

I got all of that.

The first thing to realise is that sessions at InterConnect almost exclusively do not teach you how to do things, no how to write code or how to install or maintain things.  The sessions (IMO) are more intended to show you what can be done, what’s happening with different divisions of IBM and technologies.  Oh, and no-one knows who ICS is or cares about email or Domino or Collaboration.  I didn’t see , speak or hear about any of the ICS products all week.  So this isn’t about “our” technology directly and that’s fine - I know about that and there are many many great user groups every year I can attend for free that have sessions telling me “how’.   I will leave InterConnect having learnt about technologies and parts of IBM I had no idea existed and with a plan to go learn more.

None of those things move me away from ICS in fact I couldn’t help thinking how well our ICS community would understand and be able to bring value to these technologies.  I would see sessions on NoSQL and wish Mark Myers were there or on Blockchain and security and wish Andrew Pollack was there so I’d have someone to talk to about it, on data analysis and even storage.  I attended 6 sessions on Monday alone and not once, not once, was I bored. I could sit here right now and write abstracts for friends I know are amazing presenters on technologies that not only belong at InterConnect/WOW but that our community has a unique perspective on.  A best practices track at InterConnect is missing and we would rock that.

There’s also the issue of perspective. The ICS community in my opinion has closed in on itself in many ways, has become insular and narrow focused but being at InterConnect you can’t help see how small that world is compared to the rest of IBM. It’s just waiting for us to arrive and bring our skills, expertise and understanding of customers and collaboration. If you have left ICS to go work with other technologies in the past 5 years, those technologies are there at InterConnect/WOW and you don’t have to choose, you can combine existing knowledge with new knowledge in a way that I think is unique to those coming from a collaborative software background.

So where to now?  Well I can tell you that I’ll be at the next InterConnect (possibly World of Watson) and from discussions I had and heard this week, it’s unlikely Connect will be repeated as a standalone conference.  The general consensus is that Connect will be “rolled” into a large IBM Vegas based conference but possibly as a standalone pocket conference at its own hotel and with its own agenda just running alongside and with access to the larger conference.

I hate that idea.

HATE it 🙂

If it’s not clear from this long blog, I got so much out of InterConnect which gave me a chance to learn and hear about new things. I spent 4 hrs wandering the Concourse (show floor) talking to vendors, getting demos and visiting labs. So what would happen if ICS and all the ICS sessions were at say Caesers with InterConnect or WOW and only the keynotes at the Mandalay.

I’d never go to the Mandalay.  I’d miss all the InterConnect sessions.  And so would you.

If you have never been to Vegas it’s hard to understand scale but I averaged 7.5 miles walking a day just from my room at the Mandalay and around the conference centre.  It was only 4 mins from my room to the main reception but the size is Dolphin  + Swan.  Getting from Caesers to the front door of the Mandalay is at least 1.5miles. You could walk it or get in the queue for a taxi - either way you aren’t doing it to go to one session. Especially if all your friends are hanging out in the lobby or a bar at Caesers.

I think my ICS friends integrating into the existing InterConnect or WOW conference at the same location as everyone else could not only reinvigorate the community but save it.  

Don’t let IBM isolate ICS, let’s have a best practices “how to” track in Vegas at the Mandalay Bay and bring your skills, smarts and enthusiasm to a wider audience.

 

 

 

 

03.15.17
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Watson Work Services - Connect Review #4

I know it’s a bit late in the day but I have a couple more things I want to talk about post Connect and with preparations for Interconnect and trying to tie up work before I go away - well these got pushed back.

Watson Work Services, what is it?  WWS (not sure if anyone else is using that acronym but let’s go with it) is not a product, it’s a platform. It is designed to connect to Watson’s APIs and leverage those for language, search, and data. The results can then be fed back to your application and used to trigger actions.  If you’ve seen Watson Workspace (formerly known as “Toscana”) then you might know that it is underpinned by Watson Work Services.   I stole this screenshot from Marc Pagnier’s presentation which I think explains the role WWS is intended to play.

Screen Shot 2017-03-14 at 23.37.37

So why is this good news? Well most of us have heard of IBM’s Watson efforts and understand some of the things Watson can do but for the majority the idea of accessing Watson’s APIs or applying its intelligence to our data appeared out of reach. I mean it’s not like you’re going to install Watson on site.  WWS gives any size company or even single developer access to those Watson APIs without installing anything on site and without investing a lot of money.  In fact WWS works within Bluemix and so your application, whether on premises or in the cloud, can call a query to WWS to feed it data and get results back you can then store and act on.  The cost is calculated in pennies each time you run a WWS query so , as an application designer, that is entirely within your control.   With that model you can easily and quickly experiment with integrating cognitive logic and intelligent behaviour into your applications.

To get started with WWS go to https://developer.watsonwork.ibm.com and to access example applications visit http://github.com/watsonwork . To stimulate  your creative brain here’s another screenshot I stole that shows some of Watson’s APIs and you can find out more about what they can do here Screen Shot 2017-03-14 at 23.53.36

For a start we already have several ideas for our customers who generate a lot of data and would benefit from integrating  intelligent analysis and action triggers into their applications.

 

 

03.07.17
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Benefits and Risks of a Single Identity

Below is my presentation from IBM Connect 2017.  I have added some speaker notes to the slides so if you were there in person, this looks slightly different but I wanted to offer some clarity to a few of the pages that were heavy with graphics.  If you were at Connect and saw this presentation I hope you found it useful.

I will next be presenting on the Internet Of Things in the Enterprise @ InterConnect in Las Vegas on March 22nd so a new topic for me and one I hope you’ll find interesting.  Personally I’m nervous - new location, new audience, new topic 🙂

03.01.17
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Connections Futures - IBM Connect Review #3

We interrupt this blog to apologise. Usually I like to sanity check my statements before publishing them but 80%+ of presentations from IBM Connect are missing online. That means my notes are all I have right now.

So let’s talk about IBM Connections and where it’s going.  You’ve probably heard references to Connections 6 as well as Connections Pink maybe Muse or Livegrid so let’s try and clear some of that stuff up.

First Connections 6 will be shipping in Q2 (tbc) and will be an upgrade from Connections 5.5 (possibly 5.x). It will have the same architecture as existing Connections and that means WebSphere, DB2/SQL/Oracle ,TDI etc.  There are some much needed new features in Connections 6 like the ability to customise as well as copy Communities. It will also ship with the first component of Connections Pink in Orient Me which will be an optional service offering an intelligent newspaper like homepage that customises itself for each person and their activities / interests.

To get to Connections Pink you’ll first need to be on Connections 6 so let’s talk about Pink and what it is.

To quote IBM Pink “is a Vision, not a Release”.  It is the future of Connections reconceived from the ground up.  There are several principles behind that Vision

  1. Currently there are multiple code streams for Connections depending on whether you are in the cloud or on premises.  There will be a single code stream
  2. Websphere will be gone
  3. Everything will be delivered as a microservice inside a docker container
  4. DB2/SQL/Oracle will be gone and replaced by MongoDB
  5. You will be able to choose the location of data for each service/component so if you want your Activities data in the cloud but your profiles on premises you can have that
  6. Every service / component will have a published API
  7. You will be able to develop your own extensions and publish them to your own github repository to deploy

There’s a lot more but essentially the ties to the legacy IBM architecture are gone. The keywords (as far as I could tell) are customisable,  flexible and developer focused. If you’re an admin then things should get much easier as you’ll be deploying services that are prebuilt inside docker containers and can automatically pick up updates directly from IBM as you would any other online software update.

So let’s take a brief timeout and discuss docker.  If you’re a developer you probably already know and maybe use docker but as an admin, especially one managing production environments it’s likely you haven’t come across it.  A docker container can be deployed anywhere as inside it are both the software code and application and the operating system needed to run it.  In theory simply starting a docker container will enable you to run the application inside it without ever having installed anything.  As you can imagine that’s a very tempting idea for Connections where we have 14+ individual applications that could then each be run inside their own individual docker containers.  Now that seems simple but as admins we will still have to understand docker behaviour, networking, container to container communications and so on.  It does mean however that add / removing / upating services becomes a simpler task.

One of the important goals of Pink is that there is to be no migration effort  from Connections 6 to Pink.  As they are doing with Orient Me, IBM will gradually introduce Pink elements into the existing Connections architecture and those elements will read data from the legacy components into their new Pink components so that at some time in the future it’s all Pink.  I stole this chart from Maureen Leland’s presentation and there are three important things to note from it.

  1. Yes those are a lot of scary looking technologies
  2. No you do not and will not need to learn or understand any of them. That entire middleware layer will be invisible to you
  3. The takeway from the diagram is that the Connections cloud code (Green) and the Connections blue code (on premises) will seemlessly transition to the Connections Pink code without you touching a thing.  Like magic.

The other feature I want to talk about is the Muse Proxy.  Overlaid on top of Connections it will allow us to customise our Connections UI.  If you want to add a button on screen or  javascript action somewhere one doesn’t exist, you can do that using Muse and without touching the docker containers that have the services in them.  Think of it like a really powerful stylesheet (well I’m an admin so that’s how i’m going to think of it).  Now imagine your docker containers continue to update with the latest code but your configuration settings via your Muse proxy don’t change. We can separate the customisation elements from the service elements.

So I could type pages more on this and I will in future blogs when I want to talk about all of the technologies that you should not need to learn but want to be aware of.  Livegrid for instance is a new development platform for Connections and that gets a blog all of its own. The good news here is that IBM are dismissing the more lumbering dated and complex technologies and trying to replace them with architecture designed as if they were a new startup with all the technologies in the world to choose from and not just ones branded IBM.  It’s a big vision thing and I hope they can pull it off.

To quote Jason Roy Gary the Director of Software Development for IBM Connections

“We don’t want to develop software for you, we want to develop it with you”

- I applaud both the intent and the HUGE effort being put in.  As partners and customers we will do what we can to contribute to that end goal.

So to summarise, you need to get ready for Connections 6 not just for its new features (of which the Community customisations would be worth the upgrade alone) but because you will get the first Pink service (Orient Me) and have everything in place for the Pink updates and services as they arrive.  Connections 6 should be the last whole system upgrade you need to do.(that’s me saying that not IBM) 🙂