From the blog ‘Ben means Business‘, Ben Jones lists the 7 reasons why corporate blogs suck. I really like the first reason:

Reason#1: Fear of Transparency

People who read blogs expect to “know” the author, and participate in discussions with the author and other readers. They enjoy an atmosphere that is genuine and has a “living room” feel. In other words, they expect you to acknowledge problems, fixes, and incidents instead of using your blog to further validate cover-ups. Remember, PR ploys are for people who read the newspaper. Blog readers are a different breed and they respect and embrace what’s “real”.

I like to think that transparency is what I am bringing that’s ‘new’ to the area of business integration and enterprise software. I’m willing to talk about the frustrations of being a consultant in the field in an open forum.

I’ve been feeling pressures abound to reduce the transparency, but I fear that will just add DanZrobok.com to the list of useless ‘corporate’ blogs. I’m uninterested in parroting marketing feature lists and pretending the earth is flat.

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I think some of my readers need a refresher course on exactly what I’m doing here and everything that I’ve contributed to the external IBM community (aka, the community that IBM does next to nothing to help thrive).

1. I constantly post and answer questions of all levels in the two external newsgroups for WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server. The groups get about 10 posts a day and between myself and Neil Kolban, we’re the primary responders. If neither of us runs with an issue, it doesn’t get solved. Where do the unsolved questions go? A straight negative to IBMs bottom-line with a PMR. Or better yet, just another unsatisfied practitioner.
2. I constantly post to this blog outlining my personal experiences with the two products. I try to tackle the problems that I encounter along with their resolutions. The hope is that through my trials and tribulations, the external community can learn and avoid the productivity waste associated with running into insane exceptions.
3. I also try to post about my honest assessments of the product stack at the point in time. Sometimes I’m happy with the way everything works, and sometimes I’m extremely disappointed in the solutions. I think it’s completely fair to air these in the blog. I’m not here to be another marketing slide for IBM. Are the products good 90% of the time? Sure. Are they crap in the other 10%? You bet. Competing products either fail 60% of the time or just don’t provide the feature in the first place.
4. I’ve written articles for DeveloperWorks on WID.
5. I’ve completed redbook residencies on WebSphere Process Server.
6. I attempt to provide feedback back to IBM through the various IBMers who may swing by. I’ve found that since I left IBM my voice carries more weight than it ever did internally. I’m hoping the right people can stumble around here to make the future software revisions even better.
7. I’ve also worked with numerous people who email me with problems. I prefer it when they’re posted to the newsgroup but I can accept someone needed a critical answer quickly.
8. I’m pretty much open 24/7 for YOU the Business Integrator. I solicit comments/topics/questions as much as I can  in the hope that it doesn’t take you three years to skill up on the product set like it did for me.
9. Oh yeah, my actual job. Implementing SOA solutions with WID/WPS. Spreading skill to the field by working hands on with customers.

Anyway, I’ve hit a very big crossroads with respect to the external IBM community and my role in it. Over the next few weeks there will likely be some large changes that can range from status quo daily blogging to ceasing my newsgroup activities to flat out deleting danZrobok.com and forwarding it to icanhascheezburger.com forever.

If you read between the lines, I’m at a very VERY low point in my blogging career. If you have any kind of pick me up, I can use it right now.

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I’ve been running danZrobok.com now for about four months now and I’m curious as to who my readers are. Feel free to comment to this post as an introduction. I’m always in the market for topics to talk about in the blog or features of the IBM Suite of products that you’d like to know more about.

Some questions I’d like to know:

• Who are you?
• Where are you?
• What company do you work for?
• Are you an SOA practitioner?
• Do you have any topic suggestions?
• Likes/Dislikes about the blog
• Do you twitter?
• Whats your feeling about Business Integration and where we’re headed?

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As my gig here in Toronto doing WebSphere Process Server implementations comes to a close, I’m going to be moving on to a new opportunity using Oracle Fusion and Oracle BPEL. This should be very interesting as I will be able to directly compare and contrast the two integration engines from the perspective of someone who knows the IBM software (some would say too) well.

I may have to update the title of the blog now

Of course, the WebSphere focus of the blog likely won’t change too much, but I do hope to keep everyone up to speed on what I think of the Oracle Platform as I go.

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I re-wrote IBM DataPower Certification test 284 over the weekend and passed with a 75% when requiring a 60%. Taking the course made my life a lot easier. I still spent two hours writing and reviewing the answers but I was a lot more confident about passing when I ended the test.

I did notice that there is a bug in the Prometrics Windows based client (non web-browser) that you need to be aware of. One of the questions deals with “Which of the XMLs is invalid”, and the answers use xmlns to define namespaces. The problem is that the URLs follow the http:// format and the windows client is turning them into blue-underlined hyperlinks while removing the surrounding quotes. This will make three of the answers appear as invalid XML.

I have emailed the only person in IBM who I know is deeply involved in the certification organization and I hope IBM will either update the question or fix the windows client bug.

The other weird thing about the windows client was that I didn’t see an option to provide feedback directly when ending the test but not yet getting the score. I took a notes about questions that I really disliked and wanted to provide feedback on but I didn’t have the opportunity. The ‘paper’ I was given to record my notes on when writing the test was an erasable surface that had to be returned at the end.

Anyway,  the test was pretty much the same one that I had written previously except that the hard questions were first which freaked me out a bit

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This is the course that I am attending this week. This will be nice as I’ll have a hardcopy of the course contents. Also, being able to go through the content slowly over a week with hands-on usage of the datapower box will be a huge bonus. When I was trying to learn the machine without  the help of the exercises, I was overwhelmed by the number of options available and unsure when to use what. So far, I see nine attendees in the room. Lower than the other two times I’ve been here (WebsSphere Application Server v6.1 admin had a maximum room of 20 and WebSphere Process Server was the same).

Additionally, for attending this course I have two certificates for free certification test (WebSphere 284 firmware v3.6.0 and WebSphere 289 v3.6.1) .

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Sometimes the stars just align perfectly. I’m trying to get my DataPower Certification and IBM’s business partner relations team is offering a free course on DataPower next week in Markham. It pays to be in a city with an IBM Office. I’ll be in attendance there and hopefully sitting in the room for 5 days will put me over the edge.

Naturally, I’ll try and blog it.

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I have a theory as to why I don’t see my mapped data objects in my result business object. I’ll give a write up once I figure out what’s going on. I was ready to point fingers all over the product stack, but it looks like (as always) the finger will end up on me, aka user error.

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Mapping logic between two business objects or the secret plans for the next Intel Processor?

Simply follow path ‘A’ from the Business Object on the left to the destination ‘B’ on the right. Pack a lunch, you may be there a while.

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It’s a Canadian holiday on Monday, so I’ll be back blogging on Tuesday. Cheers.

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IBM provides a variety of self-help tools and other support resources to help you maintain and troubleshoot systems that are based on WebSphere products. In addition to these, IBM also provides three levels of Premium Support that can be customized and added on to your Passport Advantage support agreement. This article describes the advantages of IBM Software Premium Support and how these additional services would impact your day-to-day operations. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

I can't help but notice the similarities between my old SWAT Team job and this new Premium support concept. In the SWAT role, I was a developer from the development organization sent around to early adopters of WebSphere Integration Developer in order to help them get into production as smoothly as possible. This involved providing a single contact point back into the IBM hierarchy, managing their Problem Reports and guiding best practices.

This problem with SWAT was that it was the right role, but provided by the wrong organization. Development should be focused on developing products, not pro-bono consulting work. Now we see the "Premium Support" package arrives which uses ISSW consultants to basically do the same job that SWAT did but within the proper services organization. I'm sure it will as big a success as SWAT was.

But my issue with "Premium Support" is that the service they provide are all things that the pre-existing support channel should be doing. When a customer spends a few million dollars for software/support, is it really too much to ask to have a single point of contact inside the company? Someone who will champion your issues within the organization and provide regular feedback of their status.

My second concern with the Premium Support package is that it lands up providing even more incentive for IBM to cut testing cycles on product releases. Testing a product costs money. Billing a consultant generates money. It's easy to see which one is preferable. If you can generate a large revenue stream from support contracts and numerous engagements for Premium Support at high billable rates, they can only be sustained by releasing poor products. A rock solid product running without issues doesn't have Premium Support revenue streams: It's not needed.

I'm also concerned what impact that this team will have with the long-term building of an external SOAcommunity. If customers can solve the issues on their own, why would they buy this services offering? Premium Support revenue will grow based on stifling the information that is released beyond the firewall.

The Premium Support product is an interesting concept that I'm sure some companies will get on-board with immediately, I'm just concerned about the long-term issues a team like this may cause.

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I will arrive from Las Vegas in the early monday morning red-eye, so don’t expect any updates from me today.

I am still working on writing up my notes from a very good WTSC2008 session about how to be an “excellent IT Architect” amongst some other goodies from Las Vegas.

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I wrote three certification tests:

1. Test 253, IBM WebSphere Application Server, Network Deployment
2. Test 142, XML 1.1 and Related Technologies
3. Test 664, SOA Fundamentals

Test 253, IBM WebSphere Application Server, Network Deployment

As I had mentioned before, I attended a WAS 6.1 Administration business partner course run out of the IBM Toronto Lab. I have a printed copy of the course and have spent the last month reading it off and on. I decided to attempt to write the certification. I thought that the test was pretty fair and I don’t remember anything note worthy about weird/unfair questions. The course was a very good match for the test.

Passing Score: 53%
Your Score: Pass - 61.11% (33 earned out of 54 possible)

Test 142, XML 1.1 and Related Technologies

Given that I’ve been working with XML for a long time, I figured I should be able to pass this one pretty easily. The test is focused on DTD & XSD definitions of XML. There are also questions along the lines of “Why is this XML bad” or “When to choose SAX over DOM for parsing”. There were some low-level technology questions too. Things like “How do you create an XML Reader” or “What jar do you need to put on the classpath to use XSLTC in Java 5?” (??). There were also some hardcore XSLT iterative data manipulation calls where you had to describe the output or error. I’d say you’ll have a better time with this certification if you are currently using SAX/DOM API to parse trees. I haven’t done that in a very long time.

Passing Score: 61%
Your Score: Pass - 61.22% (30 earned out of 49 possible)

Yes, I passed by %0.22.

Test 664, SOA Fundamentals

I wasn’t in the mood to write another difficult test (say WPS Admin). I noticed that 664 is a required test to obtain IBM Certified WebSphere Administrator status (I’m not sure about the exact term, but it’s the combination of 664 + 235 + WPS 094). This test was pretty easy if you have been working in the SOA space in any capacity. The key terms to remember is that SOA is all about business value and rapid responses to change. That theme was hammered in about 50% of the test. If you use common sense and understand things like Web Services and WSDL you should be fine.

Passing Score: 66%
Your Score: Pass - 77.78% (42 earned out of 54 possible)

So far so good. I will likely write Process Server certification today.

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I was recently asked about where to find resources on WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer in order to pass certification tests 093 and 094. I responded to basically search developerworks for articles along with IBM RedBooks.

I didn’t really like responding without concrete links, so I did a little browsing of the site and found the following books. I’d recommend reading the latest books on the software, as a lot has changed since the 2005-product release days.

1. Technical Overview of WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer, REDP-4041-00
   Redpapers, published 6 December 2005, Rating: (based on 14 reviews)
2. Getting Started with WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus V6, SG24-7212-00
   Redbooks, published 14 June 2006, last updated 14 June 2006, Rating: (based on 9 reviews)
3. Patterns: SOA Foundation - Business Process Management Scenario, SG24-7234-00
   Redbooks, published 8 August 2006, last updated 11 August 2006, Rating: (based on 10 reviews)
4. Human-Centric Business Process Management with WebSphere Process Server V6, SG24-7477-00
   Redbooks, published 15 October 2007, last updated 17 October 2007, Rating: (based on 6 reviews)
5. Getting Started with WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Part 1: Development, SG24-7608-00
   Draft Redbooks, last update 18 April 2008
6. Patterns: Building Serial and Parallel Processes for IBM WebSphere Process Server V6, SG24-7205-00
   Redbooks, published 23 April 2006, last updated 25 April 2006, Rating: (based on 3 reviews)
7. A Simple Example: Using the WebSphere Adapter for Flat File, REDP-4235-00
   Redpapers, published 28 December 2006, Rating: (based on 3 reviews)
8. Business Process Management: Modeling through Monitoring Using WebSphere V6.0.2 Products, SG24-7148-01
   Redbooks, published 21 August 2007, Rating: (based on 8 reviews)
9. WebSphere Business Integration V6 Performance Tuning, REDP-4195-00
   Redpapers, published 26 September 2006, Rating: (based on 1 review)
10. Migrating WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation to WebSphere Process Server & Best Practices, SG24-7416-00
    Draft Redbooks, last update 9 December 2007, Rating: (based on 2 reviews)
11. Getting Started with WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Part 2: Scenario, SG24-7642-00
    Draft Redbooks, last update 18 April 2008
12. Patterns: SOA Foundation Service Connectivity Scenario, SG24-7228-00
    Redbooks, published 17 August 2006
13. WebSphere Adapter Development, SG24-6387-00
    Redbooks, published 20 June 2006, Rating: (based on 9 reviews)
14. Redbooks - Production Topologies for WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB V6 2007-04-20

It’s a bit much to ask someone to read all of them, but the ones that actual focus on the product themselves instead of scenarios or patterns are probably the most useful in order to pass a test.

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Well I must say I was taken aback when I saw that that my SOA Jam ESB question was responded to by Steve Mills:

Steve Mills is a senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. In this capacity he is responsible for directing the development, marketing, sales and support of IBM’s software portfolio. Mr. Mills is a member of IBM’s Operating Team, Performance Team, Values & Integration Team and the Asian Task Force.

It’s not everyday that you get someone at Steve’s level to respond to something you say. Of course, I’ll be right back in there with my rebuttal but this definitely made my day.

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