What Kept Me Busy In 2016 and Where Am I Going Now?

I think this post might be just under the wire for 2016 reviews so let’s talk about what I was working on and learning for the past year.  I always need to be learning, if I’m not I feel like I’m standing still and last year most of my learning moved outside of the core IBM products simply because there was little new to learn.

So what kind of projects did I work on?

  • Security reviews of Domino, Connections, HTTP environments
  • Single Sign On projects including deploying SAML using ADFS and TFIM as well as lots of Kerberos / IWA integration projects
  • Designing hybrid environments for customers moving mail to the cloud
  • Lots of TLS configurations on lots of different products
  • IBM Connections upgrades to 5.5
  • IBM Sametime deployments from sites that had 8.5.2
  • Domino consolidation, maintenance and hardware migrations
  • High Availability for Traveler, Domino HTTP and Sametime

What was I learning?  I’m always looking for interesting and challenging technologies that can make a difference to those smaller customers who need to stretch a tight budget.  It’s how I got involved with Notes originally in the early 90s - It allowed me to make big changes quickly for smaller customers.  This year that has meant staying on top of cloud and hybrid security issues and single sign on products and technologies.  Beyond that I have become really interested in data visualisation and have been working with products like Tableau and some of its cheaper competitors to see what they can offer.

Then in December I signed up for a Lynda.com subscription to ensure I have a good grounding in wider technologies and how they can work together.  Of course signing up and actually making time to learn are two different things so that takes us to 2017.

Goals for 2017

  • More data visualisation tools / learning cool things to do with Tableau
  • Building myself a Lynda training plan
  • Deploying Verse on Premise for existing Domino customers and introducing those without Connections to that integration piece
  • More work with database technologies around performance and security
  • Identify ways to deploy docker solutions with better stability and security
  • Improving my languages (I’ve been working on Italian and want to learn Spanish)
  • Working on interesting projects or ones that make a difference

As you can see my “goals” are fairly loose, I am always open to new ideas for technologies to learn (except development languages - blech).  It may be my review of 2017 will be nothing like my goals list and I won’t consider that a failure.