Air Chat - Instant Messaging On A Plane

Flying back from the US yesterday, Tim and I had window seats one row behind the other (by choice, long story).    I’m a nervous flyer and this was the first time I haven’t had him right next to me so as we boarded I started to get more tense.  Tim suggested we find a way to message each other during the flight and quickly found Air Chat which we both downloaded.  It provides encrypted bluetooth messaging.

IMG_2246

We paired our phones and that was it, we were able to chat the entire flight (Airplane mode does not require BT being disabled).  I’m not sure how far it would reach in a cabin, we were a row apart and it’s obviously limited by BT distance.  Useful I would have thought for families or groups travelling together.

Best of all they have a watch app so when my phone was turned off and he messaged me it would vibrate on my wrist and I could read it.  I couldn’t reply from the watch but we probably talked more during this flight than we do sitting next to each other.

 

IMG_9855

 

 

 

Destination Domino (yes, yes I’m late to the party) **

Well this is a lot of good news all at once.  IBM have launched the Destination Domino site - a one stop shop for all your Domino v10 and future strategy news.  If you doubt their commitment to the future development of Domino and the community that believes in it, well just look at all that yellow.

On Thursday 24th May (the day after Engage) I’ll be participating in a webcast on what’s new for Mail, Verse, and Chat for v10.  I will be joining Andrew Manby (Director of Product Management @ IBM) and Ram Krishnamurthy (Chief Architect, Notes, Designer and Xpages @ HCL) on the call.  Registration is here. I recommend you also sign up to the newsletter on the Destination Domino site to stay on top of the developments happening because those are coming at us pretty fast.

I was fortunate enough to visit HCL’s offices in Chelmsford, MA last week and met many of the development teams working on Domino, Verse, Traveler and Sametime.  Some I have known from their years at IBM before they moved to HCL and some were new to me - most of the day is under NDA and you’ll be hearing more about what they are going to deliver at some point if you attend Engage, DNUG, MWLUG and other conferences this summer. If you can’t attend just keep an eye on the Destination Domino site.

One thing I can share that isn’t under NDA is how impressed I was not just with the rapid development of features many of us have been waiting a long time for but also the innovative and open thinking behind Domino as a development platform and the energy and enthusiasm just about everyone I met that day (over 30 people) had.  We are going to see a lot more on the Notes client for iPad and the integration of Node.JS in the next few months and that’s all very exciting.

**I have a good excuse since I’m currently on holiday in St Lucia BUT we interrupt this pool / beach time because this is really important.

An Introduction Into Configuring Domino for Docker

9.0.1 FP10 brings support for Domino on a docker platform.  You may know that docker is a container solution but what does that mean and how could it affect your Domino infrstructure?  In this session we’ll review how to install and run Domino in a docker container, whether it can support external clustering and the decisions to consider when designing container architecture.

The following presentation was meant to be given at the Swiss User Group on April 18th.  Unfortunately I was throwing up with a stomach bug from April 15th - 19th so had to cancel the day before.  I have never had to cancel an event I committed to before so thank you to Andrew Magerman and the team for understanding.  I sent Klaus Bild my presentation which I believe he gave a version of in my stead so thank you to him as well.

DMARC, GDPR & Social Connections

Last week I was at Social Connections in Philadelphia.  The Social Connections team once again put on a great conference around IBM social software and extended this time to include security content.  I presented two sessions - one around security and specifically SMTP DMARC deployment which I am increasingly being asked to deploy..  My second session was about how to approach GDPR as the regulations come into force in less than 1 month. I tried in this session to speak to a US audience who may not be aware in what ways GDPR will impact their business.

Both sessions are shareed below and I hope you find them of interest /use

An Introduction To The DMARC SMTP Validation Requirements
DMARC is a SMTP security standard being increasingly requested by customers to protect against email spoofing. It uses a combination of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Using DMARC you would publicly specify how your outbound mail is sent and the receiving server would verify that the mail it receives matches your requirements. In this session we’ll discuss DMARC deployments and what to do if your mail server (like IBM Domino or SmartCloud) does not yet support DKIM?

How To Approach GDPR Preparation & Discovery
In this session, presented as a workshop outline, we will walk you through your GDPR responsibilities and how to assess your risk. We’ll give some recommendations on high priority but easy to fix issues and how to discover, secure and take ownership of existing data. At the end of the session we will share the workshop outline to help with your own planning.