Living in a sweet shop

When my friend Suzanne Minassian-Livingston described IBM as “like a candy store” at last year’s Web 2.0 Expo conference in Berlin it immediately struck a chord with me; and I’ve reused her slide (based on a Creative Commons-licensed image from a Flickr contributor) many times over the last year.

One of the things I’ve learned about the company I work for (particularly as a result of getting involved with social software, networks and communities both internally and externally) is the massive diversity the organisation has and the enormous strength that it delivers. It’s a diversity that is constantly being refreshed as new acquisitions are made and new thinking and innovation joins the existing talent pool. It’s a diversity that’s reflected not only in the global nature of the business, but also in the different areas in which the company is engaged – from hardware, software, services, methodologies, research, all kinds of cool thinking. It seems lately that almost every day I meet someone new who has something different to share with me.

Yesterday I was presenting to a customer about what IBM has been doing internally with social networks, and how we collaborate both internally and externally. That brought me back to the diversity slide – the sweet shop, the candy store. What was really cool about that was that it enabled me to tell the story of how I’d widened my network internally, and began to reach out to people across the organisation – making friends in Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Delhi, all over the world as well as around the UK, and from all different areas of the business. One of the things that I learned as part of the briefing the IBM team delivered yesterday was about IBM’s green strategy and Project Big Green – I’d heard about it before and been excited, but I learned a lot from one of our VPs about a number of different client stories where value and environmental improvements have been delivered.

It’s just incredibly exciting. That, and that the fact that there’s always something new to learn, coupled with the rich cultural diversity and the enormous amount of trust that I feel that the organisation places in its employees, is really what makes it such an enjoyable place to work, and that I believe makes it a really strong organisation.

WebSphere Message Broker. Seven.

Seems there’s a whole “7” theme going on around here lately… Barcamp London 7, WebSphere Connectivity v7…

I’m very excited that WebSphere Message Broker version 7 has shipped today. I have a huge amount of respect for my colleagues in IBM Hursley and the other labs that made this possible.

How did I find out that the eGA (electronic GA i.e. downloadable media) was available? Guess what, it was via Twitter.

I mentioned the highlights of the release in my recent post about the general WebSphere Connectivity v7 family:

further simplification of components and prerequisites, a much enhanced administration interface, a multitude of new nodes, better integration with WMQ v7 (pubsub and HA), slicker integration with the BPM suite through SCA support… this product just keeps getting more streamlined, refined, and functional.

It also includes support for the new Service Federation Management features that were announced as part of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository version 7 which is due later this year. There are more details about the cool new features in v7 in the What’s New in WebSphere Message Broker v7 page in the Infocenter.

Barcamp. London. Seven.

This past weekend saw a first for IBM South Bank as it played host to Barcamp London 7, the seventh time a the Barcamp unconference had been held in London (I know this, because I asked @thehodge why it was called Barcamp London 7, and he said it was because it was the seventh one… cunning!). South Bank is not often used for events at the weekend, and certainly not for events of 200 excited techies, creative types and those wanting to run their own talks on subjects as diverse as Failure, the TV series Lost, CSS design, niche bands you should be listening to, a photography project involving a rubber duck, life drawing, and Enterprise Software Patterns.

The IBM side of the event organisation was largely the effort of Zoe Slattery, although a host of us volunteered to help support the external organisers, and several IBM folks attended. Attendance at a Barcamp is free and the event is supported and funded by sponsors. It was great to mingle and chat with people I’d met at similar events, friends, and others I was connecting with for the first time.

The way that a Barcamp is organised is that there is no set agenda – attendees turn up and volunteer to speak for 20 minutes on a topic of their choice (and these topics can be very diverse). We used something like 12 or 13 rooms and I believe we had nearly 200 available session slots spanning the 2 day period from 10am on Saturday through until 5pm on the Sunday. By the end of Saturday almost the entire session “grid” was filled. It is a Barcamp tradition that first timers are expected to give at least one session… in the end, I gave two.

There’s an event on Slideshare where the decks for those that used slides are being collected, but there was a huge range of different topics and styles (including my own favourite, Ben Fletcher’s Fingerspelling lesson, which had us learning the alphabet in British Sign Language at increasingly higher speeds!)

The overnight stay went well – there were a few party games and many, many discussions on Saturday evening. A good time had by all, judging from the tweets and photos.

The staff at South Bank were exceptional, working the weekend and remaining in great spirits, helped by the sunny dispositions of the Barcamp attendees. All in all it was a great success, and I hope that we’ll be able to get involved in more of these kinds of events!

Zoe and Ben also have some nice write-ups, and the Flickr group of photos is filling out nicely. Thanks to Adewale Oshineye for this cool photo of me!

WebSphere Connectivity products v7 announcements

I briefly tweeted a few Fridays ago about one of the new products IBM announced at the start of this month.

Regular / long-term readers will know that WebSphere Message Broker is one of my technology specialisms – it’s a product that I’ve been working with for 8 or so years now, through various versions. A few days ago I also mentioned in passing about the new version of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Both of these products are part of my day job, working in product strategy and development in IBM Hursley.

So let’s just review the announcements in the WebSphere Connectivity portfolio, and pick out some my favourite new features and enhancements.

• WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition v7.0.2 – extension of platform support, enhanced security, richer scripting, and bridges to FTP and SFTP. As Ben says, it’s “cram-packed… with lots of good stuff!”.
• WebSphere Message Broker v7 – w00t! further simplification of components and prerequisites, a much enhanced administration interface, a multitude of new nodes, better integration with WMQ v7 (pubsub and HA), slicker integration with the BPM suite through SCA support… this product just keeps getting more streamlined, refined, and functional.
• WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus v7 (and Process Server and Integration Developer) – currency with the WebSphere Application Server and MQ platforms, support for the new Service Federation Management features, Open SCA support, and Business Space widgets.
• WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging v2.3 – enhanced high-reliability and self-management.
• WebSphere DataPower firmware v3.8.0 – lots of enhancements here, but some of the nicer things I spotted in the release notes are the improved load balancing, WMQ v7 support, JSON and REST handling, and more B2B capabilities on the XB60 appliance.
• WebSphere Service Registry and Repository v7
• WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Advanced Lifecycle Edition v7 – taking these last two together, WSRR v7 offers some great improvements in integration with products such as Rational Asset Manager and Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) for SOA and the Change Configuration Management Database, REST and ATOM interfaces, the new Service Federation Management Console for cross-domain management and sharing of services, and widgets that work within the Business Space framework to offer an easy-to-recompose business interface to services and policies. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been working closely with my colleagues in the WSRR team recently and this is shaping up to be a great update.

Take a look at the announcement letters for individual products for full details of what to expect.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Redbooks

One of the products I’ve been becoming increasingly involved with as part of my work at Hursley has been WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Rather than redefine what the product is here, I’ll take a snippet from the WSRR FAQ:

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is a system for storing, accessing and managing information, commonly referred as service metadata, used in the selection, invocation, management, governance and reuse of services in a successful SOA. In other words, it is where you store information about services in your systems, or in other organizations’ systems, that you already use, plan to use, or want to be aware of.

The Registry and Repository is becoming increasingly central to many SOA deployments and is strongly integrated with several of IBM’s runtimes (including hooks with my long-term product specialisms, WebSphere MQ and Message Broker).

Version 7 of WSRR was announced at the start of October (more on this later in the week), but in the meantime it’s worth noting that a great set of Redbooks and Redpapers for the current 6.3 release have recently hit the publications website:

• Redbook: Service Lifecycle Governance with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Advanced Lifecycle Edition
• Redbook: Service Lifecycle Governance with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Message Broker
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with WebSphere DataPower
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with Tivoli Security Policy Manager

Over the past few months I’ve gotten to know many of the IBMers who worked on these books and papers personally, and I have to say that they are the absolute experts on the topics. I know I’ll be reaching for these publications when I need to know my way around specific topic areas.

My review policy

Earlier this week I heard that the Federal Trade Commission has introduced new advertising guidelines, which amount to rules for bloggers who review products. A contact of mine also sent me a link to this information directly… I think the unspoken implication there was that they were aware I’m sometimes sent free things to review and that maybe I wasn’t being open about that.

Both of these events acted as triggers to make me finish this post, which has actually been sitting in draft state in my blogging client since… well… March this year. I can’t see that the FTC has any jurisdiction over my blog, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while, as a way of telling both readers and companies what they can expect from me.

It’s true that I’ve been given access to products for review purposes on occasion, and sometimes I’ve been able to keep hold of the products (or been given a full software license after the review period has ended). I’ve always been careful to point out where I’ve been offered a product for review, most recently for example, with the LG Arena mobile phone.

So here’s my standpoint.

• Firstly, and very importantly – I write here as an individual. I do not make a secret of who my employer is, and you are welcome to read all about me on the About page. However, my opinions and are my own and may or may not represent my employer’s views. I will not review anything here on behalf of my employer, I do so as an individual.
• If a company wants to invite me to review their product or service then I’m often interested in taking a look.
• I appreciate it when the company or PR firm actually takes the time to find out what I’m interested in and what I write about, rather than sending me a silly email. Do your research.
• If you send me something to review, you should expect an honest set of opinions. I will not sugar-coat what I think of it.
• If you send me something to review then it will be on my timescales. I have a life and a day job and both of those come before writing about your product, site of service.
• I will always disclose whether I was given / given access to a product in my review. If I do not call that out, then readers should assume that I own the product or am otherwise a personal user of that site or service.

That’s it. Pretty straightforward, really.

Guest posting

Although this blog has been slightly quiet I’ve been posting content elsewhere lately as well:

1. There’s a guest post on the SOMESSO blog about whether or not corporate blogs are still relevant in the world of more dispersed social media.
2. I’ve contributed to the revived HomeCamp blog with some links to good sources of information.
3. Talking of revivals, eightbar continues to attract some great content from my fellow Hursley folks, with more changes to come soon.

Things I like best in Snow Leopard

There are a heap of things I’m really liking about Snow Leopard so far… even though it turns out that my early 2007 MacBook Pro can’t take advantage of a lot of the under-the-covers enhancements

1. The new (configurable) Dock behaviour to have application windows minimise into their app icons – combined with the click-hold-Expose feature, this has made the Dock useful for me again. I’ve moved it from autohiding at the side of the screen, to permanent (but 2D) at the bottom.
2. Safari running Flash as a separate process. Far fewer browser crashes.
3. Nearly 15Gb of reclaimed disk space. Seriously! Could be the fact that I opted for a custom install and removed most of the language support I didn’t need, too, and also influenced by the fact that Snow Leopard reports disk space differently.
4. Scrollable, more intelligent grid views in Stacks. The Dock is even more useful.
5. Seeing the date in the menubar. Bye bye, MagiCal.
6. Setting Spotlight search to find in the current folder by default (in Finder preferences).
7. The default screen gamma setting is now 2.2 – at last.

If you want to dig a bit deeper to find some of these things, check out a couple of Macworld articles – I wouldn’t have known about them otherwise! All-in-all then, a minor upgrade with a bunch of welcome changes.

Learn WebSphere Message Broker

A couple of weeks ago I noted that the highly talented Mr Martin Gale is allowing me to absorb his genius by osmosis, or at least by working in the same office. I also mentioned that he’s successfully learned the basics of WebSphere Message Broker, too. This is an enterprise middleware product which I’ve spent around 9 years working with – using the product, consulting with clients, writing Redbooks, and educating newcomers.

When I wrote that blog entry, I missed an ideal opportunity to mention that IBM has a trial version of WebSphere Message Broker which is available for download. It’s a great way to take a look at the product and start to develop your own skills. The Information Center and Samples Gallery (available from the Message Broker Toolkit once the product is installed) are very effective places to start, too.

A couple of additional resources that might be of interest to newcomers are the articles in the WMB Zone on IBM developerWorks (check out the “latest content” section), and an unofficial user forum called MQSeries.net which has an active discussion group about WebSphere Message Broker.

Yammer? Really?

I noticed a bit of an upsurge in followers on Yammer in the past couple of days. Concurrently, I also noticed that there appears to be a campaign on Facebook at the moment reminding folks of the existence of Yammer. It seems as though the campaign is mining my user profile information to identify a company network to advertise at me.

I’m generally an early adopter, as regular readers of my blog will know. I joined Yammer in the initial landrush… but I’ve barely used it, despite a desktop AIR client and an iPhone app being launched to make access and use of the service a lot easier.

What’s the issue? Well, for me, there are two fundamental problems:

• it’s a service hosted outside of the corporate firewall, and yet encouraging me to write about “what [I'm] working on”. I do realise that some organisations will not have an issue with this, but in our case, I can’t go posting confidential information to servers outside the company. It’s the same reason that we’ve had internal virtual worlds and social computing guidelines for a long time. Ultimately it’s the same reason why we have homegrown internal microblogging options, although we do also use external services like Twitter where confidential information is not at risk (and my preference is to be open by default, and use internal tools only where necessary).
• it defines a “company” based on email domain. Mine is a country-specific address, so I’ve ended up part of a Yammer community which is only for the UK section of the company. For a worldwide corporation, this defeats the object. Taking a look at Yammer’s pricing options, it looks like they have Silver and Gold paid plans that offer greater control and multiple domains… but I can’t imagine that we’d end up using those options.

I’m not taking potshots at Yammer for the fun of it… I can see that they do have a number of major clients, and when I’ve been to conferences I’ve met some of those who use the service – they’ve seemed happy with it. For me, it’s just not practical. I’m intrigued to note that even with the rush of new sign-ups which I can only assume are driven by the current Facebook advertising campaign, there’s almost no discussion going on in the community, with some people even redirecting folks back to Twitter or our internal tools in their very first posts…

Trust and empowerment are key

From a great post about the ESPN and USMC social media rules / bans:

You might not expect a corporate juggernaut like IBM to lead the way when it comes to creating effective social media guidelines for its employees, yet here we are: IBM was one of the first enterprise-size companies to not only recognize the need for such a document, but also to deliver an adequate set of guidelines within it that made sense and allowed its culture to spread. IBM recognized that treating its employees like responsible adults rather than dangerous little children might yield pretty good results.

Indeed. I’ve written about IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines before, and I’ve spoken about them at conferences. I’ve also repeatedly opined that blocking access is counterproductive. It’s important to note that the guidelines were written collaboratively, and they are linked to IBM’s existing standards of professional conduct (the Business Conduct Guidelines) which employees agree to annually. Folks at the leading edge of technology continue to inform and educate the rest of the organisation on good practices and behaviours in these online social spaces.

Let’s end with another of the many quotable extracts from Olivier Blanchard’s post today:

The risk here is not the medium, it is the behavior. Ban access to the medium and you solve nothing: The behavior is still there, only now, you are blind to it. Double-fail.

Oh, in case you’re new around here: I’m an IBMer. My opinions may differ from IBM’s official line from time to time, but that’s OK. My employer trusts me, and I appreciate that.

Living with the LG Arena

Thanks to the nice people over at LG, I’ve had the opportunity to play around with one of their devices for the past month – the LG Arena KM900. Let’s get the next bit out of the way straight off the bat…

Disclaimer: LG solicited my feedback on their products and provided me with a free phone for evaluation for one month.

Right, that piece is done

Bearing in mind that before the iPhone, my previous mobile phone was a pretty old Sony Ericsson T6xx, this was quite a change from the mobile phones I’d handled in the past. Of course, the flipside of that is that I’ve now been using an iPhone 3G and 3GS for more than a year, so the Arena had to cope with many of my prejudices formed on the basis of familiarity of how a touchscreen phone “should” (or, at least, could) work. I wanted to give it a fair chance, though, so I chose to ditch my BlackBerry Pearl 8100 for the period I had the Arena – frankly, not a hard choice, as I’m no fan of the BlackBerry UI, which I’m convinced was designed by someone who hates other people.

The out-of-the-box impression was certainly pretty good. It’s a sleek, shiny, device which feels well-made with a brushed metal and glass front. It’s got a great feature set, too – 5.0MP camera which also records video, Dolby Mobile audio, front and rear-facing cameras, wifi, bluetooth, Java, an FM transmitter, multiformat video playback including DIVX, 3G video calling… the list really goes on. It also has quite an interesting 3D user interface where the screen rotates around a virtual cube as you swipe left and right through the menus. So it scores highly on both the prettiness/style and the features. It’s lighter and smaller than the iPhone, too.

I’ll be honest… I had a mixed experience with with LG Arena. I think it could be a great consumer phone, if you take a step back and forget that the iPhone exists. The camera is great (and has a flash), and the video quality and playback were more than acceptable – very good, actually. I confess I didn’t try the music player much – I guess such things are becoming pretty commoditised and it seemed to be fairly standard. This was the first phone I’ve had with a front-facing camera for video calls, which was a nice feature – but I don’t know anyone who has a video call-capable phone or who uses that, so it was somewhat redundant. The range of stuff available on this handset is great, though. Email and web browsing, check and check… although the browser interface was a little finickity at times.

I had a few issues, the first being, sadly, the screen. Touchscreens are becoming de rigeur and this one looks good… until you try to view it in strong daylight, when the fact that it is highly reflective becomes a huge problem. Plus, it collects fingerprints like crazy. I also found that it wasn’t as responsive as other screens I’ve used, and some aspects of the UI were frustrating (swiping through menu options left-to-right, as well as through lists up and down, for instance). It looks stylish, but it’s not the best experience I’ve had. It does offer a level of haptic feedback, which I switched off straight away – by default, when you touch the screen it buzzes to simulate the experience of having been touched, but in practical terms I found this somewhat annoying.

The next drawback is fairly minor, as it’s mostly a business issue. I wasn’t able to use this on an office network, as the wireless didn’t support either 802.1x certificates or LEAP – disappointing, but not a core feature in a consumer model, I’ll accept. However, there was another problem with the way in which the wireless and networking support worked… it has a fairly complex set of profiles which (I think) are supposed to help to decide which type of network to use at which time, and I found that it kept prompting me to use wifi or GPRS rather than just defaulting to the faster option, which did drive me nuts from time-to-time.

The final complaint I have relates to probably the biggest emerging area in the mobile market… Applications. In theory, this is a Java / J2ME capable device. So, I merrily installed a series of applications, none of which were really suited to the touchscreen, and all of which looked very plain. An SDK is available, but I found it was poorly documented. There’s no centralised way of getting hold of apps, either. LG have a couple of downloadable “widgets” on their website, but having downloaded them to a PC I couldn’t find a way of installing them. All-in-all I felt it was a device that is highly capable, but crying out for an easier way to extend functionality.

Thank you, LG, for giving me the opportunity to take a look. I think it’s a nice handset, got a great combination of hardware features, a nice looking UI – but, in my opinion (and I’ll readily admit I’m an uber-fan of one of the competitors here), it’s let down by the “small touches” and by the software.