mandag 3. februar 2014

My thoughts on IBM Connect 2014

IBM Connect 2014 is history. I am writing this on the flight back to Norway and everyday life.
This post is not about all the new stuff IBM presented for us. All of that is probably fully covered in numerous articles and blogs already. Rather I will try to describe my impressions and thoughts. 

The IBM message

During the conference it became very clear to me what IBM has tried to tell us all the past 4-5 years; "Jump on the Connections bandwagon or we will have to leave you behind!"
This would have sounded like craziness some years ago but now it makes perfect sense! Connections has become a fabulous piece of software and the Social Business Toolkit makes it easier to contribute to it than ever before, almost whatever platform you're contributing from.


My goals 

 

Inspiration

 IBM Connect is actually all about inspiration. Meeting other people sharing the same interests and passion as yourself creates loads of positive energy. Seeing all the cool stuff speakers are presenting makes you wanna go home and do the same.

 

Making community friends

To keep this inspiration I found I had to get to know some of you better. Not only as bloggers (or whatever you all are doing for the community) but as persons with a name and a face. I'm not saying I got to know you personally (Connect was to short for that) but going to the same sessions, smalltalk during breaks etc. felt rewarding and will help me keep that inspiration in the year to come.
For this I thank you all!

Certification

Since IBM just started using Pearson Vue as their certification partner all assessment and certification test were available free of charge during the conference. This is a great idea and something I hope IBM will continue to do going forward.
My last AD certification was 8, and thus I tried to pass the AD 9A and 9B tests. I failed at 9B, but at least it got me started...

Sessions  

 

Opening General Session

If I return next year I will probably stay in bed or do some shopping instead of attending the OGS. Russel Maher states in his blog about the subject "Now the entire OGS is just one long promotional video interrupted by an actual commercial?". And he is darn right!
Sad...

XPages sessions

As a Notes/Domino old-timer another objective for Connect was learning more about Xpages. Spending half of my time at work doing Domino administration hasn't actually made me an expert.
Thus I wanted to attend so many sessions about Xpages as possible, which I did.
And mostly they all were very good! The speakers were well prepared, provided extensive slide material making it easy to follow up on back home, good examples etc.
No wonder IBM calls you Champs! Well deserved! Kudos!

I mostly attended sessions in the AD track. What annoyed me was that several the intresting sessions was scheduled at the same time, thus making me choose. Other times I found that there in fact were no sessions I really felt like attend... I hope this was not intentional and that IBM will pay more attention to this next year.

OpenNTF BOF

OpenNTF held a birds-of-a-feather (BOF) where we got to discuss plans for 2014 with members of the board. Can't tell you much plans now as need some decicions first. But it looks promising and will be very interesting!
Another topic discussed was how we could persuade IBM to make a XWork (Domino) community server, free to use for non-commercial purposes. This would possibly attract more developers to the platform and give students a viable alternative to Glassfish, JBoss and all the other application servers out there. We all signed a piece of paper that was handed over to IBM during the "Meet the product managers" session.

 

Domino development BOF

Another favorite session of mine was the Domino Development (BOF205 hosted by Pete Janzen and Martin Donnelly) where the core developers for Domino, Designer and Xpages met hard core developers from the community. Demands from the community like "give us a Designer based on a newer version of Eclipse", "open source more parts of the Domino server", "modernize the java API" and "get rid of the java.policy" was debated. Really interesting!

Solutions Showcase

I didn't get to spend much time in the Solutions Showcase this year. I did go to the OpenNTF booth, however, where Nathan Freeman gave me a demonstration of the new wrapper for the Domino Java API project. I must say the work done in this project is simply awesome!

Except for this I actually were most impressed by the Whitsell Consulting booth. They told me they were a small company (10 employees) selling nothing but their consulting services. No products, just heads! Really cool!

Next year...

I hope IBM takes our evaluations (and conserns) into account when planning for Connect 2015. To much of this commerial and non-technical babble will eventually scare off us hard core developers and administrators. As my colleague Arnstein stated; "Next year I may consider Google IO instead..."