Presenting Presentations 101 Session from the IBM Think Academy

I just finished giving my session on the soft skills and other tidbits a person should think about when presenting or building their slides.

If you were lucky enough to be here in person, great, if not, I can help you or your company with your presentations in person or online. Ask me how.

Presentation on Soft Skills, Hard Skills, Body Language and More from Keith Brooks

Thank you to David Hablewitz for his input.

Remember, all the world's a stage and we are merely players.

Where's Keith? Trip plans and my sessions at IBM Think

Where's Keith between March 15th and March 26th? 

IBM Think from Sunday the 18th thru Thursday the 22nd I will be at IBM Think.

Send me messages on Social Media, Twitter(@lotusevangelist) is preferable or Watson Workspace, but any one of numerous ways will work, if you want to meet me or have business to discuss with me like jobs, projects, training requests, competitive pitches coaching.

I will be flying to LAX via CDG on Wen the 14th Air France 10:20am if any of my European friends are on that very, very long flight let me know.

Hopping a flight from LAX to Vegas Saturday night because as you will see below I have a busy morning.

I will be speaking or guiding discussions as follows:

Sun, 18-Mar

10:35 AM - 10:55 AM 

9239A How to Engage More Customers and Potential Clients While at Think

MGM Grand Conference Center, Level 1 - Room 103

10:55 AM - 11:15 AM

9240A Birds of a Feather/Roundtable: Promoting IBM and Vanquishing the Competition

MGM Grand Conference Center, Level 1 - Room 103

Mon, 19-Mar
3:00 PM - 3:40 PM
Hone Your Communication Skills - Powerpoint and Presentation Skills, Intro to Body Language Workshop
At the Think Academy, located in Mandalay Bay, 2nd floor, Shoreline Ballroom

Wen, 21-Mar
12:30 PM -1:10 PM
Hosting a Champion Chat: So You Want to be an IBM Champion
Champion Corner Bayside D

Thu, 22-Mar

10:30 AM - 11:10 AM

2858A I'm a Lego Man Living in a Duplo World

Mandalay Bay South, Level 2 - Lagoon B

1:00 PM - 1:40 PM
Repeat Session: Hone Your Communication Skills - Powerpoint and Presentation Skills, Intro to Body Language Workshop
At the Think Academy, located in Mandalay Bay, 2nd floor, Shoreline Ballroom

Beyond that I would say look for me in my Champion gear but there will be over 200 IBM Champions walking around.

I will be taking the late flight to JFK on Thursday night and then a Sunday afternoon back to Israel direct from JFK should anyone be flying my way.

Domino 10, The Early Game is Afoot

Notes is dead they say.

Domino is passe.

Who uses this thing?

Why do you (meaning me) bother?

Yes it is a tough life one leads when they go against the grain.When you believe in something so strongly you pursue it until a better pivot comes along. So far nothing I have used outside of Salesforce makes me want to pivot away from ICS, but I always have a soft spot for CRM apps, see my history with SugarCRM.

IBM did a webinar yesterday and due to the holiday here I could not be on it live but I just finished the recorded version (only some slight redactions of a few screen shots) and want to report about it. You can watch/listen to it here.

Bob Schultz the recently crowned GM for IBM Watson Talent and Collaboration Solutions opened the call.

Bob then handed it over to Richard Jefts who is the GM/VP Collaborative Workflow Platforms for HCL and Andrew Manby Director of Offering Management for ICS. 

Jason Gary of the ICS internal Pink team, now with HCL, also snuck on the call and did a quick Node.js discussion and demo. Leaving Connections to work on Notes and Domino is a loss for the Connections team but a big win for the Domino one.

So what did they actually tell us?

I am skipping the dev items because I am not a developer and would not explain them well at all. Aside from the Node.js inclusion that will be built in, not bolted on, please go read some other blogs from my developer friends like Paul Withers and Hogne Pettersen and the Red Pill team.

The list is in no particular order includes the following and feel free to provide more details or comment:

• 256GB NSF sizes - Currently we have a 64GB limit so this is nice but why in a world of unlimited cloud storage and massive mail files is there even a limit of under 1TB? Performance and function. The larger it is the harder it is to maintain it properly and the resources to manage it efficeintly. My guess is IBM has some data to work from and notices database sizes are growing and this is an acceptable compromise.
• Leveraging Microsoft Word as an editor - Not sure I like this idea given every single version of Word not only handles regular text and rich text differently it also messes up HTML and XML and O365 is not exactly efficient especially when run from the Cloud. But I understand IBM's reasoning and understand the option should be available.
• Team Calendar Enhancements - They were kind of vague about what was new and it was a fast screenshot/demo. Presumably making it easier as the speakers said the loudest voice was to make functions easier to use.
• 3rd party invitations to a meeting - That you don't own which would be great instead of just forwarding an email or entry but adding someone to a meeting you don't own.
• Group forward mails - This we already had so I was not sure what was so new. Sometimes our own people don't even know the 1,001 things we can do with Notes and Domino. Anyone feel free to provide me some edit for this one.
• Scheduled email - All I can say is FINALLY! This has been one of the top things I always get from Outlook users that they need. Personally I could use it maybe once in a while so never a big need but i understand why people want it.
• iPad app is coming. - I know because I was on the beta until my iPad was no longer included in updates from Apple and thus I can not leverage it anymore. But I have grown apart from my iPad and so while this may be needed, it may have jumped the shark already.
• Version 11 and others in pipeline  - which means items they could not do for 10 or items which were questionable get pushed forward to what I hope internally the beta will be called Spinal Tap "it goes to 11" edition.
• NSF-2 - NSF is getting updates and the future of NoSQL looks to be in good hands.
• OAuth support via REST API - which will allow Domino to interact with so many apps and websites that will be exciting to see how this works out.
• Domino apps on the Cloud - is a needed service and sounded like it will be coming out.
• SAML support is being extended - Not much details provided yet, come to Think is the mantra for more information and SEE it in action.
• Elastic search - or just better, broader search is coming.
• Active Directory integration - continues because why should you run two different directories.
• Client AutoUpdate - Yes, been asking for this for years. Of course big customers with tweaked environments will turn this off, but for the rest of us out there just Thank the team. This presumes they do not just mean an update to SmartUpgrade and a real polling and downloading from a "store".
• Automated Database Repair - More proactive database monitoring and automated fixups or whatever goes a long way to letting Admins stop putting out fires and be more proactive in expanding their users worlds of collaboration.
• Docker - I am on the fence if this is really a genius idea or just another VM type option. But for companies who want it, it is coming. You can already make use of Domino and Docker in 9.0.1FP10.
• Destination Domino - SME and IBM Champions and IBMers will be more proactively writing useful and detailed information in what sounded like a newsletter or another DeveloperWorks community  for admins, developers, security people and business owners. As they said on the call communication is key and they have planned many routes to inform everyone about what is going on. 
• 3rd party mail integration - "At THINK" more will be known, shown, etc.. Being a mail person I am very interested in what they have in mind.
• Verse and Desktop client parallel development work - going on because large groups exist for both currently.

ETA for Domino 10? 2018 which is a vague way of saying 2nd half of the year.

Serverless Presenting at IBM Think

Greetings one and all to my first blog post of 2018.

I gathered you here today to admit that I was rewarded by my creative writing efforts with an acceptance email to come speak at the ultimate IBM event of the year, IBM Think.

In 2018 IBM has decided there should only be one event to "rule them all" and dropped all of the division events including many of my dear readers favorite Lotusphere IBM Connect.

Las Vegas, where the event will be held at the Mandalay Bay on March 18-22 will be like going to an all day concert where you will listen to everyone, but really just want to hear a few artists.

Naturally my ICS side hopes/expects there to be enough to keep me and the faithful happy.
With an estimated 100 tracks (just kidding, but if a normal event has 5-10, this could have 30+?)I also look forward to learning and seeing more about other areas of IBM's world that most likely you, and I, never knew existed. Examples? How about:

• The AI Bar where it knows your mood when you walk in and provides the appropriate drink.
• The IoT Plane Seat that automatically reduces the movement of your chair if you have unruly adults behind you.
• Collaborative lunch plans when your email/chat/IM/text/messenger/Facebook/Twitter feed senses you should eat and go with people ready at the same time. (choice of foods is still left to you)
• Teenager Security, keeping you alert to when your teenager....
• Beer chilled data center servers, because once you move non essential stuff to The Cloud, you need to get some ROI from that space and every company should have their own microbrewery.

Yes, in addition will be the Websphere, DB2, Tivoli, MAAS360, Trusteer, Smarter Planet, I P and Z series hardware, Kenexa, Redbooks and lots of things you never knew IBM sold.

Okay, what am I presenting on you ask? Here you go:

I'm a Lego Man living in a Duplo World
"Try it you'll like it", works for food, alcohol and TV shows, but doesn't work very well for software, does it? You know what works in software? Headless, adminless, serverless, payless parts and pieces. We live in a Lego world and piece by piece you need to build your world with as little as possible that is interchangeable as well. Finding the right piece that fits just the way you need it to do so, is all that matters.

I know what you are thinking, wtf is he talking about? 

Honestly when I revisited my submission notes, I am not sure either, my notes scribbled at 3am were impractically illegible.

How do you try IBM Cloud when you are not a developer? It's like going to the Whisky bar and being unable to make a choice because you never drink scotch, whisky, bourbon or rye.

Can one just "use an email service" without a server and license? 
Should you? 
Would you? 

How do you manage all these parts and pieces? Do you use a different piece for security or trust the one inside the IBM(or AWS, Azure, etc.) Cloud?
How do you monitor them since any one part can fail and kill your solution?

All of this and more, well what will fit in my time slot.

If you have any ideas or thoughts on this, questions, or maybe your company provides some of the tools I discussed, let me know about them.

See you all in Vegas! For more information go to IBM Think.