Showing posts with label IBM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IBM. Show all posts
Friday, June 17, 2011
Friday, December 31, 2010
IBM to Collaborate with Leading Singapore Institutions
IBM has announced a research collaboratory in Singapore, where researches from IBM will collaborate with Singapore local institutions to improve urban services. This is one of the project which will come under IBM Smarter Planet strategy.
From the news,
IBM will work with several agencies including the Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to develop decision support tools to help Singapore more effectively manage its resources. As part of these efforts, IBM also intends to drive research collaborations with an ecosystem of research institutes and universities in Singapore.
The Group director of LTA Singapore Dr Chin Kian-Keong stated
From the news,
IBM will work with several agencies including the Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to develop decision support tools to help Singapore more effectively manage its resources. As part of these efforts, IBM also intends to drive research collaborations with an ecosystem of research institutes and universities in Singapore.
The collaboratory will enable world-class researchers in Singapore and IBM's mathematical experts, renowned for applying advanced analytics to solve real-world issues, to share skills, assets, and resources to achieve common research goals.
Singapore is one of the most advanced cities with extremely high demands placed on its urban infrastructure (water, transport and energy) due to its geography, size, population and dependence on neighbors for natural resources such as water and power. The country has also been at the forefront on the global stage in rallying for liveable and sustainable cities for the future. Besides promoting a learning network through the hosting of the biennial World Cities Summit, Singapore also aims to serve as a living lab for companies to test-bed innovative solutions for densely populated, compact urban environments. The research collaboratory for smarter cities will advance this endeavor.
The Group director of LTA Singapore Dr Chin Kian-Keong stated
"For LTA, the use of technology has always been at the forefront of what we do - how do we squeeze out more efficiency out of our transport system, and at the same time making it safe."
Dr Chin said the research could provide intelligent solutions to real-life transport problems. "If you can get information of any traffic congestion to motorists way before they reach this incident side, and get them to detour, that will help to relieve the congestion that can be caused," added Dr Chin.
While Singapore already has mechanisms to control traffic and the traffic alerts in place, I believe this initiative would push it even further and could well end up with personalized commuting. Here is a little video to illustrate some of the upcoming innovations from IBM where personalized commuting is a part of it. Come to think of it, I see Singapore is already laying foundations for personalized commuting.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
My Journey with XPages
Well, this Xpages thing is running in mind for quite some time. I had attended a training conducted by Stephan Wissel a.k.a Singapore Lotus Guru some time ago. During one of my chat sessions with him i was discussing with him about a simple task management sytem and told him i make use of some of the free wiki based tools for the same.
He told me that why don’t I write a Xpages application for the same for which I responded that after the training I will give it a try. He was kind enough to tell me that he could host the app for me in his server.
Work kept me busy and didn’t find much time to read and learn Xpages stuff. Yesterday, i was in a mood to learn and write some code and play with it. So I started learning Xpages. My usual way of study is I read a lot of theory first before start doing anything with it. Somehow I fel t that I should not follow the same for Xpages and started doing it and within a day I manage to put a simple application.
I learned Xpages and applied it for a simple task management system. This may not be a full fledged application but contain all the ingredients to make use of it rightaway.
My objective is very simple. I need to store personal tasks that needs to be done and the priority. Also a brief description of what needs to be done. I should be able to update it any time if I need to change (for eg. Changing the priority etc).And I can also delete the tasks if I don’t want it. Since the need is not complex, i want all this to be done in a single screen in Web2.0 fashion
Here we go, in traditional LND development, you will have a form to create the task list with the fields inside. If you build it will look like this,
You can start creating task documents using the above Task form. Then you need a view to show the task documents. Then build a view to show the list of tasks. It will look like this,
For a simple application, that’s all we need. With this one can perform all the CRUD operations using LN client. Now Domino does quite well in translating this and you could make use of this from the browser too. Wanna see that,
Upon clicking the link, it will take you the document itself
You can actually edit the document and update from here. Not so pretty but you can make it pretty by making use of custom HTML, CSS and a bit of Javascript. That will take some time though.
With the advent of Xpages, this is kind of breeze. How do we do that? I will show the output first before I go in to the details. This is how it looks at the end of it,
Much neater, isn’t it. The magic behind this is Xpages in Domino which is available from LND 8.5 Remember the first form we built in the beginning, now you need to build a corresponding Xpage and assign a data source for the same in this case it’s a Domino document. Once you are done with it you will have to do a simple data binding. Data binding is an important thing where for every element in the Xpage you match that with the corresponding field element in the Notes form. Let’ see how,
There are plenty of controls that is available with Domino 8.5.1 and using which you can built a nice looking pages as shown above.
Drag and drop the controls based on your needs, and finally place buttons for submit and delete. Since we have already defined the data source as Dominodocument before, clicking the submit button will create documents in the database.
Ok next thing is the equivalent of Notes View in Xpages. For which build a Xpage and define the data source as Domino view this time and choose the view you want to use. You can drag and drop the view columns from the data palette that is shown there, the output will be like this.
Notice the page navigation a.k.a pager has been added automatically. Now comes the best part, using Xpages you can tie this both in a single screen by making use of the container controls panel, table, include page and view. I have imported the style sheet that is provided in the training class Styles.css which and the image resources.
So I build a new Xpage called xpIndex which will include the above,
After that it’s all about just configuring the delete button so that all the things will happen in a single screen itself when you hit the URL http://localhost/tms.nsf/xpIndex.xsp
Upon clicking the task, it will be populated in my new task page and I can modify and submit. The changes will go in to the database automatically. Similarly, I can delete the document, for eg
Selecting a task New will be added in the new task page and upon clicking ‘Delete’ the system will prompt for the confirmation
and if you say Ok the task will be deleted,
That’s it. One more thing, until now you view this in browser and you just don’t have to do any more thing to use it in Notes client. Wanna see the Notes client view,
There lies the Xpages beauty…
Considering the fact, I have not done much coding lately, most of my work is related with Project Management, customer handling, team management and selling technical solutions to customers this is quite reasonable. Learn Xpages in a day’s time and building a simple app.
I will learn more from here and might just give it a try to build the same using .NET
He told me that why don’t I write a Xpages application for the same for which I responded that after the training I will give it a try. He was kind enough to tell me that he could host the app for me in his server.
Work kept me busy and didn’t find much time to read and learn Xpages stuff. Yesterday, i was in a mood to learn and write some code and play with it. So I started learning Xpages. My usual way of study is I read a lot of theory first before start doing anything with it. Somehow I fel t that I should not follow the same for Xpages and started doing it and within a day I manage to put a simple application.
I learned Xpages and applied it for a simple task management system. This may not be a full fledged application but contain all the ingredients to make use of it rightaway.
My objective is very simple. I need to store personal tasks that needs to be done and the priority. Also a brief description of what needs to be done. I should be able to update it any time if I need to change (for eg. Changing the priority etc).And I can also delete the tasks if I don’t want it. Since the need is not complex, i want all this to be done in a single screen in Web2.0 fashion
Here we go, in traditional LND development, you will have a form to create the task list with the fields inside. If you build it will look like this,
You can start creating task documents using the above Task form. Then you need a view to show the task documents. Then build a view to show the list of tasks. It will look like this,
For a simple application, that’s all we need. With this one can perform all the CRUD operations using LN client. Now Domino does quite well in translating this and you could make use of this from the browser too. Wanna see that,
Upon clicking the link, it will take you the document itself
You can actually edit the document and update from here. Not so pretty but you can make it pretty by making use of custom HTML, CSS and a bit of Javascript. That will take some time though.
With the advent of Xpages, this is kind of breeze. How do we do that? I will show the output first before I go in to the details. This is how it looks at the end of it,
Much neater, isn’t it. The magic behind this is Xpages in Domino which is available from LND 8.5 Remember the first form we built in the beginning, now you need to build a corresponding Xpage and assign a data source for the same in this case it’s a Domino document. Once you are done with it you will have to do a simple data binding. Data binding is an important thing where for every element in the Xpage you match that with the corresponding field element in the Notes form. Let’ see how,
There are plenty of controls that is available with Domino 8.5.1 and using which you can built a nice looking pages as shown above.
Drag and drop the controls based on your needs, and finally place buttons for submit and delete. Since we have already defined the data source as Dominodocument before, clicking the submit button will create documents in the database.
Ok next thing is the equivalent of Notes View in Xpages. For which build a Xpage and define the data source as Domino view this time and choose the view you want to use. You can drag and drop the view columns from the data palette that is shown there, the output will be like this.
Notice the page navigation a.k.a pager has been added automatically. Now comes the best part, using Xpages you can tie this both in a single screen by making use of the container controls panel, table, include page and view. I have imported the style sheet that is provided in the training class Styles.css which and the image resources.
So I build a new Xpage called xpIndex which will include the above,
After that it’s all about just configuring the delete button so that all the things will happen in a single screen itself when you hit the URL http://localhost/tms.nsf/xpIndex.xsp
Upon clicking the task, it will be populated in my new task page and I can modify and submit. The changes will go in to the database automatically. Similarly, I can delete the document, for eg
Selecting a task New will be added in the new task page and upon clicking ‘Delete’ the system will prompt for the confirmation
and if you say Ok the task will be deleted,
That’s it. One more thing, until now you view this in browser and you just don’t have to do any more thing to use it in Notes client. Wanna see the Notes client view,
There lies the Xpages beauty…
Considering the fact, I have not done much coding lately, most of my work is related with Project Management, customer handling, team management and selling technical solutions to customers this is quite reasonable. Learn Xpages in a day’s time and building a simple app.
I will learn more from here and might just give it a try to build the same using .NET
Saturday, June 19, 2010
IBM Lotus - This last 2 weeks
Originally i started writing a comment in Volker site and since it was slightly bigger i wrote a separate blog entry itself
It started with Volker in his typical way followed by Jake and John Vaughan. I read through almost each of the comments and it was definitely enlightening to go through each of it and how each one of us perceive about Notes software and i must say i thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have made comments on Jake's blog and from then on to read all the rest of the comments took a long time and digest. Every now and then Lotus community face this sort of discussion and i remember once i too have written along these lines in the past.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2006/02/laug-1st-meeting.html
Each time, i want to write comments in Volker site, there is whole lot of things running in mind and don't know exactly how to write about. That's what writing experience is all about. If you start writing on a daily basis, your writing will get polished and you know exactly what needs to be communicated and to be able to do that with just few words yet powerful. IMO, that's why Volker is able to sum up in a nice way and others like me think but whole lots of things comes to mind and stop and then again lots of things comes to mind while you sleep etc.
Before i start i have to say "I just love IBM". Even though i have never worked there, i am just attracted by Big Blue IBM. I get excited every time i hear that IBM makes software for big corporations and they are massively scalable and nothing comes close and simply not comparable to other vendors. They have just about everything for a big company to be their customer and even smaller ones. Am bought by the IBM brand much earlier somehow.
After i completed my Engineering i was selected in a campus interview to join a IT services company and it was there i was first introduced to Lotus Notes R4.5 in the year 1998. In my team we were 12 trainees who started reading through Lotus Notes CBT and were given training on the platform by our senior employees in the team. And it's about 12 years now. All this while, i have been working in Notes and Domino and until 2006 its very much Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, LDDM, Lotus Workflow.
After that, the market started slowly dipping in SG for Notes. Not much new development in Notes. Singapore Gov is a very big customer of Notes and every Ministry, Stat boards, and Agencies associated with Government uses Notes for Email. Not only for mail and plenty of applications in Notes and lots of services company has made huge money until one day the Gov said: We are going to standardise our operating environment (SOE) and the following are the software that will be available in each of the civil servant desktop and the list doesn't include Lotus Notes. It's a massive deal SGD 1.5 billion (atleast from outside it looks so). The consortium that won the deal includes Microsoft who are the key software supplier. And that means, its Exchange over Domino for mail. And the project has officially started in the year 2007 and its still on going. Not sure how successful will be but analyst like Gartner predicted it will not yield much gains though.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2010/04/soeasy-is-not-so-easy.html
Anyways for people who built their skills around Notes and Domino, they have to move on and in my case, out of 12 people in my team there was no one doing Notes except me at that point in time (team mates were smart and they changed careers am not repenting though) and i for one continued with IBM but its just that i shaped up skills in Presales and started in WebSphere Portal technologies and WCM. As a IT services company, it made a lot of sense to them that they can make more money in Portal and WCM rather than just Notes in which applications can be done usually 1/10th of the cost and even IBM reps were pushing for the Portal and WCM than Notes purely because they cannot add any new licenses in Notes and only by selling new licenses they reach their target. Because majority of the Notes systems are not very complex systems and usually 10 - 15 apps can be maintained by a developer and administrator, it's not visible to C-level management.
May be IBM should have delivered things like Lotus Connections in Domino platform as Nathan very rightly stated or i wonder why not a SharePoint like system is delivered in Domino platform. I just wonder, why IBM has not capitalised on a opportunity like this. They had 140 million seats during year 2004 or something and if they had polished Domino and built a system like Sharepoint on top of Domino wouldn't they have increased the business to double. IMO, Domino had everything what Sharepoint is doing today and i wonder what would have taken to built a system like that. May be IBM perception of collaboration was different and they wanted to make it more of a process centric rather than document centric.
Volker has asked a very genuine question why IBM has acquired Lotus in the first place and how Domino is perceived by other divisions of IBM. To find out answers, I digged through some of the interviews by Steve Mills to understand what can i make out from the statements. That has given me some broad level understanding. I will quote some of the items here
Excerpts from
http://www.information-age.com/channels/management-and-skills/features/313746/an-interview-with-steve-mills.thtml
IA: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are building huge data centres across the US and Europe with a view to offering software-as- a-service, storage-as-a-service, email-as-a-service and more. They see themselves as the new large utility companies, delivering application services. So does IBM see that as something it would want to replicate?
SM: For the consumer, no. We have made it clear in the market that our orientation is not toward [the consumer]. It is not that we won’t help others serve the consumer, we are happy to do that, but we don’t want to be consumer facing. That is not our forte.
IA: Acquisitions have become a central part of IBM Software’s expansion strategy, and that has moved the portfolio up the stack from middleware and systems software into the applications layer, with FileNet and Cognos products. Can you give us an idea of whether there is a clear applications line that you do or do not want to cross?
SM: So I am the guy that makes these decisions, and [I can tell you] there is a clear line. However, the line is more related to an understanding of the ecosystems in which we participate.
Take FileNet as an example. Clearly, there are people who look at FileNet as an application. But most of the code, by weight, is infrastructure not application code, even though it has application-like characteristics.
He goes to say that
What this comes back to is that we are not afraid to deliver applications, but we are clearly very selective about where we do it. It is in spaces which are highly exploitative of infrastructure.
Even though this interview was done quite some time back, we can still see the mind set and we will have to definitely take this as voice of IBM. The above answers some of the questions that were asked by the Lotus community and that is IBM is not interested in consumer facing because that is not their forte and they are very much in to providing infrastructure software and services than applications.
That's why IBM never shows product in their marketing because they are not consumer oriented where as MS and Apple are.
And that's why IBM don't want to produce good looking and nicely polished UI because they are marketing to end users.
Their market segment and the areas of focus are very different from others and that's why IBM is hugely successful company and know what they are doing.
So if you are working with Lotus technologies it is expected that they may not carry a UI like Apples or Microsoft's and it's up to the consultant to build up nice UI's with the software because IBM is not selling to end users.
So to come to a conclusion, my take is as a consultant we can love a particular technology or product but still has to keep options open, we definitely have to pickup different skills and need to apply when it is needed. In my case since i love IBM, i managed to move to WebSphere Portal, WCM, OmniFind, along with LDDM, Quickplace/Quickr, Sametime etc. Besides development i also do presales and project management.
When i write this, in Singapore there is only a handful of Lotus Notes jobs and to be precise its only 5 from the job site and WebSphere Portal is also very less.
J2EE and .NET openings are quite a lot and nothing wrong in picking up .Net / J2EE and infact IBM wanted us all to know J2EE and if one fine day Domino is consumed by WebSphere which is their home grown and not acquired as in the case of Lotus, they don't want people to loose out jobs.
Ok now what, go back and think about what you could do to make yourself more marketable. Learn Xpages or .NET? Am going to learn both and other technologies too. Happy learning...
Update : This post is not supposed to be meant as Negative. IBM has done a great deal to Lotus Notes without which Lotus wouldn't have come this far. All am trying to convey here, IBM probably have a different strategy and may be it doesn't gel with what we think. Project Vulcan is a prime example for that kind of commitment. IMO,if we understand the technology fundamentals my take is it's not very difficult to apply and learn new technologies right? That's how i want to view and move. Life has to go on.
Long Live IBM Lotus
It started with Volker in his typical way followed by Jake and John Vaughan. I read through almost each of the comments and it was definitely enlightening to go through each of it and how each one of us perceive about Notes software and i must say i thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have made comments on Jake's blog and from then on to read all the rest of the comments took a long time and digest. Every now and then Lotus community face this sort of discussion and i remember once i too have written along these lines in the past.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2006/02/laug-1st-meeting.html
Each time, i want to write comments in Volker site, there is whole lot of things running in mind and don't know exactly how to write about. That's what writing experience is all about. If you start writing on a daily basis, your writing will get polished and you know exactly what needs to be communicated and to be able to do that with just few words yet powerful. IMO, that's why Volker is able to sum up in a nice way and others like me think but whole lots of things comes to mind and stop and then again lots of things comes to mind while you sleep etc.
Before i start i have to say "I just love IBM". Even though i have never worked there, i am just attracted by Big Blue IBM. I get excited every time i hear that IBM makes software for big corporations and they are massively scalable and nothing comes close and simply not comparable to other vendors. They have just about everything for a big company to be their customer and even smaller ones. Am bought by the IBM brand much earlier somehow.
After i completed my Engineering i was selected in a campus interview to join a IT services company and it was there i was first introduced to Lotus Notes R4.5 in the year 1998. In my team we were 12 trainees who started reading through Lotus Notes CBT and were given training on the platform by our senior employees in the team. And it's about 12 years now. All this while, i have been working in Notes and Domino and until 2006 its very much Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, LDDM, Lotus Workflow.
After that, the market started slowly dipping in SG for Notes. Not much new development in Notes. Singapore Gov is a very big customer of Notes and every Ministry, Stat boards, and Agencies associated with Government uses Notes for Email. Not only for mail and plenty of applications in Notes and lots of services company has made huge money until one day the Gov said: We are going to standardise our operating environment (SOE) and the following are the software that will be available in each of the civil servant desktop and the list doesn't include Lotus Notes. It's a massive deal SGD 1.5 billion (atleast from outside it looks so). The consortium that won the deal includes Microsoft who are the key software supplier. And that means, its Exchange over Domino for mail. And the project has officially started in the year 2007 and its still on going. Not sure how successful will be but analyst like Gartner predicted it will not yield much gains though.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2010/04/soeasy-is-not-so-easy.html
Anyways for people who built their skills around Notes and Domino, they have to move on and in my case, out of 12 people in my team there was no one doing Notes except me at that point in time (team mates were smart and they changed careers am not repenting though) and i for one continued with IBM but its just that i shaped up skills in Presales and started in WebSphere Portal technologies and WCM. As a IT services company, it made a lot of sense to them that they can make more money in Portal and WCM rather than just Notes in which applications can be done usually 1/10th of the cost and even IBM reps were pushing for the Portal and WCM than Notes purely because they cannot add any new licenses in Notes and only by selling new licenses they reach their target. Because majority of the Notes systems are not very complex systems and usually 10 - 15 apps can be maintained by a developer and administrator, it's not visible to C-level management.
May be IBM should have delivered things like Lotus Connections in Domino platform as Nathan very rightly stated or i wonder why not a SharePoint like system is delivered in Domino platform. I just wonder, why IBM has not capitalised on a opportunity like this. They had 140 million seats during year 2004 or something and if they had polished Domino and built a system like Sharepoint on top of Domino wouldn't they have increased the business to double. IMO, Domino had everything what Sharepoint is doing today and i wonder what would have taken to built a system like that. May be IBM perception of collaboration was different and they wanted to make it more of a process centric rather than document centric.
Volker has asked a very genuine question why IBM has acquired Lotus in the first place and how Domino is perceived by other divisions of IBM. To find out answers, I digged through some of the interviews by Steve Mills to understand what can i make out from the statements. That has given me some broad level understanding. I will quote some of the items here
Excerpts from
http://www.information-age.com/channels/management-and-skills/features/313746/an-interview-with-steve-mills.thtml
IA: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are building huge data centres across the US and Europe with a view to offering software-as- a-service, storage-as-a-service, email-as-a-service and more. They see themselves as the new large utility companies, delivering application services. So does IBM see that as something it would want to replicate?
SM: For the consumer, no. We have made it clear in the market that our orientation is not toward [the consumer]. It is not that we won’t help others serve the consumer, we are happy to do that, but we don’t want to be consumer facing. That is not our forte.
IA: Acquisitions have become a central part of IBM Software’s expansion strategy, and that has moved the portfolio up the stack from middleware and systems software into the applications layer, with FileNet and Cognos products. Can you give us an idea of whether there is a clear applications line that you do or do not want to cross?
SM: So I am the guy that makes these decisions, and [I can tell you] there is a clear line. However, the line is more related to an understanding of the ecosystems in which we participate.
Take FileNet as an example. Clearly, there are people who look at FileNet as an application. But most of the code, by weight, is infrastructure not application code, even though it has application-like characteristics.
He goes to say that
What this comes back to is that we are not afraid to deliver applications, but we are clearly very selective about where we do it. It is in spaces which are highly exploitative of infrastructure.
Even though this interview was done quite some time back, we can still see the mind set and we will have to definitely take this as voice of IBM. The above answers some of the questions that were asked by the Lotus community and that is IBM is not interested in consumer facing because that is not their forte and they are very much in to providing infrastructure software and services than applications.
That's why IBM never shows product in their marketing because they are not consumer oriented where as MS and Apple are.
And that's why IBM don't want to produce good looking and nicely polished UI because they are marketing to end users.
Their market segment and the areas of focus are very different from others and that's why IBM is hugely successful company and know what they are doing.
So if you are working with Lotus technologies it is expected that they may not carry a UI like Apples or Microsoft's and it's up to the consultant to build up nice UI's with the software because IBM is not selling to end users.
So to come to a conclusion, my take is as a consultant we can love a particular technology or product but still has to keep options open, we definitely have to pickup different skills and need to apply when it is needed. In my case since i love IBM, i managed to move to WebSphere Portal, WCM, OmniFind, along with LDDM, Quickplace/Quickr, Sametime etc. Besides development i also do presales and project management.
When i write this, in Singapore there is only a handful of Lotus Notes jobs and to be precise its only 5 from the job site and WebSphere Portal is also very less.
J2EE and .NET openings are quite a lot and nothing wrong in picking up .Net / J2EE and infact IBM wanted us all to know J2EE and if one fine day Domino is consumed by WebSphere which is their home grown and not acquired as in the case of Lotus, they don't want people to loose out jobs.
Ok now what, go back and think about what you could do to make yourself more marketable. Learn Xpages or .NET? Am going to learn both and other technologies too. Happy learning...
Update : This post is not supposed to be meant as Negative. IBM has done a great deal to Lotus Notes without which Lotus wouldn't have come this far. All am trying to convey here, IBM probably have a different strategy and may be it doesn't gel with what we think. Project Vulcan is a prime example for that kind of commitment. IMO,if we understand the technology fundamentals my take is it's not very difficult to apply and learn new technologies right? That's how i want to view and move. Life has to go on.
Long Live IBM Lotus
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
IBM Project Vulcan
Is going to leave everyone to dust. One of the announcements from Lotusphere 2010. Looks like Google Wave, Facebook, Connections, LinkedIn etc and know what, everything to be delivered in Lotus Notes client in what IBM calls Continuity, Convergence, Innovation and New opportunities.
This is definitely going to be a big leap forward in the areas of collaboration and productivity yet supporting all the Notes apps that you had built in the past. I wonder how IBM is able to achieve this sort of backward compatibility but i am sure that it's not an easy task.
Here we go some sample screen shots by far the best through EdBrill.com
This is definitely going to be a big leap forward in the areas of collaboration and productivity yet supporting all the Notes apps that you had built in the past. I wonder how IBM is able to achieve this sort of backward compatibility but i am sure that it's not an easy task.
Here we go some sample screen shots by far the best through EdBrill.com
Sunday, November 01, 2009
IBM Software Technical Certification Day
IBM has conducted a software certification day for all of its partners lacking the relevant certifications on 30th October. They provided the workstations and a friendly lab manager to assist. They also stated that the IBM team will be there to help to ensure that partners have the best opportunity to qualify. But i don't remember seeing anyone though :)
Anyway, I made most from this opportunity and took 2 certifications.
- M13 - IBM WebSphere Portal Technical Sales Mastery
- LOT 955 - IBM WebSphere Portal Deployment and Administration
Friday, September 25, 2009
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Lotus Top Gun
Last year, around this time i was selected as one of the Lotus Top Gun in the class. Its really a nice moment indeed :) This time IBM is not having the Top Gun classes in Singapore and is happening in KL. I just saw a Tweet from Stephan Wissel, he has just returned from KL after Lotus Top Gun 08.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Knowledge Networking and Web 2.0
I am delivering a presentation today at IBM Park View Square on Web 2.0 and Knowledge networking along with my Chief Architect Mr. Mani. Last 3 days kept me busy in preparing for it. It's a enjoyable experience though without much sleep etc. I couldn't prepare this piece earlier, as i was working on a Portal project presales and thought i have got at least one week to go through this but all of a sudden my better half caught up with a bad flu and had to rush her to hospital. She was completely down for more than a week and in the recovery path now and hopefully she will be completely alright in this week.
First time, am seeing flu which is there for more than 3 days. She had to undergo blood test and some X-ray tests as well as her temperature was 40-41F all the time.
Well anyways i manage to find time in these 3 days and put up a presentation for my audience. Since this is actually a follow on event to LCTY 2007, i hope most of the audience are a Lotus shop. And am gonna pitch 2 new products which is gonna hit market soon. You know it already, Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr.
And there is already one more seminar coming up on 26th April on WPS. Will cover that soon as well. Cheers all :)
First time, am seeing flu which is there for more than 3 days. She had to undergo blood test and some X-ray tests as well as her temperature was 40-41F all the time.
Well anyways i manage to find time in these 3 days and put up a presentation for my audience. Since this is actually a follow on event to LCTY 2007, i hope most of the audience are a Lotus shop. And am gonna pitch 2 new products which is gonna hit market soon. You know it already, Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr.
And there is already one more seminar coming up on 26th April on WPS. Will cover that soon as well. Cheers all :)
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Lotus Notes Domino 8 Public Beta Available Now
Back in India, expectations are sky high about Indian cricket team winning World Cup 2007 in West Indies. Meanwhile, i am very excited about Lotus Notes Domino 8 beta release here..
Public beta is available now for download. Go ahead and enjoy !!!
Friday, March 09, 2007
Real "WOW" begins next week
Just can't wait to see the Notes 8 Beta, have seen glimpses of it before both Classic and Eclipse based. Really look forward to seeing by next week. Via Ed Brill
Meanwhile, i also have my LAUG meet up where hopefully i can see Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections too Cool :)
Meanwhile, i also have my LAUG meet up where hopefully i can see Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections too Cool :)
Monday, February 12, 2007
Lotus Expeditor 6.1
I have recently attended a 4 days class on Lotus Expeditor in IBM. I must admit it was a wonderful (both personal and professional) 4 days in the recent past. All the days were absolutely fantastic in terms of learning and hearing lots of good things about Lotus. The trainers were absolutely awesome in engaging us in some whiteboard discussions where we had enough chances to put forth most of our points :) and get answers too. And the mates who attended the session with me were real good guys - most of the them from TechSales and absolutely have a flair for selling and joining in some excellent debates. The other group is from Technical services - fantastic guys who plays with WAS (Websphere Application Server) and WPS (Websphere Portal Server) every day.
The interesting point to note with these Tech Services guys is they are able to see everything from 100% technical point of view. These guys are having some real cool discussions in terms of really implementing the concepts with Java programming. I must say that i am really motivated after seeing their working style for these days. Thinkpad is a must for every employee in IBM and almost 80% of the workforce is mobile so that they can work anytime, anywhere. They don't have to come to office everyday to be productive and can work from home too if they want.
So many things happened and i am digesting whatever i have heard now.
Lets come to Lotus Expeditor. What is that and how is it useful for an organisation?
Lotus Expeditor comes with 3 components viz client, server and toolkit to build Composite Applications. They say "Universal client" because it runs everywhere - Desktops, Laptops, Devices like PDA, Mobile phones etc, and KIOSKS and can work in connected and not so connected and completely disconnected environments as well.
Lotus Expeditor is the common run time based on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) on which Lotus Sametime 7.5 (already running) and Lotus Notes/Domino 8 is going to run. It is basically Eclipse RCP plus other services like layout, managed browser, security, synchronisation etc etc. Some say that Expeditor provides client runtimes and applications run on top of it. The reason to say this is because of the fact that Expeditor itself can be deployed from a centrally managed portal server (and hence the name server managed clients) and applications can be pushed to the Expeditor client desktops or any of your devices from a central server.
The true business value of Expeditor comes from the fact that it gives the users flexibility to work in both connected and disconnected environments. The classic example would be the Insurance agents where they have to travel to locations with no Internet/GPRS connections.
And here are other reasons:
Server managed clients so applications can be automatically pushed when its available.
Composite applications - Simply put it is the portal which can work offline. The huge value comes from the fact that it makes the users productive in the context of the business process of what they do. They don't have to switch to multiple applications when they work with the customers. And the best part is they can even do this even when they are offline. These things will be of immense value if you are J2EE customer or portal customer today. Such things were non existent in the J2EE world.
If you are Notes/Domino customer things like offline data/applications, replication is something which we do traditionally and hence the value would come from the fact that you could build composite applications based on NSF data alone or if they want they could mix with the data from all other sources like Portals or other J2EE applications or even Microsoft applications. Behind the scenes it is going to be WSDL and other Web Services components which is what makes the whole on-the-glass aggregation happen. Plus because the whole thing now is going to run on top of Lotus Expeditor (which is also the underlying architecture for Lotus Sametime 7.5) plugins you develop for Sametime and Notes/Domino can work interchangeably. I was sitting besides Stephan Wissel (the Lotus guru in Singapore) during the session and picked up lots of things when i talk with him. He is truly a great person. Whenever i speak with him it will always be enlightening for me and actually it motivates me to learn and talk.
There are just too many different combinations that one could think of with Lotus Notes Domino 8 and Lotus Expeditor. I will put down as and when i read more about the subject.
It was tempting for me to say that Lotus Notes for the first time can also serve transactional applications if you code your composite application that way. For instance, you could have a composite application like BankTeller application runs inside ND8 client but serves the transactional data. I am not sure exactly whether it is possible and i leave this part to subject experts :)
All in all i thoroughly enjoyed the complete 4 days and very much look forward other training sessions. Thanks all people.
The interesting point to note with these Tech Services guys is they are able to see everything from 100% technical point of view. These guys are having some real cool discussions in terms of really implementing the concepts with Java programming. I must say that i am really motivated after seeing their working style for these days. Thinkpad is a must for every employee in IBM and almost 80% of the workforce is mobile so that they can work anytime, anywhere. They don't have to come to office everyday to be productive and can work from home too if they want.
So many things happened and i am digesting whatever i have heard now.
Lets come to Lotus Expeditor. What is that and how is it useful for an organisation?
Lotus Expeditor comes with 3 components viz client, server and toolkit to build Composite Applications. They say "Universal client" because it runs everywhere - Desktops, Laptops, Devices like PDA, Mobile phones etc, and KIOSKS and can work in connected and not so connected and completely disconnected environments as well.
Lotus Expeditor is the common run time based on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) on which Lotus Sametime 7.5 (already running) and Lotus Notes/Domino 8 is going to run. It is basically Eclipse RCP plus other services like layout, managed browser, security, synchronisation etc etc. Some say that Expeditor provides client runtimes and applications run on top of it. The reason to say this is because of the fact that Expeditor itself can be deployed from a centrally managed portal server (and hence the name server managed clients) and applications can be pushed to the Expeditor client desktops or any of your devices from a central server.
The true business value of Expeditor comes from the fact that it gives the users flexibility to work in both connected and disconnected environments. The classic example would be the Insurance agents where they have to travel to locations with no Internet/GPRS connections.
And here are other reasons:
Server managed clients so applications can be automatically pushed when its available.
Composite applications - Simply put it is the portal which can work offline. The huge value comes from the fact that it makes the users productive in the context of the business process of what they do. They don't have to switch to multiple applications when they work with the customers. And the best part is they can even do this even when they are offline. These things will be of immense value if you are J2EE customer or portal customer today. Such things were non existent in the J2EE world.
If you are Notes/Domino customer things like offline data/applications, replication is something which we do traditionally and hence the value would come from the fact that you could build composite applications based on NSF data alone or if they want they could mix with the data from all other sources like Portals or other J2EE applications or even Microsoft applications. Behind the scenes it is going to be WSDL and other Web Services components which is what makes the whole on-the-glass aggregation happen. Plus because the whole thing now is going to run on top of Lotus Expeditor (which is also the underlying architecture for Lotus Sametime 7.5) plugins you develop for Sametime and Notes/Domino can work interchangeably. I was sitting besides Stephan Wissel (the Lotus guru in Singapore) during the session and picked up lots of things when i talk with him. He is truly a great person. Whenever i speak with him it will always be enlightening for me and actually it motivates me to learn and talk.
There are just too many different combinations that one could think of with Lotus Notes Domino 8 and Lotus Expeditor. I will put down as and when i read more about the subject.
It was tempting for me to say that Lotus Notes for the first time can also serve transactional applications if you code your composite application that way. For instance, you could have a composite application like BankTeller application runs inside ND8 client but serves the transactional data. I am not sure exactly whether it is possible and i leave this part to subject experts :)
All in all i thoroughly enjoyed the complete 4 days and very much look forward other training sessions. Thanks all people.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
The Famous Deal - IBM and MS
A bit of history this time. When i was Googling about IBM and MS i found some interesting articles/deals. One of the article is about the famous deal between IBM and MS and how MS became a multi billion dollar company from nothing. Its definitely worth reading.
After completion, you will contemplate whether Bill Gates really a Genius or anyone can become so!!!
So the moral of the story is :
Sometimes, its not what you know that matters, its who you know really matters? Taken from one of the Singapore taxi drivers business card, who also happened to be a Letter writer for accidents etc.
Updated the last 2 lines on 19th Nov 2006.
After completion, you will contemplate whether Bill Gates really a Genius or anyone can become so!!!
So the moral of the story is :
Sometimes, its not what you know that matters, its who you know really matters? Taken from one of the Singapore taxi drivers business card, who also happened to be a Letter writer for accidents etc.
Updated the last 2 lines on 19th Nov 2006.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Work Place
Attended a half-day seminar on Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Workplace conducted by IBM. It was a very good and different from the usual ones. IBM has started doing some great things around Lotus marketing and it is evident in these events. The crowd was pretty decent in number and for the first time i have got DVD's as take away with lots of IBM software evaluation copies.
The presentation was indeed good by Scott Bain - Manager IBM Software Technology Group followed with nice demos from Mark Moore. The presentation was well organised and started with Domino v7 and Sametime integration and explaining the newly introduced Web services in Domino. Got some very interesting points including the free presence awareness, and IM.
This particular feature is available from v6.5 but the sad thing is not many know about this and hence haven't tried in their environments. I don't know of anyone who is using this in Singapore. Initially, i assumed that i require a Lotus Sametime server component to make this work but after taking some time with the speakers after the presentation i found out that its just a matter of turning ON the feature while installing and configuring Domino. Now i am convinced to give it a try in my notebook to begin with.
So then the presentation moved to extending Domino to Portal infrastructures. They covered some of the features of Websphere portal and how it can work with Domino and several other transaction oriented apps. They were explaining how collaboration could extend to portals and will in turn help the customers.
Till that stage, they were explaining about tool based collaboration like E-mails, IM, Discussions, Application databases which we are doing today. In the future there is going to be "Activity based collaboration" which is also called Contextual collaboration.
What it means is this : For a particular goal/activity to be accomplished users are using various tools like Emails, Chats, Word docs to generate artifacts. And the common thread which connects all these is that particular "Activity". The thread which links everything is called an Activity thread which is what Activity centric collaboration all about.
The users might have used various tools, interacted with various users and would have prepared various artifcats like word docs, spread sheets so on so forth. But at one shot, the system will show the users about all the things which has happened on that particular task and what is happening currently.
Sounds exciting!!! Today this technology is available in the form of Lotus Workplace and customers can make use of it straight away. But if users want to stay in the evolutionary path who is currently using Domino v6.5 upwards or Websphere Portal they can wait till "Hannover" time frame and Domino Next which will have Workplace technologies sowed in everywhere.
I look forward to "Hannover". Meanwhile i will start exploring about Workplace :)
The presentation was indeed good by Scott Bain - Manager IBM Software Technology Group followed with nice demos from Mark Moore. The presentation was well organised and started with Domino v7 and Sametime integration and explaining the newly introduced Web services in Domino. Got some very interesting points including the free presence awareness, and IM.
This particular feature is available from v6.5 but the sad thing is not many know about this and hence haven't tried in their environments. I don't know of anyone who is using this in Singapore. Initially, i assumed that i require a Lotus Sametime server component to make this work but after taking some time with the speakers after the presentation i found out that its just a matter of turning ON the feature while installing and configuring Domino. Now i am convinced to give it a try in my notebook to begin with.
So then the presentation moved to extending Domino to Portal infrastructures. They covered some of the features of Websphere portal and how it can work with Domino and several other transaction oriented apps. They were explaining how collaboration could extend to portals and will in turn help the customers.
Till that stage, they were explaining about tool based collaboration like E-mails, IM, Discussions, Application databases which we are doing today. In the future there is going to be "Activity based collaboration" which is also called Contextual collaboration.
What it means is this : For a particular goal/activity to be accomplished users are using various tools like Emails, Chats, Word docs to generate artifacts. And the common thread which connects all these is that particular "Activity". The thread which links everything is called an Activity thread which is what Activity centric collaboration all about.
The users might have used various tools, interacted with various users and would have prepared various artifcats like word docs, spread sheets so on so forth. But at one shot, the system will show the users about all the things which has happened on that particular task and what is happening currently.
Sounds exciting!!! Today this technology is available in the form of Lotus Workplace and customers can make use of it straight away. But if users want to stay in the evolutionary path who is currently using Domino v6.5 upwards or Websphere Portal they can wait till "Hannover" time frame and Domino Next which will have Workplace technologies sowed in everywhere.
I look forward to "Hannover". Meanwhile i will start exploring about Workplace :)
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