Social Connections 12 in Vienna

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Author: Christoph Stoettner
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Social Connections Vienna

Fountain pen and a notebook

Photo by Aaron Burden | Unsplash

This time Social Connections is hosted in Vienna. The austrian capital is a great place to meet new and old friends. I love the city and the awesome dialect, to listen and practise a little bit, start with the lovely video about the only word you really need to survive in Vienna.

The next two days are packed with informations about IBM Connections and I hope to get in touch with the developer team of Pink to see the next planned features. The agenda promises a good mix for all people interested in IBM Connections, developers, administrators and adoption experts can attend and discuss with speakers, IBM developers, product managers and IBM Business partners.

My sessions

I will do one session with my colleague and mate Nico Meisenzahl about “IBM Connections Admin Blast”. The updated session was born for IBM Connect in February this year and will guide you through around 55 different tips and tasks you should be aware during deploying and administrating IBM Connections and the available addons like Forms/Surveys,Docs and CCM. The session takes place on monday 11:20-12:20 in Breakout 2 (lunch will start around 12:30, so we will take the chance and show all slides without jumping over the last ones and let you have food in time).

My other session is a little bit shorter and is completly new. “Automate IBM Connections deployments” on tuesday 9:40-10:10 in Breakout 1. Klaus Bild an I showed some scripts to do the same during Social Connections 7 in Stockholm, but for me these were complicated and updating requirements and new packages were a lot of work. The last months I worked with Ansible , which is a perfect match to do automated installations and configurations. Ansible needs just a ssh connection to the servers you want to configure, no special software clients are needed. Agentless on Linux and with the option to do the same with remote powershell on Microsoft Windows.

Ansible

All important tasks are already built in and so you can install software through the tools of the used Linux (apt, dnf, yum…), change security settings, edit ulimits or service configurtions. Installing all Connections prerequisists (Installation Manager, Websphere Application Server, DB2, IBM Httpserver, TDI and all needed os packages) need about 20 minutes on 4 minimal installed Centos VMs on my Notebook. So you can directly start creating databases, update peopledb and finish the last tasks on Websphere.

I think adding more scripts does only need a lot of time during scripting and will need a lot of customization from environment to environment.

Working with Ansible is fun and not really complicated. Ansible has extensions for container management and the Orientme installer is based on it too. So every admin and developer should have a look at it.

Author

Christoph Stoettner

I work at Vegard IT GmbH as a senior consultant with a focus on collaboration software, Kubernetes, security and automation. I mainly deal with HCL Connections, WebSphere Application Server, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform and Linux.

Sometimes my daily work results in technical talks and blog articles, which you can follow here more or less regularly. You can find the presentations in the main menu under public speaking .

I created a list of tools I use regularly, most of which have been released under an open source license.

In my spare time I read a lot, test all kinds of technical software and gadgets and try to follow about 200 RSS feeds.
Here you can find a collection of them.

This is my private blog, all opinions are my own.

           

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This will be my fifth Social Connections Event after Zurich, Prague, Stockholm and Boston, for me all of them were great experiences and personally very successful.

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It was the first time Social Connections headed to the United States and the location at IBM Boston was a well made decision. I visited the Boston area the first time and enjoyed all the days.

I already arrived on Sunday evening and had the pleasure to stay with Victor and his family until we headed to Boston. Thanks for the hospitality!

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