I attended the Norwegian IBM User Group (ISBG) spring meeting from on the 21st and 22nd of May. Just like last year, it was held in the city of Larvik, in a spa resort called Farris Bad. Farris is a very famous brand of mineral water that is bottled in this city.
My arrival was one day before, and thankfully other people were there, and I spent an enjoyable evening, being treated with beers from the Panagenda guys. This, while I really should have been preparing my own presentation for the last day of the conference…
I will here give you a short summary of each session I attended on day 1:
Keynote: How Smart are You?
Louis Richards, Storyteller & Enthusiast, Social Smarter Work – IBM
Richardson’s talk was about how conventional we become with age, and how divergent thought is less and less encouraged as you grow older.
He referred to a Dutch study showing that children, when asked where they wanted a third eye, always said “on one of my fingers,” whilst adults wanted to have it in the back of their head. People who don’t go by the book shouldn’t always be held back. Let the rebels be rebels. They aren’t always trouble makers.
It’s not Social Business, it’s Just Good Business
Louis Richards, Storyteller & Enthusiast, Social Smarter Work – IBM
Richards also held the next presentation. He is not fond of the word social. – It’s not social, it’s just good business, was his mantra. – We have always built relationships at work and we communicate. It’s just that we are now able to do it digitally, and preserve it.
He encourages everyone to start sharing their knowledge:
- Do not frown upon people sharing things via blogs or other media
- Share your knowledge and encourage others to do the same. If you die, your knowledge and skills should be easy for others to get hold of
- Don’t ask people for the information, search for it in the blogs, wikis, files and forum postings (if you have such tools)
- Do not force people to report all the time. Let them do their jobs and then share their information with you
Like me he abhors meetings. – Too much time is wasted on meetings. The way to go about it is this: Share a file. Invite people to a meeting and refer to the shared file. If a very few, or nobody downloads the file, cancel the meeting.
Sales Tool on Ipad/Iphone, Based on IBM Domino
Einar Ellingsen, ICT System Consultant, TINE SA
Tine is Norway’s biggest producer of dairy products and the company is owned by the biggest farming organizations. They have been running Notes/Domino for years, and on the very same day that we attended the conference, they launched their brand new intranet, running on IBM Connections.
Einar showed us a very impressive solution running both on Ipad and Iphone. It could also run on other solutions since it’s 100% web based. Before 2008, TINE had loads of paper forms that needed to be filled out for each order. In 2007 they started a project where Lotus Notes databases where used. These were replicated locally to each sales person’s computer.
The entire solution was developed by Einar, and I was very impressed. Here are some key elements:
- Every sellers has their own calendar for appointments
- There’s a built in chat function so that sellers within a region can communicate easily
- You could snap a photo of an exhibition in a store and upload it directly
- You could use a scanner to read the barcode for any product
- You could generate KPI’s for a region, for a store, for a certain product within a store and so on
- Orders are generated and sent to a mailin database. From here they are generated to XML files and sent to the EDI-server
- There are help files and movies that the users can look at for assistance
Technology used:
- SQL
- HTML5 (no framework, just best practice)
- Lotusscript and Java agents
- Google Chart Grid
- Google Maps
- REST
- Cumulus
- FTP for transferring of orders to the EDI server
- Ajax
- Pic2Shop for reading barcodes
- A-PDF Text Extractor
- ImageMagick
- The API in IBM Connections
Einar finished his talk by showing us the new Tine intranet, which is 100% IBM Connections.
Simplifying the S’s: Single Sign-On, SPNEGO and SAML
Gabriella Davis, The Turtle Partnership
Let’s face it: IBM Notes and related products is a nightmare when it comes to having one username and one password. We all know this, and we have fought with this limitation for years. And the users hate having to log on several times after logging on to their computer.
Gabriella described the three techniques that we can use:
Single Sign-On: The Notes client is using the Windows AD credentials.
SPNEGO: The user logs on in Windows and AD generates a SPNEGO-token. When a user tries to access a Doino web site the web browser will send this token to Domino, which in turn contacts AD for validation of the token. If the token is valid, the user name will be returned, and since it found the user’s name, the system knows that access should be granted.
SAML: This is the future. It works on all platforms, not just windows, and it’s a standard. A user logs on to Notes. The user will then be sent to an Identity Provider which will ask for credentials (if the user is already logged on the credentials will be returned). The user is then sent back to Notes with all the SAML information. Notes will then use the SAML-service provider to check this information, and whether access should be granted.
The drawback with SAML is that it’s still not supported by IBM Sametime or IBM Notes Traveler. A solution can be to combine SAML with SPNEGO, because SPNEGO is supported by both Sametime and Traveler.
She also described using OAuth to let IBM Connections communicate with third parties like Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.
Quo Vadis – Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow With IBM Notes/Domino
Christopher Adler, Panagenda
Panagenda has a great product called the Marvel Client, which we unfortunately don’t use at my company. However, Christopher’s talk was on more general topics. He talked about a company’s attitude towards Notes.
He also touched upon the fact that in the past you were a Notes/Domino administrator. Today you are responsible for a whole bunch of collaborative solutions. And all of them communicate with Notes!
He also talked about the importance of continuous upgrades and that whenever someone talked about changing email systems, you had to be aware of the fact that a lot of solutions in Notes are tightly integrated with the Notes mail template. Quite a few companies have burnt themselves on that fact.
And with that, the first day was over, for me anyway. I couldn’t partake in this year’s competition or murder mystery. I had to finally prepare next day’s presentation and I therefore also missed the spa bit. I did go down to dinner, and it was magnificent!
Stay tuned for day 2!