At times reduced to a Barcode...
Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce
John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid
and
Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5
So there was a lot to see...
Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit). Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.
If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working. That is about 1% of a working day. So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101. With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010. So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment.... think you should be considering this stuff? I do.
For a £20k average salary
1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
For a £40k average salary
500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
or
1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.
Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right? Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.
Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone. Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.
Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles. Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified. If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine
Hi, I mentioned earlier that some fines were likely to come in to law - well they just have. So if you haven't got your house in order you probably should be thinking about it.
Whether you are governed by PCI, FSA or anything else this is the catchall - so make sure you are on top of it.
Oh, and it lok like a few guys
Zurich Insurance
(who lost 46,000 unencrypted records)
Royal London
just missed out on being the first big fine... good old post ex-facto... ;-(
Watch out all you data protection guys... call us if you need a hand...
Looks like the date is in for our next IPCCTV Event -Thursday May 06, 2010, 09:30-12:30
We've been working with Guys at King Communications to get the tweak the agenda for the intended audience. We've listened to the feedback from the last three events and think this one will be even better than the last.
The event will be held at the Dakota Hotel at Eurocentral will feature a number of in depth demonstrations of Milestone XProtect Corporate software and you will be able to see the systems running on IBM System X Servers and Storage.
XProtect 3.1 and Smart Client 5.0 Launch Webinar MIPS 2010 from Fredrik Wallberg on Vimeo.
The last event had over 60 attendees and we expect more this year. You can register on the Kings Event landing page here and if you want to let your network know what you are up to you can declare you are attending on linkedin.com by adding the event to your linkedin profile.#ipcctv #ipcctvscotland
IBM scooped the Best Security Company at Secure Computing 2010 Awards. Click these here links for a full list of finalists and winners. IMHO this is cos IBM has been going all aquisitive on us and snapped up, it would appear strategically (well done guys), all sorts of niche solutions over the past four or five years. Noteably for those of us at Seric Towers are of course Watchfire (2007) and Ounce Labs (2009) and we do see a fair bit of ISS (2006) out there in cyberville. Throw these bad boys into the already reasonably juicy mix and rub some GBS on it and IBM have a good story to tell those enterprise boys. Good enough to win the Security Company of the Year from SC at the largest awards in the Security Industry Calendar.
Here are some of the factoids about what IBM is doing to get just such an accolade
Why am I telling you this - well this would be the shameless plug section of the blog, we do this stuff! We supply and support the IBM's Rational AppScan Suite - covering black and whitebox application scanning. If you want secure code out there that won't leave you with egg (a fine) on your face (balance sheet) get in touch! Look, I even have a snazzy graphic for this stuff on my blog - yes, I spotted it should read PROTECTED
There are are 10 different siblings in the AppScan Family. You can compare the members of the AppScan clan here - though it is a particularly bad page as the row headings don't change with teh product changes and products look devoid of features when they are in fact irrelevant. Anyway - pick three and compare like-for-like, find what you like and then call us 0141 561 1161 - we'd like that ;-)
Chief geek here at Seric Towers William 'Raoul' 'MacGyver' MacLeod has put his shoulder firmly behind Windows 7. You can check out some of the reasons here on his Zeneric and never Generic site.
... but this look pretty interesting for folks going down the in house social software route... but perhaps looking to take it out to the network edge and (eventually) beyond.
The offering extends the functionality of Connections to include more of the Twitterlike ( @stuart-seric ) microblogging functionality. Here's a wee demo from Youtube land
There's a 30 day trial available and I can see this being useful for at least a decent subset of staff in an fully online business and a smaller proportion in others. No news/comments on whether mobile support will be offered or how this fits in on what Lotus are up to with RIM for Connections
This year's (Scottish) Lotusphere Comes to you Event has been announce and the word on the grapevine is it will be a corker, with even more great demos. I know David Hood has been working on bringing the right people to the show. We'll be there along with the usual suspects and of course hoping to see many more new folks along. Why not tell a friend...
You can get updates and register (not quite yet) for the Edinburgh event at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/events/lcty2010/europe.html
If in the meantime you want to let your contacts know you're interested or are planning to attend I've created an event on Linkedin so you can let folk know you are going and get some of your own networking done at the event too.
I picked up from a fine article at finextra.com that Australia's Bendigo and Adelaide Bank have
launched an online social community where anyone with a plan, project or
idea can connect with other people to find support, resources and
expertise. This sort of community enterprise enablement through social media is the sort of thing that could really bring big changes to communities.
Users provide a description of their plan, the reason they are embarking on it and an explanation of what will constitute success. They can also post pictures, videos and documents.
Other visitors can then post comments, offering support, money, advice and information. They can also "get involved" by telling people about the plan through Facebook and Twitter, voting to support it and signing up for progress updates.
The bank says PlanBig draws on the strengths of social networking to enable people to efficiently share information, create partnerships and support each other's plans.
"One day we hope that PlanBig will be part of everyday life, a self-sustaining and self-moderating community that is of real use to passionate people and real benefit to communities with all kinds of plans, big or small," it says.
Themed collaborative platforms such as these will help to bring people together around a common purpose. Interesting to see banks getting involved in this space given older survey of facebookers have suggested they might be interested in taking up such things should vendors run with them. Good on the boys down under in getting this one out, looking to take a lead in their market space. Fortune favours the brave and this might just erm disrupt the apple cart.
ClearCase 7.1.1 and ClearQuest 7.1.1 introduce support for Microsoft Windows 7
You can get trial of this stuff to put onto your shiny new Win7 clients and start to test those vendor promises right away... Rational Clearcase Download Site
Unfamiliar with Rational ClearCase? Well there is plenty to learn, Rational ClearCase is a software tool for revision control (e.g. configuration management, SCM) of source code and other software development. Here's a screenshoot and details from IBM Support describing the explorer window.
The Rational® ClearCase® Explorer window consists of several panes and a toolbar.
By
default, all panes and the toolbar are displayed.
Under the view icon Rational ClearCase lists the view tag, which is the name by which you reference a view.
Move your mouse over the root directory to display the view tag and its associated path.
When you open the Rational ClearCase Explorer for the first time, with no view selected, or when you click the Getting Started tab in the Shortcut pane, the Details pane then displays a Getting Started Help topic.
The details pane is replaced by a browser pane when it displays information in a Web browser.
Ok so that was a bit of Brain dump... but I'm not guilty cos ClearCase is pretty decent and I like what you can do. That said I am generally more interested in the Rational stable based on the Jazz plaform which you can find out about at Jazz.net here is a description from draft 0.24 of the Detailed Architechture Overview of the site.
"The goal of the Jazz Integration Architecture (JIA) is to enable diverse tools to be used together providing an integrated experience to their users. This document provides an overview of JIA, and introduces the notion of a Jazz Team Server (JTS) that provides the Jazz Foundation Services (JFS) that allow groups of tools to work together. It also explains the relationship between JIA and Rational’s Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative."
The fulcrum provides flexible bridges ... simple, logical, functionally rich. Very nice.
More info on World of Rational sometime soon... S
Some of you folks may be interested to attend Avocent's Winter breakfast briefing at Murrayfield.
You can find out about the Government's new CRC scheme, The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (formerly known as the Carbon
Reduction Commitment) is the UK's mandatory climate change and energy
saving scheme, due to start in April 2010. Joan Ruddock speaks about the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme
If you cannot see the video download the latest Flash player
And also find out about Avocent MergePoint® Infrastructure Explorer (AMIE) software which really makes managing data your data centre easy and extremely energy efficient.
AMIE has a great GUI and some delicious features for managing migrations. Want to know what was/it/will be in Rack #7 rows 15-25? Very interesting. The visualisation, calendaring and librabry feeds are key, after all if you can see it, you can understand it... which allows you to know, plan and manage your data centre effectively. It's no just pretty mind - there is sub-rack power management great for you hosting providers out there. I've whacked a few pics in here to give you an idea...
Project Planning
Putting some kit into the Data Centre
Rack front view of equipment
Rack rear view of the equipment
RRC is on the next increment of v2 and integration capabilities with RQM an RTC are greatly enhanced with the respective v2 released of each of this cheeky triumvirate of the jazz.net fold.
I'm about 2 weeks late with the news here.... afterall you could have been downloading this Good Stuff for almost a fortnight (that's the time you spent being posted to a fort -2weeks- in the olden days) and you can get it here.
Ah yes, they are all shiney and new on v2...
As reported recently online by Nick Heath and others Companies that lose individuals' sensitive personal data will face a
fine of up to £500,000 under powers expected to come into force from
April.
The powers will allow the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office, to fine private and public sector organisations that commit a serious breach of the Data Protection Act.
Justice minister Michael Wills laid a statutory instrument before Parliament on Tuesday, setting the maximum fine at £500,000. The instrument will become law by default on 6 April this year, unless Parliament objects.
All very topical since we are (in conjunction with IBM) running an Event covering - The importance of Web application security - today's most significant online threat.
A few of the guys from our team will be heading along to this Scotland IS event in Edinburgh. Especially since in this area we have the skills to pay the bills ;-).
So if you are one of the majority of people whose spending on IT Security is in all the wrong places perhaps we and this event can help. The event is targeted for IT staff.
IT is a useful truth however that the buck rarely stops with IT in my experience from a Data Protection responsibility perspective. So if that's you and you are not IT we can come and speak to you about this stuff and help you determine whether you are properly protected or not. It's all about the due diligence - not the geeking out. Though I, like many others enjoy geeking out.
Here's a little something to chew on from a cost and risk perspective...
Are you
confident this won’t happen to you?
A North American
Retailer claimed that over 45.6 million cards belonging to customers were
compromised in an intrusion that went undetected for over 18 months; however,
several banks suing the company claim the actual number is 94 million cards,
a vast majority of them issued by Visa. The breach prompted numerous lawsuits
and calls for stronger data protection laws. By the retailers own estimates,
the company has spent or set aside close to US$250 million for costs
stemming from the incident.
We are working with the Rational folks at IBM on a wee dram of and Event at the Whisky Society in Edinburgh. It should be pretty useful and a thoroughly good day out.
Event details on Scotland IS site
Probably relevant if....
You have a development team and you are interested in...
.......Or have an interest in Jazz (no comment)....
......You get all hot and flustered over Software Security & Compliance and love to.....
.... or perhaps the Software
Quality isn't quite what you would like and you have been known to say things like this but perhaps in a less marketing robot fashion
Hope to see you there....
Having had a look at Wolfram-Alpha it seems like Stephen and friends have been busy little bunnies. I've been a fan since the first time I got my mitts on a copy of Mathematica way back when and it just did EVERYTHING better. Of course other stuff has come along to fill little niches and do some stuff really well but it is still the biggest the best and has the most delicious syntax. If a syntax can be beautiful the Wolfster def made the best stab at it. Look at the wonderful things you can do with it. Easter eggs on Mathematica - I bet they taste even better than they look. Not bad for an Old Etonian.
But what the Real Michael J and friends have been up to recently looks like a real step forward in information collation for the nation, and I do mean the nation; though I salute more than Stephen's team's indefatigability their most recent progeny glut are certainly norteamericanos and sans passport at that. But the turtle progresses only by sticking its neck out and this lot have clearly been wearing their turtlenecks.
Music on a search engine - these guys have been thinking afresh and thinking it through. I've never read it but I can't imagine there are not at least a few synesthetes in the development team to come up with this stuff. What would Duke Ellington and Miles Davis have made of this stuff I suspect they would have loved it. I'm guessing Richard David James is already a keen follower...
So many clever boys and girls make explicit connections between what for many, are very different spheres of knowledge. The sysnethete to me seems both the extreme example of, and the niche polymath - and I note that last bit smells of oxymoron. I don't want to colour anyone's views but could this be the first steps towards a more general correlation of pools of knowledge in the population. I often say to people that clever people do a few things in the vedic tradition of little and often,
Well the boys at Wolfram have a wonderful alpha out there now and as it passes my 5-point test I'm all for it. Centred on America, sure; Does loads of things worse than Google, definitely; Loads of bugs, you've got me! Like I said earlier - you have to stick your neck out, so why not check it out and take it somewhere new?
