IBM Announced a new mega conference - THINK 2018

Big news from IBM on the event/conference front.

Think about it...AI, Cloud, Data, IoT, and Security. They have merged in your world... and they have in ours too. That's why we're excited to announce a first ever event that reflects the way you do business: IBM Think 2018. Bringing together World of Watson and InterConnect to form the technology industry's most important event. - https://www.ibm.com/events/think/

The current events include Connect, InterConnect, Amplify, Edge, Vision, World of Watson and PartnerWorld. All merged into IBM THINK 2018.

From my view this is a great thing. I have attended many many of these events over the last 20 years, and they in isolation have been fantastic. But the "in isolation" part is the problem. Many organisations can't justify going to multiple events, so you tend to get the same crowd at each of the events. By bringing them together you expand the audience and enable a lot more cross polination of ideas and learning. I think this is a great thing for IBM as no longer are their solutions in isolated silos, they are integrated platforms across multiple domains.

I for one am very pleased to see this merged together, and on a personal not means I will no longer have a clash with my daughters birthdays in Jan and Feb! And I get to stay in Australia for the summer! I know some will have mixed feelings however. One massive event will make it hard to get across all content in a short period of time, and I know some customers have told me that they can only send x number of people to each event so they prefer to have multiple events.

On the naming I really like it. "THINK" has always been an iconic word for IBM. Even my grandfather has always told me "Just Think" and everything else will work itself out!

"As IBM president 1914 to 1956, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. enjoyed using the phrase "THINK!" to motivate and inspire his employees." - http://oldcomputers.net/ibm-thinkpad.html 

See you there in March 2018!

Kudos Badges Webinar with e-office from The Netherlands

One of our great Kudos Badges partners, e-office from The Netherlands has an upcoming Webinar where they will be discussing how they leverage Kudos Badges to drive user adoption within IBM Connecitons. The host Mark Bouma has been working with a number of our clients implementing Kudos Badges so his experience is sure to be worthwhile.

Here are the details:

Webinar site
http://www.e-office.com/eog/nl/website2011.nsf/index/e-officewebinarwednesday#.UW6yyEoSBzc

The info for the webinar
8 th of May - demo Kudos Badges for IBM Connections
by Mark Bouma - 12.00 uur (CET)
free webinar

e-office uses Kudos Badges in IBM Connections to stimulate the adoption process within organisations.
Kudos Badges adds game mechanics to the IBM Connections-platform which encourages employees to work with this collaboration platform and enables them to be more effective with the social functionalities.
In this webinar Mark Bouma gives you a demo of Kudos Badges. You see the different parts of Kudos and you learn to configure Badges yourself, based on your organisation's key values and goals.

The registration for the Kudos Badges webinar is here.

AUSLUG Sessions!

Just noticed the awesome organisers of AUSLUG have updated the web site to list some of the sessions. I am very pleased to see two of my proposed sessions around IBM Connections have been accepted!

Connections out of the box is AWESOME, but just a few tweaks will make it a PERFECT fit for your organisation

 

There is a lot that can be done by Administrators without needed to change any core Connections code: Want to customise Profiles to add custom attibutes? Want to hide some fields or make some read only? Want to customise Search and what is displayed in search results? Want to populate extra data from data sources other than your LDAP? Want to populate photo's? Want to change the interface, add your logo, change the colour theme, turn features on or off, hide specific widgets? Add some widgets? or do you want to get hard core and customise the API so it contains your extra data? Or even get really hard core and customise the JSP's of Connections?

and

The business value of Social Software

This session outlines the real business value of social software with specific use cases of IBM Connections 3.0.1. The session will firstly outline a number of business outcomes that can be achieved by leveraging social software and then outline some key strategies to driving user adoption. This session will be done using LIVE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS for Demos.

I am excited to see that Mat and the AUSLUG team are pulling together what seems to be an outstanding event. I am looking forward to spending a few days with fellow Lotus/ICS evangelists and learning from the other speakers.

 

It is also great to see such a strong communities of partners get behind the event and the Australian community. We all do amazing things with IBM software so it will be great to leverage and learn from each others.

 

Now I had better get on and start preparing my slide decks!