A very hectic Icon UK has just passed in a blur, leaving a hangover and a sense of satisfaction.

Tim Clark put on great display aided by a number of brave souls, with great content and facilities (ignoring the on site WIFI) and amazing after event social times.

As always the IBM community put on its best and came out with a wide variety of vendors and attendees (most of them long time friends that I get to see far too infrequently) all very positive and with fresh new ideas.

But for me the highlight of the conference was the arrival of IBM Marketing’s Penny Hill and the IBM champion manager Amanda Bauman , marketings absence has been a long bug bear and to finally meet someone and be able to offer help to and get help in return was wonderful ( so Penny or Amanda if you are reading this, I was serious about just yelling if there was anything I could do to help and I suspect that applies for a lot of the community.) I also must not forget the none marketing branches of IBM who also came out, took criticism and came back with excellent answers, well done all round.

LDC Via was taken far more seriously by attendees then in previous conferences (well it seemed so to me), with us having the highest turn out of all the vendor sessions, so much so that we ran out of Gin and Pimms (and no we did not tell people before the session that we would be serving drinks) and a good stream of people with serious questions and excellent use case scenarios, leaving use with a ton of leads to follow up and a bunch of new features to go Gold with.

No technical presentations for me this time though I did help with Tim and Femke’s presentation as well as present the Changing technologies with Gab Davis

[Chris Harris](https://twitter.com/chriscwharris) was taking the good pictures this time around and did a great one of the LDCVia team. The proper serious one will appear on the official [LDC Via](http://ldcvia.com/) blog for the event but in the mean time here is one of the silly ones.

This post is WAYYYYY late but never mind (I promise no more false starts or Kale pictures)

Each year we tootle off to the Engage/Blug conference knowing full well that @theoheselmans is not going to be able to top last years awesome conference.

Each year we are wrong…. and this year was no exception, so much so that I forgot to take pictures of a number of the important stuff (including the OGS and the Library at the venue)

This time LDC were there as LDC Via and we went live with our first product on the first day of the conference.

It was great to be a proper sponsor and we had a steady stream of interested people, gave lots of demos and walked away with some good solid leads

Aren’t we a handsome bunch

We were presenting this year and @benpoole was making a return to the stage

He did a marvellous job and we got the biggest turn out for the sponsor sessions

(however he captioned the following 2 pictures himself)

@stickfight “…and then I told @benpoole what a good job he did presenting @ldcvia”

@MattWhite “LOL!”

@stickfight “Are we bringing @benpoole next time?”

@MattWhite “Hmm. Maybe stick to @woowar?”

Frenzied highlight of the conference from a personal point of view was the speed sponsoring where I got to rant madly at the entertained attendees while @MattWhite tried to read my mind to determine which of LDCVia’s feature set he should be demoing at any given second

On none-LDC Via business, a chat with Rene Winkelmeyer gave me a jaw dropping programming tip I simply would have never thought of and the tech sessions were as diverse as they were high quality, I also got to catch up with just about everybody I know as well as meet a bunch of new people.

Vibe wise: Engage was far far more upbeat than the IBM/Domino situation would warrant, but that has always been the case, now that Lotusphere/Connect is gone I rank it as the best conference to go to, and talking with some of my oldest clients who were making their first visit I was not the only one.

Lastly there was Ghent it’s self, a city I have never been to and it looks like I was really missing out, thanks again to @theoheselmans for giving me the chance to see it.

I saw something the other day that is unfortunately rare these days, a company HAPPY with IBM/Lotus Notes..

Now roll back the clock 10 years and this was the case all-over, the once proud product that used to be my bread and butter and now only accounts about for about 20%-30% of my work (the rest being taken up by Java and Javascript on Websphere/Jboss/Node with a happy side line customising IBM Connections) was loved by a huge number of its users and they bought it in droves… so what did this this office have that kept them in this happy state?

It turned out to not be what they had but what they DID NOT have, they had no limitations on who could create databases on the servers* also they all had the full Notes client with the designer, so departments created apps just like they did in the old days, they took the standard templates and altered them to fit their needs just like the do with Excel spread sheets, MS Access databases and indeed to some extend Sharepoint,

Notes had not become controlled by the management and techno elite, it was used by everybody, there was no fighting for “engagement” as is the case for modern social platforms, it was achieved organically without the need for HR and marketing to stick their hoof in.

So if you want my opinion about the real reason that notes is not as popular as it used to be, blame IT and management for wanting to control everything, for taking the users that want to be pioneers and making them drones.

*Though there were a few sane guidelines

(If this post sounds a bit world weary its not meant to be)

Sooooo, the ‘last lotusphere’ has come and gone, leaving a warm feeling* and more than a few tears, how did IBM handle the passing of one of their longest running conferences.

It was a far smaller conference (or rather intimate as IBM have stated) but it was sized as such so we were not rattling around in the 11,000 space that we have for previous years, there seemed to be just over 2000 of us with a few space issues, it looks like IBM padded the numbers a little bit too much with their own staff (although with IBM staff no one knew or cared about while denying access to the people the comunity really wanted to see)

Looking at the new offerings it feels like a major change coming from IBM, during the good times IBM products did 80% of what the clients wanted with the parters like LDC filling in the remaining 20%, however in the last few years IBM products have only been providing 50%-60% of what clients wants (compared to the competition) meaning people simply did not buy them and thus the partners got to provide 0%, now IBM seem to be fighting back with their design team leading the charge, however to me they seem to aiming to provide about 95% of what clients want…will the remaining 5% be worth waiting round for? (though it has been pointed out to me that 5% of a much bigger pie would still be a good thing)

To me a lot of what is shown was designed for users not partners, I think that the age of partners is nearly over

IBM Verse

1. On par with GMail (even if there is a lot of mad icon placement)
2. Some unique features such as the mute thread and the waiting for action (ooooh is that going to be abused by managers), xpages intergeneration side verse and running on bluemix.

Connections Next

1. Lots of new features a lot of them aimed at the cloud, I need to have a look at them in detail to pass judgement, but such a sudden jerk away from on premises, runs a bad risk of angering existing customers while not gaining any new ones,

LDC were there in force (or rather LDCVia as we are are now named to match our first product) and nicely on brand even if were cant manage the reputable part yet.

Julian and Ben handled the night time work and the socialising, I seemed to end up talking to partners while wearing smart trousers and a shirt (I’m not sure how this happened), but it was good talking about a real product we have built and how we could glue it to other vendors offerings to build something even better.

Matt was hugely missed but as he and his good lady were getting ready for the arrival of their second born I suppose we can let it slide just this once (but don’t let it happen again)

I did not do hardly any drinking or going out this year mainly due to being shattered at the end of each day and also having work to do, but the turtles ( Gab, Tim and Mike) insisted that I go out for a round Epcot pub crawl (a drink at every country) which turned out to be one of the best nights I have ever had at the conference, why Why WHY had we never done this before

Personally this was the most business orientated conference I have ever done, other than the fact I was in jeans less than half the time, this was the first time I have got to go to the leadership Alliance, that and the champion status let me talk to a lot more people about “stuff” than I ever have before. there was also far less “conferencing” for me, I did not attend the closing sessions or any of the IBM parties but still only managed a few hours sleep a night as there was so much going on (I was also looking for work and that takes up time)

The session of the conference goes to Mark Roden’s and Mark Leusinks excellent “The future of web development write once, run everywhere with angular js and domino” which had everything a good session should have

1. Topical (AngularJS)
2. Relevant to target audience (Domino)
3. Interesting and well presented
4. Something to take home (the app is live)

Happily my own session went over quite well, with a reasonable turn out (my sessions being so fringe are never that well populated) and excellent audience participation. so I’m happy.

Where does this leave next year??, the merging of this conference into the giant IBM one in Vegas makes a lot of sense to a certain marketing point of view, but it would also kill the life and technical content of the conference formally known as lotusphere, leaving only the lugs to go to if you want to learn anything, but as marketing hold the purse strings for this kind of thing I dare say they will have their way (booo)

All in all a great conference and even if it was the last one it was a great send off, roll on [Engage](http://engage.ug/) in march

*Like pissing your self in a dark suit

My self and the rest of LDC went to the MongoDb Coming To You day in London and amongst the many interesting sessions, there was one about MongoDb security, I’m not going to even post a link to the slides as the interesting part was not on them, it was an story about a company going under due to losing control of their AWS (Amazon Web service) access keys, their site was hacked, their servers terminated, their databases deleted and all their backups purged. Everything…. Dead

This gave me quite a shudder, I’m more than a little bit paranoid at the best of times, but it did remind me of off the old phrase to never “put all your eggs in one basket” and that applies as much to cloud platforms as to anything else, however its a tricky trap to escape from as the cloud service providers sell them selves as everything you could ever want and there is no need to have any other vendor, they make it sooo easy to just bolt on services using the same credentials, yes they do provide granularity and yes they provide 2 factor authentication, but they are always a single point of failure and there is no physical security measure if you suffer a major breach (you can’t pound down to the server room and yank the cables out the back of your router or servers) if the bad guys get your security keys then they ARE you.

So what to do?, cloud services are cheap and hideously powerful for their money, not using them robs you and your company of a major advantage in the Internet economy?

Well let’s relate this all back to personal experience and in particular LDCVia, after the conference we sat down and worked out some worst case scenario ( loss of the root account API keys, breach in a primary admins 2 factor authentication or a member of the LDC founders being possessed by a Brain Slug) and figured out how we would deal with them, not what we would do to prevent them, as we had already do everything we can to that end:

1. 2 factor authentication on every account capable of doing anything at an infrastructure or admin level
2. Not using primary accounts or their API keys for day to day activities.
3. Multiple single function accounts and granulated security.
4. Operating level accounts should not have access to database content
5. Proper firewalls.
6. etc. etc. etc.

But how much damage we would be looking at and what the hell we could do to mitigate and recover from it.

For how much damage?, cater to losing all of it, the whole lot lost or compromised 🙁 how are we going to deal with that >:( .

1. Backups should not be on the same security domain as the servers and databases. hell they should not even be on the same cloud service (you create backup accounts with read only access to only databases, with no OS access) and the servers should have no idea the external backup provider exists, don’t forget to limit the source IP address for these accounts or else you are just giving people a nasty back door to your data.
2. App servers and database servers should should be segregated in the same way if possible, now this will often depend on network connection speed as db access though a firewall is really going to slow down your apps, but often cloud providers provide good links between different accounts on their network.
3. Inquire with your cloud provider about a separate authentication method in the case of a breach, a phone number to call and a list of real people and credentials such as you use for phone banking that can shut down all access so you can pick up the pieces,
4. Talk and I do mean actually TALK with your provider to find out what provisions they have for this scenario type. and while you are there find out their notification schedule are you being told about their network changes? also what back door accounts to they insist on adding to your systems, how are they protected? … in short be knowledgeable about your cloud platform.
5. Can you take full images of your machines and store them else where (not just backups), they are a lot faster to recover from
6. Work out your full DR restore strategy, how fast can you get all the servers and database built and back on line, what gets built in what order, what do you tell your clients during that time, what’s the public message you display? get it all written down distributed to the right people and for heavens sake down store it in one place.

I think I need a brown paper bag and a quiet place to calm down (shudder)