IBM Connections 4.5 Installation Details Spreadsheet

Last year around this time I posted what became a top 10 page for my blog, the IBM Connections 4.0 installation spreadsheet. I took the IBM Wiki page provided and broke it down by topics (IHS, WAS, DB2, etc) and included some items along the way as well.

For those that need, that is, should be, documenting your installation details, hopefully this helps make your life easier.

Yesterday IBM posted an update for 4.5 CR1 here.

I have updated my spreadsheet and included the changes as posted as well.

You can get the new version and make sure it says 45 in the title here or from my Downloads page.

Enjoy

Day 2 of Impact 2013

So what did I do on Day 2 of Impact? Today was The World in Motion.

Business calls most of the morning, bad wifi upstairs, bad wifi in OGS and the exhibit hall. A frustrating problem because if you needed 30,000 IP addresses or so, what would you do?

Duh, grab a Z series! Okay not exactly but it is a problem which should have been addressed Sunday.

Which brings me to what I did Tuesday, meetings, interviews, an ignite speech and a session I did with 3 other IBM Champions and a night cap of Matchbox 20.

So the OGS had BMI, one of the music publishing and royalties companies, explaining what they do and how they leverage IBM products while dropping song snippets from numerous artists. As an ex-ASCAP person it was nice to see and hear the industry has come a long way since the paper trails I used to audit.

Westjet had a video that explained what they needed IBM for and how they accomplished so much in such a short time. Nicely done.

Today's 4 things to know are:

1. 3.6B $ is spent on process reinvention
2. 25% productivitry improvement due to social interactions and software
3. 47% cloud process growth 
4. $100B big data business

There was also a demo of what a mobile app could be doing in the near future around auto insurance and an accident of a viper.

I then ventured off to the Social Playground, great name given we are in Las Vegas, and powered up my now worn down laptop and phone. Caught up on some emails met some people, committed to do another Google+ hangout and prepared for my Ignite talk.

The Ignite talk was fun, for me, and was not supposed to be a sales thing, but others did do it that way. I think I had the best slide though (see the slides here):

Afterwards I spent the rest of the afternoon in meetings or doing interviews with the Redbooks team, GWC (Global Websphere Community), Websphere Socmed team all before heading to my session.

We had an open panel on mobile plans and services. Fellow IBM Websphere Champions Yuki Kurosawa, Andrew Paier, Ashraf Souleiman and myself were joined by Phil Kelly of IBM as the moderator. Hope no one took my "Buy Apple" as a forward looking announcement or stock tip. 

We left there and headed to the BP reception which preceded the Matchbox20 concert. We had great VIP seats upfront, thanks Daphne! The band played for about an hour and a half and I now have Matchbox20 Twitter groupies following me. No doubt they are also following the other 9,000 people that tweeted tonight.

And the day ends with me finding out The Venetian does not do late checkout. Really? In Las Vegas? Oh well what can you do. Tomorrow I head home on the red eye. A day of meetings and hopefully some sessions is ahead of me. 

PS - The video we shot on Sunday debuts at the OGS on Wen. morning.

My First Impact Conference

As a long time Lotusphere person, I am reminded of Bruce Springsteen after he played, and won,  the Academy Award in 1994 for his song the Streets of Philadelphia and said this "And thank you all for inviting me to your party."

I came out to Impact not sure what to expect. At times Websphere is my friend and at times a hard companion, but I found a great community of people here so far that rival my friends in the Lotus/ICS world.

My journey to Impact 2013 held in Las Vegas at the Venetian hotel, started at 5:00am Sunday morning. Head over to the airport and got through security just in time to board my flight that left at 7:30 am  and on time I might add. We landed in Dallas on time, waited about half an hour and filled up with a few people, but most of the flight was empty. I guess everyone was staying in Dallas. We got to Las Vegas on time, my bag was the fifth one off the plane. Off I go to catch a shuttle and....my first delay. We waited almost 45 minutes for a shuttle to take us to the hotel and then it took about 30 minutes. Those of us hanging out already knew we were going the right place because Lotusphere backpacks, IBM paraphernalia was attached to each of us.

Obviously, I did not get that "I'm home" feeling, as I do when I walk into the Dolphin hotel in Orlando. My bewilderment at where things are and how to get there reminds me just how hard Connect must be for someone new to the conference. The Venetian is a beautiful hotel and all I can say is WOW! The Dolphin and Swan rooms have nothing next to the Venetian hotel! Vegas really knows how to take care of people. Once you get your bearings, you should be fine.

By the time I got registered and charged some devices, I missed lunch and most of BP day. Picked up my badge, business partners have blue pouches, and my Champion ribbon. Off I went to find where we were making a commercial shoot with the other 34 IBM Websphere Champions coming to the conference. What seems like a simple thing, repeat your line 3-4 times, turns into a lesson in elocution and stage voices. I think the Redbook video I did over the summer was easier, because it was less formal. Either way, I look forward to seeing how we all come out and hope you enjoy the videos too at some point once we can post them.

After the shoot, I went to listen to a session on leveraging IBM Worklight for your mobile needs. More on Worklight over the week. We have a break, when I went to call home and then down to the conference floor for the BP reception and first look at the exhibition hall. From the diagram it looks huge and it is. Inside the hall is "The Social Playground", in the back, where I will spend some time doing smaller talks and answering questions about being a Champion. I ran into a few old friends, met some new ones and joined the GWC, the Global Websphere Community, The GWC had a remote control car field setup and a race car sitting by their area. 

I am amazed at how many people there are here and the number of tracks and sessions. I thought Connect was over filled, this makes that look like kids play. There are over 40 sessions running concurrently at some points! It would take weeks to catch up to every session you missed. My guess is they can't really do this as a 2 week conference, but seriously, how do people get anything out of this when they are so overwhelmed with options. And great options usually too!

Looking forward to Monday, Forest Whitaker, a great actor and film maker, is the guest, THEY TELL PEOPLE in advance at IMPACT who is the speaker. Lotusphere and Connect we have had to wait to see who we run into in the Dolphin Rotunda due to the secrecy. Which actually to me is better due to the various betting and anticipation that we all work on up to the moment they take the stage.

Look for more tweets, posts and details over the next few days but I can feel the love of other Champions. Off I go to find the general populace and where they hang out instead of ESPN, Kimono's or the Dolphin bar.

PS - There is a contest on for everyone to take a picture with an IBM Champion and post them with a #ibmchamp if you want to find me, follow me on Twitter and 4Square as @lotusevangelist.

What would make installing WAS, DB2 and X product easier

Does not matter if it is Sametime, Connections or Quickr you may face the following challenges.

These are out of the ordinary for most companies but certain locked down, highly secured environments should keep the following in mind.

There are excellent step by step directions for the products, Sametime, but this is about before you start them.


Imagine you have a set of servers to work with, now imagine those servers have every single port aside from the absolute minimum locked down.

The documentation warns you to disable any firewalls on your server. You can follow that, but what if you are not allowed to enable any ports? Am I serious? Yes. So what you need to do is either enable ALL ports on the server for the short term of installation or if security requires it, work from the existing knwon ports that are in use by EVERYTHING.

Remember this from various IBM docs:
Note: No validation is done to see if the ports are in use or if the ports file is valid.

BUT IT SHOULD!

So for those in a locked down environment, here are links to the known ports you may need or how to find them:
Sametime - http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/stwiki.nsf/dx/Sametime_8.5_Ports_and_URLs and this one which is more detailed: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/sametime/v8r5/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.help.sametime.v85.doc%2Fplan%2Fplan_ports.html

Quickr J2EE - http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lqwiki.nsf/dx/Configuring_the_Lotus_Quickr_ports_qp85

DB2,Websphere Deployment Manager - http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/topic/com.ibm.websphere.nd.iseries.doc/info/iseriesnd/ae/rmig_portnumber.html
for As/400 http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdoc400/v6r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.iseries.doc/info/ae/ae/adrport.htm

Lotus Notes Traveler - https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21298475

And please disable your anti-virus solution as well.

Lastly, remember to use an 8 character administration name (DB2 limitation) and keep directories and naming as short as possible as well.

Fudbuster Friday #12 - Lotus is Going J2EE

Sorry for a lack of postings this week, was traveling but watch out next week!

Yep, you saw it and heard it everywhere. Maybe even from various vendors.

But is it true? Yes
Is Domino itself going J2EE? Not likely.

We know the products coming out soon or announced either run with Websphere as an option or solely run on it or with it.
Lotus Quickr, Connections, Sametime all have it in one form or another.

But is it that different from everything running from a browser? Or a universal inbox which is NOT part of your email system?
Or is it like running your car with petrol, ethanol or electric? It still does the same work, just presumably more efficiently, with some changes to your engine and auto parts.

Where does this leave your admins? As an Admin, the last thing I want is to have yet another platform to manage on top of the others. But you either embrace change or distance yourself from it.

It's a great time for other vendors to attack.
What do you want do? What is your company prepared for? Does IBM have enough Websphere professionals in existence to help people?
And at what expense?

Does Websphere scare you because you think it is how it was 10 years ago? Or do you see it as a much needed piece of architecture to raise your entire offering beyond your competitors.

Let me know your thoughts because some out there are on both sides of the fence and we need to push them off it and take a stand.

And on that note I will close and remind all Americans to vote on Tuesday.

Fud Buster Friday #8 - The Ex-Lotii Knows

Ex-Lotus people who end up at Microsoft always have great insights about what's wrong with Lotus? Or IBM killed Notes! Or Websphere will replace Domino!

I could accept their premises, if not for the fact when these rats abandoned ship R7 wasn't even out yet.

Now some would argue what about me, I left Lotus in 2001 and what do I know or why do I care. I care because clients should know what they are getting into. True sharing and collaboration can exist, no matter what solution the client wants, IF the client wants to make it happen.

Back to the questions above.

Nothing is wrong with Lotus and as far as I know, IBM sales people do not go around saying Microsoft has problems because they lost their head and the body is flailing in the wind grasping at dead branches. Yes, IBM has reduced head count for Lotus at times and detoured down a Workplace path but the last 6 months to a year has seen a renewed interest in everything Lotus, not just from the company but from the Press, advertisements and general sentiment. So unless you have been under a rock for the last year Lotus is anything but dead.

IBM killed Lotus Notes. No, Workplace did hurt the company but as discussed previously the recent 3 years growth is unprecedented in a flat market. If anything IBM encourages Lotus to move forward by not only working with Apple, RIM and Nokia but providing advances in development and technology into the core products. And IBM spent the money to have the R8 UI improved to a point where Outlook users prefer it.

Websphere will replace Domino? This one is possibly true(again what would I know as an outsider), but more than likely is they will coexist in a way which will only make the 2 products even stronger. IBM gets closer to this reality with every release and the robustness of the 2 together will make a very formidable opponent to Microsoft.

So the next time you hear a Microsoft sales rep or ex-Lotus person lay down some silly ideas about Lotus, remind them that even great baseball hitters only hit the ball 1/3 of the time. But if you don't take a chance with some pitches out of your comfort zone you may miss an easy home run too.