Portal Demo

I guess people wonder what I do at work all day (I know my wife does !).

Well, I do lots of different things, depending on what events are coming up. The majority of my time would be spent reading I guess – trying to keep up with the rapidly changing technology and products.

I’ll try and keep you up to date on the interesting things I’m doing for work, while also trying to not annoy any of our legal team :D

Right now, I’m building a demo system for our WebSphere Portal Server. After many many months of waiting, we finally got our new ThinkPads a couple of weeks back – T40’s with 1GB RAM (we held off on the 2GB RAM upgrade since it is too expensive still). My productivity levels have gone through the roof already (seriously !!). These are really sweet laptops – with built in Centrino wireless, long battery life, and enough grunt to run even our most powerful WebSphere software.

Running a full WebSphere Portal up, including all of the collaboration software and features really gives the machines a good workout. What’s more, doing it all in VMware to keep things portable puts another level of overhead on the system, since I am effectively running 3 operating systems on the one box.

Anyway, I’m setting up a full collaborative demo system that I can use in the presentations I do to customers and business partners, and I will also use it in classes I’m teaching. I’m preparing for a trip to Melbourne at the end of this week – where I want to show it all off.

This is the first time I’ve attempted this full demo capability, and there is a lot of configuring to do (and a lot of learning, since we are using Lotus products for the collaborative capabilities, which I haven’t used before). The experience is great though, since you really learn how the whole thing hangs together, and how WebSphere/Domino Single Sign-on (SSO) works and such.

I’m writing this blog entry from my desktop machine while I’m waiting for my laptop to catch up between configuration updates (running some pretty serious server software on a laptop, it struggles a bit at times, and patience is required). It actually works surprisingly well still, given the resource requirements to run all this software (WinXP host OS, 2x VMware sessions each running Win2K Pro, one with Lotus Domino, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickplace on it, and the other with Lotus Domino, DB2, WebSphere Application Server (WAS), WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), WebSphere Portal and more !

So there you go, currently I’m playing with my laptop, installing and configuring software in preparation for some presentations at the end of the week. Don’t think my wife considers this working still though – you get that.