Recap of The View Admin 2011

View from my hotel room of the Planet Hollywood hotel and The Bellagio with the mountains in the background

Sorry this is a week late but I took a few days off with the family after my week in Vegas.

If you have never been to one of The View Admin or Developer conferences, you don't know what you are missing. Sessions are given by IBMers, ISSL staff, Vendors, Sponsors, (announced at the event)IBM Champions, Bloggers, Regular speakers from other Lotus IBM Collaboration Solutions events. In other words, the people that know what they are doing and have done that, blogged it and forgot some of it already. No marketing, okay some IBM sessions naturally but even those are aimed at YOU not some exec or business line person, you the technical decision maker.

I spent time with many of my friends some of which I only knew online, some which are lurkers on this blog (hi Missy) and others from Twitter or just rare glimpses from Lotuspheres. I did feel out of place surrounded by iPads everywhere. You'd think they were sold at the local store like chocolate bars.

This year every attendee received a recycled material backpack and inside were usual items from the sponsors and vendors but also chances to win the latest Plantronics headsets, $500 Best Buy gift card and I believe I heard an iPad was given away too. Thanks to Scott Hooks from GBS, their Transformer product was a big sponsor of the event and one evening entertainment, he was nice enough to donate his bag to me, I did not have a backpack with me and it really came in handy.

In conversation with attendees I pointed many to other sessions friends were giving and heard great reviews from those sessions. What is so bad about getting up close with the speaker in a room for about 100 people? And then you get to talk to them in the hall or at lunch or wherever? Really try to do that at Lotusphere, it just is not as easy or relaxed.

Mark Harper(L) and Keith Brooks

My highlight was meeting one of my co-authors of our Quickr book, Mark Harper. Here we are with a copy, we autographed a few for some lucky people. So it was a social conference as well.

My session on  DDM and what it is telling you ran the gamut from technical to professional aspects of how to impress your management and keep Domino in everyone's good graces. We also touched on the lack of updates to some of the events database details which I hope IBM will get to at some point. But that was part of the session, the ambiguous or odd messages from the server. Well received and a mostly full room.

The Quickr session went well and while I posted the qpconfig file already, one item I demo'd only 1 person had even known they could do it at all! So I will try to get that posted here as well at some point shortly.

The session I did on Hacking your server was a bit off the beaten path but the questions afterward were really interesting. As were the few stories others told me about the deleted servers from their names.nsf ...all 400 of them.

There was a Bar Camp, emphasis on the first word, where we discussed various topics, somehow, I ended up at a table about competitive discussions and how to save your world from the encroachment of MS, Google and others. A post will be coming on this topic too as it is important for everyone to keep some things in mind so your job is secure.

Lastly, thanks and compliments to the staff of The View and all who helped put on the show for treating everyone so well and letting me print out my boarding pass.