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We are delighted to announce the next meeting of the WebSphere User Group, which will take place on 30th September 2014 at the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Provisional Agenda
Registration and Coffee begins from 8:30am, with the Chairman's Intro at 9:00am. The first session begins at 9:30am.
A buffet Lunch is served at 12:30pm, with coffee breaks included in the morning and afternoon.
WAS 1
Session 1
Title:
WebSphere Foundation Update and Technical Direction
Abstract:
Our world - and how people interact with it - is changing with the convergence of mobile, social, big data, and cloud. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) has also been changing, to set the standard for application hosting in the cloud: from rapid development of lightweight and engaging applications in PaaS environments to deployment of complex enterprise topologies via patterns on IaaS infrastructure. In this session, I'll talk about some of the latest WAS features and describe how WAS is evolving to continue to meet enterprise needs, on native, virtualized and PaaS infrastructure. I'll talk about developer ease of use, deployment flexibility, operational resiliency, partner ecosystem and the future direction of WebSphere Application Server including the ways in which we expect to deliver it.
Speakers:
Ian Robinson
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Session 2
Title:
How to take advantage of new WebSphere development initiatives to help speed up your development!
Abstract:
Do you want to spend more of your time building innovative and engaging applications for customers instead of standing up development environments? This session will talk about how to utilize the right tools and development environment for your application. We'll cover new enhancements in the WebSphere Application Server developer tools (WDT), WDT and Liberty integrations with devOps and how to leverage the new Bluemix development environment.
Speakers:
Anita Rass Wan
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Session 3
Title:
Dive into Liberty development and the Admin Center
Abstract:
So, you're sitting there with Eclipse in front of you, and you need to write an app and get it into your Liberty collective. How do you write an app for Liberty? And what's a collective? In this session, we will look at building up a simple web application using the WebSphere Developer Tools for Eclipse, highlighting how Liberty allows you to perform dynamic updates in a development environment. Once the app is completed we'll explore how you can package your application and server into a single archive which can be deployed into a Liberty collective using the Admin Center. This will give you an insight into some simple development and deployment topologies and how to apply that in your own development, test and production cycle.
Speakers:
Ross Pavit
Download:
[not available]
Session 4
Title:
A discussion on Next Generation Security Threats
Abstract:
Mobile and Cloud have changed the landscape of enterprise security; business drivers are overriding security requirements left right and centre, creating complex solutions (and complexity is the enemy of security). Systems are integrating with internet based services to provide functionality and meet business requirements, but more and more security architects are finding their enterprise corporate data suddenly protected by security systems that are not entirely under their control. This talk is a frank discussion on strategies and mechanisms to start to deal with this evolution, focussing on the art of the possible. This is intended to be a two-way discussion; the speaker is also here to listen to your needs and requirements, this is your chance to influence direction by raising what is important to your business.
Speakers:
Simon Kapadia
Download:
[not available]
Session 5
Title:
DevOps with Liberty and Chef
Abstract:
The IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile is a simplified, lightweight runtime for development and production use. It is simple to configure through a single XML file. It is dynamic and flexible - recomposing itself in response to configuration changes. It is extensible through the use of system programming interfaces. Its self-extracting Jar file makes it quick and easy to install. Configured with a basic web application, it starts in under five seconds. This makes it highly compatible with DevOps tools and cloud. Chef is one such tool. Chef embodies "infrastructure as code." Teams write code to describe how the machines in the infrastructure should be configured. As organizations scale out their development and production infrastructure, Chef will configure it all. Presenters introduce Chef and the part the IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile Chef cookbooks play in standing-up a load balanced web application.
Speakers:
Jeremy Hughes
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WAS 2
Session 1
Title:
Building highly available architectures with WAS and MQ
Abstract:
This talk will look at architectures in which IBM MQ can be configured with the IBM WebSphere Application Server (and Liberty profiles) to give a highly-available scenario. The basis be some of the scenarios that are documented in the developerWorks series "A flexible and scalable WebSphere MQ topology pattern". (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/1308_broadhurst/1308_broadhurst.html)
Speakers:
Matthew White
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Session 2
Title:
Building a better product with data analytics and the cloud
Abstract:
As we move from traditional waterfall development through agile and onto continuous delivery the approach we adopt to build and test our products needs to evolve. No longer can we rely on a long stabilisation phase at the end of a release. Quality now needs to be assured at every stage of the release with every code change.This talk has two aims. Firstly to take you through a number of the innovations being made in the delivery of Liberty to give you an insight into how we drive quality throughout the release. Secondly, to inspire ideas on how you can apply data analytics and the cloud to drive your own build and test environments.Key innovations covered will include our delivery lifecycle as well as our dynamic scalable build environment (based upon Smart Cloud Orchestrator and uDeploy). Finally we wil cover our use of big data analytics to automatically identify potential regressions any optimise our build and test environment.
Speakers:
Kevin Smith
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Session 3
Title:
Got Cache? Discover how IBM elastic caching for your mobile apps help deliver responsive integration with services and API’s: Demo included!
Abstract:
How might I ensure my mobile solution is responsive regardless of load?Mobile technology offers a unique opportunity for organizations today. Mobile capabilities are disrupting traditional business models, providing businesses with new sources of data and insight, and driving top and bottom-line results. One of the key benefits of mobile includes enhanced user experiences which lets you respond faster and better to customers, thus improving customer service. Mobile strategy leaders must put into place the needed building blocks to take full advantage of new mobile opportunities. One of the important building blocks is Elastic caching to deliver responsive integration of mobile with existing services and reusing API’s.In this session, attendees will learn about practical caching concerns and patterns through presentation and demonstration. The demonstration offers a scenario where customers interact with their bank through a mobile device, which interacts directly with an Extreme Scale Cache, via REST Services or API’s. The Bank administrators load the cache and update the cache content via a separate administrative web application, while maintaining data consistency and application responsiveness.
Speakers:
Kevin Postreich
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Session 4
Title:
Intro to MQ v8 and JMS 2.0
Abstract:
The Java Message Service (JMS) specification was first released in 1998, at the dawn of Java EE, with a major update in 2002. It then remained unchanged during the decade that followed. Meanwhile, technology evolved and many vendors pressed ahead with enhancements outside the specification. During that time, the rest of Java EE evolved significantly, with improvements and new features added. Despite the lack of development of the specification, JMS continued to be a popular and successful standard, with numerous competing implementations, both standalone and as part of complete Java EE stacks, and open and closed source.
Speakers:
Matthew White
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Mobile
Session 1
Title:
Client-side mobile architecture choices
Abstract:
With the recent IBM-Apple announcement fresh in everyone's minds, in this session we are planning to focus on client-side architecture choices for mobile apps. We'll take a look at the various different options, including hybrid apps - exploring JavaScript toolkits such as Dojo, AngularJS + Ionic, and others, as well as looking at options for Android and iOS Native Coding, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. We'll explain how this relates to the latest versions of the IBM Worklight Foundation platform, as well as a brief exploration of how these options fit in with the IBM Bluemix cloud offering.
Speakers:
Andrew Ferrier
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Session 2
Title:
Delivering Real World Consumer Facing Worklight Apps
Abstract:
<FOR SLIDES, SEE LINK BELOW>Over the past year we have been working with a client to put a Worklight App into the Android & Apple App Stores. Using innovative strategies such as Continuous Integration and Automated Testing we were able to rapidly build out an App, the Adapters & the Security Model while regression testing as we built. Moving the App away from the developers' laptops and into production comes with more things to consider but powerful tools enabled us to circumvent large volumes of bugs and issues. This talk aims to illustrate the lessons learned, the good practices & gotchas for speedy delivery of Worklight applications to the App StoresSlides from WUG are available here ::http://slides.com/donalspring/worklight-lessons-learned#/FYI - some more useful CI information is here if you ever need it ::http://slides.com/donalspring/ci-wl-best-practice#/And some moving to production material here ::http://slides.com/donalspring/productionising-worklight#/
Speakers:
Donal Spring
Download:
[not available]
Session 3
Title:
Need API’s? Explore the value of IBM’s API Management solution for sharing service APIs with mobile applications: Demonstration included!
Abstract:
How do I share service APIs with mobile applications? To be a successful business and provide increased value to clients, you need to continue to innovate while achieving cost optimization. With IBM’s API management solution, you have an opportunity to expose key business services to business partners to drive new forms of collaboration, increase revenue opportunities, and provide higher value services to your customers. Business services are exposed with APIs. An API management solution is imperative to the success of externalizing the core services by providing easy assembly of new APIs, enabling security and different levels of service, providing management and insight to developers and business users, and socializing those APIs to developers, through communities and portals. This enables organizations to participate in the API economy, with rapid, highly secure connections between API providers and API consumers.API Management V3.0 provides capabilities for creating, proxying, assembling, securing, and scaling the APIs. This solution also provides detailed analytics and operational metrics to the business owner and a customizable developer portal to socialize the APIs and manage applications that can be used by the developers.In this session, attendees will learn how to quickly configure an API management solution and rapidly create new APIs from existing business assets and cloud services through configuration and a no-coding approach. This session also includes a demonstration of the solution whereby a new API is defined that assembles existing cloud services running on IBM Bluemix and IBM PureApplication System. The API developer exposes a simple interface that exposes the Bank Location and Branch Services from the system of record REST service and SOAP service in the cloud. We will demonstrate how WSRR and API management work together to build new APIs from existing services registered in WSRR.
Speakers:
Kevin Postreich
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Session 4
Title:
Fulfilling Retail Expectations with Mobile
Abstract:
One of the world's largest retailers, generating over $100 billion in revenue in 2013, serves millions of customers a week in stores and online. One of the key areas in which they differentiate themselves is in their network of distribution centers, which use advanced technology to support a modern, efficient and cost-effective supply chain. Underpinning its fulfillment process is a Warehouse Management System, based on CICS and running on System z. This session provides an overview of the technical challenges, technology choices and benefits of mobile-enabling a core CICS application. It covers the business value identified in exposing warehouse management capabilities through a Mobile interface, plus the technology design for implementing the solution on System z. The indicative results demonstrated cost savings of about $2.5 million per year, which equated to an approximate return on investment of only 16 days.
Speakers:
Richard Gamblin
Download:
Cloud
Session 1
Title:
Developing Cloud Applications using IBM Bluemix
Abstract:
Why do the most difficult tasks in software development often come after you finished writing the application code?Installing and configuring servers, runtimes, databases.Setting up security, backup, networking.Monitoring operations, performance and runtime issues.The list of tasks needed to deploy finished applications is endless…Why do developers have to care about infrastructure issues?Platform–as–a–Service cloud solutions are revolutionising application development. Developers can focus solely on writing application code and leave everything else to the platform. No more installing, configuring and monitoring infrastructure. Used to waiting six weeks for the IT department to provision you a basic virtual machine? You can now provision a new runtime with dozens of integrated Software-as-a-Service offerings in seconds.In this talk I will introduce IBM's new cloud platform, Bluemix, which is now publicly available. We'll see how easy it is to provision brand-new application runtimes, integrate popular open source technologies, automate elastic scaling in response to user demand and much more. All this functionality operates on a "pay as you go" pricing model, allowing developers to only pay for exactly the resource they need and nothing more. IBM's cloud platform is based upon popular open source technology (Cloud Foundry), which provides a stable and mature platform without locking the user into a proprietary vendor solution.
Speakers:
Brian De Pradine
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Session 2
Title:
Enabling hybrid cloud with PureApplication System - Second Generation
Abstract:
This session listed the new features which IBM has built into the PureApplication System, the world's most capable, simplest-to-use and powerful cloud-like infrastructure for running enterprise application workloads.Covering topics such as hybrid cloud, multi-rack deployments, pattern improvements and many more. From months to minutes, a change of mind-set: heroics don't scale.This session describes second generation hardware and firmware, which will offer customers improved performance, lower power requirements and even greater flexibility. IBM PureApplication System v2 is an optimal private, on premise cloud platform for enterprise application.The session also covers IBM PureApplication Services on SoftLayer. Focus on your application and let PureApplication handle the rest, be it on premise, off premise, a true hybrid cloud solution is waiting to be announced at the next turn: combine traditional on premise environments with often temporarily off premise instances running on SoftLayer.
Speakers:
Claudio Tagliabue
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Session 3
Title:
Deploying workloads on the cloud with IBM SoftLayer
Abstract:
In June 2013 IBM announced its intention to acquire SoftLayer, the world's largest privately held cloud service provider. Six months later, an aggressive $1.2bn global expansion programme for the service was announced, including plans for a UK-based delivery centre. Come and hear about the latest jewel in IBM's crown, our ambitious plans for the future and how it offers unmatched performance, flexibility and control.
Speakers:
Jim McKay
Download:
[not available]
Integration & BPM
Session 1
Title:
Trends in Integration: How Emerging Use Cases in Cloud, Mobile and Analytics are Changing the Game
Abstract:
Organisations today are looking to utilise major market technology shifts from new business models made possible by cloud technologies to new channels of engagement with customers via mobile and social platforms. In this new era, agile movers gain competitive advantage as they are quicker to respond and gain valuable insights into business activities. Is your organization positioned to adapt and capture these opportunities? Underpinning all of this is a robust and flexible integration layer which has never been more important. This session wiill show how IBM Integration Bus can enable your organization to spend less time keeping up and more time innovating and engaging with your customers.Learn how to: • Use integration technologies to speed up the production and hardening of mobile apps.• Leverage the cloud for universal access to support your needs.• Gain insight into in-flight data for more informed decision making.• Use new technologies such as chef to speed provisioning deployment.• Rapidly deploy integrations with pre-built patterns and tooling.
Speakers:
Andrew Humphreys
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Session 2
Title:
Differentiating Between Web APIs, SOA, & Integration - And Why It Matters
Abstract:
There are many similarities between the design techniques for the new trend of web APIs, and those we have seen maturing for many years for service oriented architecture (SOA). Indeed SOA could be seen as "just" an evolution of traditional integration, but that type of thinking was the beginning of the end for many SOA initiatives. Drawing on multiple customer experiences, this session will looks at the things that make web APIs unique from what came before, and the differences in how they are designed and implemented. Also, since no sizable enterprise is starting from scratch, we look at how existing integration architectures should be evolved to accommodate these new requirements.
Speakers:
Kim Clark
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Session 3
Title:
Transaction Tracking on DataPower SOA Appliances
Abstract:
This session focuses on how to configure IBM WebSphere DataPower to track message flows and get tips on how to use analytics to perform proactive diagnosis. Key takeaways:· How to monitor the health and performance of IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances· Handling incorrect message format processing· Tracking messages that come into IBM WebSphere DataPower, but are routed incorrectly
Speakers:
Scott Corrigan
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Session 4
Title:
WebSphere MQ V8.0
Abstract:
WebSphere MQ is the world's leading messaging system used by most of the top fortune 500 companies. Millions of messages and trillions of dollars flow though MQ every day. In spite of this success the product continues to evolve and improve. Constant evolution and development is the bedrock of sustained success and WebSphere MQ is no exception to this process. Why not take this opportunity to come along and listen in about the most recent changes and features in the WebSphere MQ product family, including JMS 2.0 support, LDAP authentication, SSL support for managed .NET, Client MQSC and much, much more. Come to this session to hear all about the latest updates to WebSphere MQ in the version 8 release.
Speakers:
Jon Rumsey
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Session 5
Title:
Value through BPM: an IT approach
Abstract:
This sessions will show us what BPM is, how can it be a major block in every organization IT architecture and, most of all, how IT can leverage BPM to add real and perceived business value.The last decade shown us a great journey on organizing the IT landscape in the distributed systems era. What started as large portfolios of decoupled applications, turned into a nightmare of rigid and highly coupled systems. Thanks to SOA, they are now becoming decoupled, presented as core and isolated services, flexible and manageable. Organizing the landscape was one of the major IT challenges we recently faced and SOA gave us the map and guidance on managing that integration complexity.But that’s only part of the challenge. We addressed the IT pain and that added value. But your end users were not fully onboard yet, we are still talking a different language and IT is still struggling to deliver as quickly as needed.Learn what BPM is and how it fits in your IT landscaping, while leveraging any SOA initiative you may have in place and orchestrating how things happens across your core systems and your human workers. Even if you don’t have an explicit SOA programme in place, BPM can fill a huge gap orchestrating a lot of system interactions, eventually becoming the ultimate driver for a more manageable IT architecture.
Speakers:
Marcelo Fernandes
Download:
[not available]
Digital Experience
Session 1
Title:
Integrating Digital Experience with WebSphere Commerce and Connections using the Digital Data Connector
Abstract:
This session will outline and demonstrate the capabilities and latest innovations to integrate IBM Connections social services and WebSphere Commerce into the IBM Digital Experience platform.Increasingly, businesses require a Digital Experience that integrates e-commerce capabilities alongside the usual suspects of web content, social collaboration capabilities, and self-service applications. Digital Data Connector (DDC) easily enables the display of commerce product information in your portal user interface. In this session you will learn how to configure DDC to consume e-commerce product information using examples such as WebSphere Commerce, Sterling Commerce, and social platforms like IBM Connections and customize the presentation of product listings using IBM Web Content Manager without coding.
Speakers:
Bernd Beilke
Download:
[not available]
Session 2
Title:
Do your business users control their own portal?
Abstract:
It is tempting - and in many case appropriate - to tightly control the ability to make changes to your production portal. However, the transition to more agile business practices is leading business owners to demand increasingly rapid turnaround on updates. Fortunately, WebSphere Portal offers a number of powerful features (like Managed Pages and the Script Portlet) to allow authorised non-administrators (and non-developers) to modify the portal. And when there is no out-of-the-box user interface for a requested function, there are always APIs with which you can create one. Come along to this session to discover the pros and cons of allowing business users to control different aspects of the portal, along with tips and techniques to make this control possible.
Speakers:
Graham Harper
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Session 3
Title:
Serviceability: how Portal developers can turn administrators into friends AND have more time for development
Abstract:
Developers are experts in delivering business functionality and constantly searching for better methods to meet functional requirements for their businesses but they often miss the opportunity to help meet the non-functional requirements key to satisfying today's users. Applying the same skills and techniques to supportability, configurability, availability and maintainability by considering your operational staff as another key stakeholder can dramatically improve these aspects. And don't despair, you don't need to start from scratch - your organisation's existing common approaches and frameworks can be used to address these aspects across projects. In this session we offer practical design advice to help your Portal applications respect the "-ilities" and to keep your administrators and users happy.
Speakers:
Graham Harper, Richard Shooter
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Session 4
Title:
What you need to know about ExperienceOne
Abstract:
IBM ExperienceOne is the new IBM brand for Customer Experience Management. Due to the breadth and depth of the IBM software portfolio, ExperienceOne aims to deliver customer experience capabilities through one platform, whilst leveraging the market leading technologies IBM can bring to bear.At the fore-front of this initiative is the IBM Digital Experience Portfolio, which enables the business to deliver empowering digital experiences to customers, in a seamless and easy way, whilst leveraging what they know about their customers to make the experience personal.This session will outline this initiative and how IBM Digital Experiences leads the pack.
Speakers:
Chris Moore
Download:
[not available]
