Engage - Was It Really Over A Week Ago?

It’s 2am so apologies in advance for any rambling in this post but I’ve been wanting to write about the Engage conference in Antwerp ever since I got back last Thursday (and if I leave it much longer I might as well write about next  year’s conference).

This year Engage was held in Antwerp which is only a 3.5hr drive for me so we met everyone else there who came by train.  Top tip - don’t try and drive in Antwerp, the one way systems will get you every time.  Yet another beautiful city and conference location by Theo and the Engage team.  The Elizabeth conference center was spacious and since there were 400 of us and the Engage team had made sure to provide lots of seating / meeting areas, it felt right.  One thing I really enjoy at conferences is the opportunity to meet people (OK I hate approaching people to talk but I like being part of a conversation) and I had the opportunity for some great conversations with sponsors and attendees. I managed to bore people to death about my latest obsession (docker).  IBM also sent a lot of speakers this year with Scott Souder and Barry Rosen updating us on Domino and Verse futures and both Jason Roy Gary and Maureen Leland there to sprinkle some (Connections) pink around.  There was a lot of open discussion about technology now and what we were each learning and working with along with a fair amount of enthusiasm for what we’re each working with, so thanks to everyone for that.

This year the agenda expanded to including emerging technologies and one of my sessions was in that track - on IoT in the Enterprise, GDPR and data.  I try to aim my presentations at the audience I’m talking to and when it comes to IoT the IT audience naturally has a lot more concerns then line of business managers.  Outside of IT IoT is purely about opportunity but since IT need to take care of the rest my presentation was more technical with a security checklist for deploying IoT devices.  All the opportunity for businesses will inevitably involve a lot of work from IT in the areas of data retention, data analysis, security and process redesign.  Some really interesting technologies are evolving and IoT is very fast moving as evolutionary technologies are so now is the time to start planning how your business can take advantage of the incoming swarm of data and tools.

My second session was on configuring a Domino  / Cloud Hybrid solution with step by step instructions for setting up your first environment.  That presentation is on my slideshare and also shared below.  The key thing to understand about hybrid cloud is that as a Domino administrator you still manage all your users, groups, policies and your on premises and hybrid servers, in fact the only things you don’t manage are the cloud servers themselves.  Getting started with a hybrid cloud deployment is a good way to understand what the potential might be for migrating or consolidating some of your mail services.

As always the Engage team put on an amazing event, lots to sessions to learn from, lots of people to meet and a lot of fun.  I was very pleased to see Richard Moy who runs the US based MWLUG event there for the first time and I’m looking forward to attending his event in the US in August.   Finally my crowning achievement of the week was when no-one on my table could identify either a Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber song at the closing dinner and none of us considered cheating by using Shazam (I’m looking at YOU Steph Heit and Amanda Bauman :-)).  Theo promises us Engage will be back in May 2018 at a new location.   See you there.