Store and Forward

I’ve spent the last five years since joining IBM as a consultant in Software Services for WebSphere. This has been the most rewarding and happiest time in my career and I’ve made many new friends from my customer assignments and my IBM colleagues. But my mission in life is to make sure all the WebSphere MQ out there in the world is secured and there are limits to how many customers I can reach working one at a time. That’s one reason I love presenting at the conferences and writing articles – I get a chance to meet and influence many customers at a time. I can spend 40 hours on a customer engagement and help one customer, or I can spend half that time on an article or a few hours at the podium and help many customers. That’s leverage and I’m going to need a lot of it to reach as many MQ users as I want to.

One down side to consulting was that I was focused so narrowly on customer assignments that there was little time for anything else. That was especially true in the last year due to a sharp increase in demand for security services. The net result was that as consulting work ramped up, extracurricular activities such as the developerWorks column, the blog and the podcast ground to a halt. This meant that the activities which had the most leverage were the ones that fell by the wayside.

All that is about to change. As of August 1, I’ll be moving to the WebSphere messaging family product management team. Actually, I have always worked with the lab and product management teams but up to now it was as a customer or as an IBMer in my “spare” time. Beginning next month it will be my primary role and I won’t be consulting anymore. In addition to things like fully participating in the Early Access Programs, I’ll have time (in fact, be expected) to resume blogging, writing articles and podcasting. My conference schedule will likely expand as well, although at the moment all I know of is a possibility of staffing some of the IMPACT Comes to You events here in the US. More on that as it develops.

Over the next few weeks as I transition, I’ll try to get the blog caught up with some of the WMQ security news you might have missed, then resume the blog and podcast in earnest. The recent Fix Pack included security-relevant APARs for which there’s a CVE published. I’ll put the details in the next post but if you have compliance concerns be thinking about applying the Fix Pack if you have not already done so.

After a long and happy relationship with Webzpro, I am afraid I need to switch hosting providers.  In their never-ending battle with spam, Webzpro has changed their email policy to no longer support some features which I require.  Other than this policy change, I’ve been quite happy there but unfortunately, this is a deal-breaker for me.

Please bear with me while I relocate.  I’ve found a new host with the features that I require and, they say, the ability to transfer my existing content seamlessly.  If you can still read this tomorrow, then perhaps all that is true.

Finally, I’m not investing in SSL at the new host until I’ve fully moved in there and tested the blog and podcasting functions.  Hopefully this won’t present any major issues.  Wish me luck!  Here goes…