@Steve_Will_IBMi Twitter Digest Volume 2

A while back, I blogged about some of the things you will find out if you use Twitter to follow news using the #IBMi hashtag, specifically, what you will find me tweeting about. When I asked for reactions to that blog, I was encouraged by several readers to do a “digest” blog now and then, to allow you to catch up, and to keep some information from falling off then end of the Twitter world. So, today, we have Volume 2. I will not repeat all of my tweets, but here are some, in categories which provide some organization to the rather random nature of the Twitter-verse.

Events: As I mentioned a couple of months ago, there are many customer events that have been taking place this fall. In fact, as I write this, I have just finished my presentations at Power Systems Technical University, and I am preparing to go to Japan for a very large conference of customers who use IBM i. #PowerTechU was very energizing, with a larger set of IBM i clients than I have ever seen there before. I’d like to think it was because of the participation of so many good IBM i speakers, but we have to give some credit to the venue, too. Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is a pretty good draw. Nevertheless, we had some excellent sessions, so if you want to start planning now, you can see from my tweet that next year’s conference will be in Orlando.

At the time I wrote my “Conference Season” blog, I didn’t even have the RPG/DB2 Summit on my itinerary. It was held up in Minneapolis, though, so after running into Jon Paris & Susan Gantner at the OMNI conference in Chicago, we worked out a way for me to drive up from Rochester to give a keynote at the Summit. Great fun.

Some of my customer events are virtual, too. The top tweet in the list represents that sort of event. I was able to talk to a large set of clients of Infor, one of our key IBM i ISVs. We did a webcast with some IBM i information from me and Infor product information from their experts.

Good Reference Material: If you follow the #IBMi hashtag on Twitter, you will encounter many great pieces of information. I try to be one of the sources of that information, so when one of the DB2 team sent me the link to this video which describes how Guardium works with DB2 on i, I just had to share it.

Customer Input: A big part of our job here in the IBM i development labs is listening to customer requirements and responding to them. We had our Large User Group in Rochester for their fall meeting. Most of the week gets spent talking about Power & IBM i technology – current and future. And we always mix in discussions about requirements. The tweet mentions one specific session in which we responded to the most critical requirements this particular advisory board has on its books.

Announcement Material: On announcement day, I am not the only one providing information about IBM i and Power Systems. Far from it! So I try to point my followers to others who give out great tips and descriptions.

Of course, some of those are my fellow IBM i bloggers, but other key pieces of information are in the Information Center, in IBM i developerWorks pages, in the actual announcement letter, and from others who are tweeting as well.

You can certainly get some of this information from the blog directly, but some of these sources don’t become available until after “You and i” goes live, so the tweets help with sharing links that are useful for you. It’s my intent to make sure that those of you who can follow Twitter get good useful information as it becomes available.

I hope this has been helpful. I realize Twitter is not for everyone, and some organizations are not using social media quite as much as others are. I recently saw a statistic from B2BOnline, though, that 3 in 5 IT decision makers use social media to learn about new products and technologies. With that in mind, it’s good to have a growing community of people – IBMers and our partners and customers – using social media such as Twitter to talk about the platform which can help those decision makers run their businesses efficiently with state-of-the-art technology.

 

 

You can follow me on Twitter @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBM i Information Strategy

In this week’s “i Can” blog, Dawn May celebrated three years of giving her readers excellent tips and techniques, as she has revealed some of the “hidden gems” from the IBM i operating system.

But it’s more than that. It is a cornerstone of the commitment the IBM i team has to the idea of ensuring our clients can get full value from the platform. As the years have gone by, we’ve adapted our information strategy to include more social media than we ever imagined a few years ago. Today, social media is part of our platform strategy. Since this blog deals with strategic topics, and this week also marks the third anniversary of “You and i,” I decided to share some history and some highlights with you.

In the spring of 2009, several key IBM i people gathered in a conference room here in Rochester to discuss how to get more information out to the IBM i community. We decided we should start two blogs. “You and i” would focus on strategy, customer stories, high-level technology, and new features. “i Can” would be more deeply technical, telling people things they might only find out by going to a conference or playing around with the machine on their own.

I wonder if any of our readers appreciate how startling this decision was. As we sat in that conference room, some of us wondered, “Will they let us start blogs?” The unanimous feeling by the time we left the room was, “We are they – we need to start them, so we will do it.”

Our experience has been overwhelmingly positive. This blog, for example, has more than twice as many hits each month than when we started it. Of course, the growth of social media in general has been tremendous. (Did you know Twitter had only reached its billionth tweet in May of 2009, but by 2011 a billion tweets were happening each month?) IBM has been embracing it companywide, and the IBM i team is glad to have been at the forefront.

Our strategy for getting information to our partners and clients now explicitly involves social media. Of course we still have the Information Center, which will remain the “Technical Reference” for the platform. And, of course, IBM i will continue to have a presence in ibm.com. These are both extremely important reference points. But these days, it’s important for you to understand the role played by blogs and developerWorks.

Blogs: We now have (at least) four IBM i-specific blogs being written by IBMers. (I say “at least” because someone will read this blog a year from now, and it’s possible we’ll have more.)

• “You and i” – Announcements, strategy, customer references
• “i Can” – Tips, techniques and examples
• “Modern-i-zation” – Modern application development
• “DB2fori” – IBM i’s integrated DB2 and related topics

For the most part, the authors of those blogs have discretion over their topics. However, we do coordinate some messages and articles. For example, “You and i” always talks about the highlights of a new release or Technology Refresh, and then we ask Dawn May to pick out a few of the highlights and describe them more deeply. Now that Tim Rowe and Mike Cain have started blogging, if we have a topic that fits best in an application development blog, Tim will write about it and if we have a DB2 topic, Mike will put it in his blog.

developerWorks: For almost a year and a half now, we’ve been working to consolidate many widespread IBM i webpages into a cohesive set of material hosted in IBM’s developerWorks. This information is for everyone, not only for people who think of themselves as “developers.” This, too, is a cornerstone element of our information strategy. The IBM i Technology Updates page in developerWorks is the home for detailed information about the function delivered with each new Technology Refresh, as well as function delivered via other means between releases. It also hosts many forum topics, and links to many articles written by our technical team.

Twitter is another social media tool that I am using fairly extensively to communicate with our users. If you follow @Steve_Will_IBMi on Twitter you’ll get notified whenever this blog has something new, and sometimes I tweet about what’s going on in IBM i development, or I’ll point you to a webcast or article or blog which might be useful. Though Twitter has the reputation for being the medium used to share unimportant details, I can tell you Steve_Will_IBMi I won’t be tweeting about what I had for lunch! I use the @Steve_Will_IBMi account for IBM i-related tweets, or sometimes other IT or IBM topics. After my blog about IBM i strategy work, for example, I used Twitter several times to let you know which technologies had presented their strategic updates, but I also pointed to a couple of articles about clients who are using mobile technology with IBM i.

If you are interested in keeping up with IBM i, you have many more opportunities to do so than you had as recently as three years ago. We hope you find our information useful and interesting. Let us know. We are definitely paying attention!

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi, @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

Off to a Fast Start and Tweets with Good Links

I know, I know. You haven’t read anything new in “You and i” for a while. My fault (obviously) so let me explain.

The first (working) day after Christmas, I had to find my office and remember my password. After 17 days away from the Big Blue Buildings (come to Rochester sometime, if you doubt me – the buildings are blue) this is basically all I can do on the first day. Well, except for looking at my email to see approximately 2,000 pieces of new mail and panicking about how I will ever respond to them all. (Sorry, Justin! I see your email in there. I’ll get to it, really.)

The second (working) day after Christmas, I powered through 90% of that email.

By the third day back, the pace of activity for the year had already risen to full speed, and I was talking to clients, figuring out what plan changes occurred while I was gone that affect IBM i, and wondering why I even have an office if I’m never in it. (I have a lot of meetings during the day.) (And I’m being somewhat sarcastic. Half of my meetings are over the phone, which I take in my office, if I’m in town.)

Anyway.

One of the other reasons I’ve been slow to write here is that there are a large number of topics that are not quite ready for public consumption. February and March, I think, will be a very busy months for this blog, as I will have several topics to cover, which will be very fresh on people’s minds. But in January, we’re preparing. It’s hard to write about preparing.

Still, though this blog has been a little quiet, there has been plenty of interesting information out there. I hope you’ve been following #IBMi on Twitter over the past few weeks. Why? Because there have been some excellent tweets pointing you to good information. (My comments are in parentheses after the tweet.)

@Steve_Will_IBMi: Excellent blog about the value of Local User Groups to #IBMi community by Laura Ubelhor bit.ly/y4pgVK

@IBM_ddefranc: #IBMi and #VMControl work together to allow image creation and management of IBM i partitions. (#IBMi, #PowerVM) http://t.co/W2VUEJc3 (Oh, wait, that points to this blog. Cool!)

@angustheitchap: Myth #1716 debunked! You ~can~ google #IBMi http://t.co/CLVq5odZ (Love it! Some day I should blog about this. Or catch me after I present at a conference sometime and we can chat over a beverage.)

@IBMimag: RT @angustheitchap: More requests for the #IBMi family tree: bit.ly/lrP7Qr OS: bit.ly/lORfHe Dates: bit.ly/AgovP2 (Honestly, I am going to steal, um, er, borrow, ummm, errr, use these with full attribution.)

@IBMimag: Shouldn’t Everything Run on IBM i? bit.ly/A1NSo9 #IBMi (Very interesting article, Aaron.)

@stevencpitcher: Most of my time at #ls12 will be doing #ibmchampion stuff or meeting with IBM'ers, customers and BP's. I haven't looked at session list yet! (#ls12 is Lotusphere 2012, which many IBM i users of IBM Lotus products will attend this week. Not I, though; I have some educating of IBM sales people to do.)

@IBMimag: RT @jennifertaylor: Three #SMB Trends in 2012 and How to Stay Ahead of Them bit.ly/x7ov8I #IBM #MidmarketIBM (OK, not technically tagged #IBMi, but it’s a good read.)

And though I don’t think I’ve tweeted it yet, the team did some webcasts late last year which are available for listening. IBM sponsored them, so there is no charge to hear them. Here’s the link. One of the webcasts is “Moving up to 7 - IBM i 7.1 recent announcements and POWER7 value” and features Mark Olson, Pete Massiello and me talking about preparing for the move many of you have already made, but many, many more will be making soon. (Right?)

Until next time, I hope you can find your office. Or at least remember your passwords.

Welcome to 2012.

 

Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi 

 

Recent #IBMi Tweets – Volume 1?

Lately as I’ve talked to customers about the methods they can use to stay up-to-date on IBM i, when I mention my use of Twitter, some of them point out that their workplaces don’t allow Twitter through their firewall.

“We wouldn’t mind if they followed you,” they say, “but we don’t want them following <<name of a prolific tweeting actor removed>> at work.”

OK, so that’s a business decision, and I can see the point. But nevertheless, this type of policy does mean that some of the “#IBMi” information that's been sent out into the community is not reaching everyone.  (#IBMi is the hashtag used on Twitter to identify information about IBM i.) So today, I want to mention a few things that have only been covered there.

First, sometimes I let you know who I’ve been talking to. For example:

 

Sometimes people allow me to say I’ve been talking to them (FIS) and sometimes they don’t. That’s just the way it is.

And then there are tweets where I tell you what the IBM i development team has been up to:

 

No, I can’t tell you exactly what we were talking about yet, but it’s quite interesting to be looking at the things we’re going to be delivering in the next few months and years.

And finally, I retweet items that I find interesting, and that I think many of you might find interesting:

 

Sometimes they don’t even have anything to do with IBM i or Power Systems directly.

 

So, there you have it. Now I have a question for you? Was this useful? Should I do this again every once in a while? I titled this entry with a “Volume 1?” because I don’t know. Give me your opinions.

 

Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi