I joined IBM as an information developer intern (co-op) in June of 2005.  Dell Burner, my team lead, was working on a project with our visual designer and user experience engineer to create a quick start visual for setting up WebSphere MQ for use with Q replication. Q replication is a database replication technology that is extremely high performing due to its architecture and infrastructure. The integral piece of making Q replication out perform standard SQL-based replication is that it pushes its instructions over WebSphere MQ message queues.

WebSphere MQ administrators are a whole different audience than DB2 database administrators.  These two different products are like night and day. DB2 database administrators typically don’t know anything about WebSphere MQ and also are not likely allowed to touch the WebSphere MQ configurations.

Q replication was facing a major customer pain point when it came to configuring WebSphere MQ. The DBAs were not skilled in the technologies needed to implement it. In most shops, there were communication and procedural barriers to getting the environment configured. In most cases, the best case scenario for getting just the WebSphere MQ portion of the environment configured was a minimum of 1-2 days. If the DBAs were working in a z/OS shop, that time frame could be even longer.

Of course a best case scenario means all parties involved are well versed in their requirements and can communicate those from DBA to WebSphere MQ admin.

In an effort to ease the learning curve of Q replication, Dell Burner, Daina Pupons-Wickham, Kevin Lau, and Michael Mao undertook an effort to create a diagram based document and supporting instructions for assisting DBAs to create their setup scripts that they would ask the WebSphere MQ admins to run.

My contribution

I was just two months into my coop and Dell was showing me the PDF of the diagram that he was going to present to one of our vice presidents later that day.  I had worked with PDFs a bit in previous jobs and at school and knew that I could add some additional functionality to his design that would improve it further.

In its current state, the diagram was intended to be printed out and the DBA was expected to hand write on it the names of the objects (while cross referencing the docs) that they expected their WebSphere MQ admin to create.  That first day before Dell presented to our VP, I was able to add text input fields that a user could type into instead of hand writing. I also added tooltips to each of the fields that added embedded assistance to help with explaining each of the objects to cut down on the need for looking up documentation.

Dell’s presentation was a hit even though it was just minor updates to the existing diagram.  As much as I added in just a single day, I knew there was still significant room for improvement.

PDFs support what is called “calculations” and other processing of form entries. An author can add JavaScript instructions and functions into the PDF that allow it to become more dynamic. I had already added all of the text fields and tooltips–why should we expect the DBAs to assemble their setup scripts when we could do it form them?

I created additional scripts that would take a users input into the diagram and transform the input into fully functional WebSphere MQ scripts that could be run as is. The instructions and PDF forms were also customized depending on the type of Q replication environment (unidirectional, bidirectional, peer-to-peer, event publishing, etc).

Download a copy of this tool from: WebSphere MQ Script generator for Q replication and event publishing

Watch a demo of the tool at: The MQ Script Generator – ChannelDB2

User testing

While still in the draft state and testing the scripts, we performed user testing and validation. We were able to measure that the new PDF tool was able to reduce user task time from 24-48 hours to down to 15-20 minutes.   Obviously a significant improvement in time and thus customer’s ROI.

Patent application

After some thought and later research, we determined that no one else had done anything similar. We filed our international patent application (US Patent App # 20070162891) in January of 2006. In July of 2009, we finally heard back from our first patent office–China granted our patent for our invention “Graphical aid for generating object setup scripts.” Chinese patent number is #ZL200710001513.4.

Later additions and enhancements

Eventually Adobe added the capabilities to Adobe Acrobat Professional that allowed content creaters to create “rights-enabled” PDFs. This basically means you can allow a user of your PDF that only has Adobe Reader to be able to save their filled out forms. Previously, the lack of that capability was extremely limiting.  With the addition of this capability, the InfoSphere Replication Server product now bundles my tool as a launchable function from the GUI.

While this PDF definitely helped reduce a major customer pain point, I believe its implementation could have been done in a richer way if we could have gotten a programmer to build the actual functionality into the product. This began as kind of a demonstration and turned into its own full-fledged tool.

Other use cases of this capability are constantly popping up so you might see something come along soon.

Install this script from userscripts.org: IBM Lotus Connections Drop-down menus

IBM’s Lotus Connections software is an enterprise social software application that consolidates a lot of collaboration and information sharing within the enterprise to a single location. We use Lotus Connections quite extensively within IBM and it has been an amazing improvement over many of our previous tools and methods for project, team, and professional collaboration.

The recently announced Lotus Connections 2.5 features communities, blogs, wikis, file sharing, social bookmarking, activities,  profiles, and a customizable dashboard.  I can tell you that I use every single one of those features on a daily basis and its been a great step forward in so many ways. Knowledge is being better shared across our enterprise and it can be found more easily. Projects and teams can stay organized and on track. To-dos can be assigned and tracked.

While my overall satisfaction with the product is quite high, one small design issue bugs me. Thankfully, Lotus Connections is a web application that I can use the Greasemonkey addon for Firefox to alter aspects of the design.  I often find myself having to switch between sections in Lotus Connections–On a wiki page and need browse to a wiki section within a community.  The default design has a top bar menu with only top-most navigation items:

Getting around Lotus Connections sometimes requires clicking through multiple unnecessary pages.  I decided to add drop-down menus to each menu item to reduce the number of clicks to get around. I eventually discovered the ATOM feeds for each Lotus Connections area and determined I could add links for specific areas such as a list of all your communities or a list of all files that have been shared with you (had to blur out the actual files in the screenshot):

Overall, this script helps improve an already awesome application a bit more.  I’m hoping to convince the Lotus Connections teams to implement some kind of navigation that either matches this experience or something similar for being able to more quickly navigate to specific items in your network.

Using this script

You can use this script on http://ibm.com/communities, which is an IBM implementation of Lotus Connections 2.5. You can also customize the locations that this Greasemonkey script runs to include your own installations. For example, if you want it to run against http://mybusiness.com/connections/* you would include that location:

I recently released a version of my Lotus Connections greasemonkey script for adding dynamic drop-down menus for use with IBM’s myDeveloperWorks. You can download this script from userscripts.org: IBM My developerWorks drop-down menus

Improvements to myDeveloperWorks

MyDeveloperWorks is awesome but sometimes navigating between sections gets annoying if you are someone that constantly uses this site. Jumping between Blogs to your Groups could involve multiple page loads and clicks by default. This script can help eliminate that unnecessary browsing by adding drop-down menus to the site’s existing menu.

Default menu on myDeveloperWorks

When you install this script, it will add some standard drop-down menus and it will also load your specific items such as your groups, bookmarks, and activities.

Showing dynamic and customized drop-down menus that are added by this script

Script details

Interested in the code?  This Greasemonkey script uses jQuery 1.2.3 to perform most of its work. jQuery makes creating Greasemonkey scripts amazingly easy to work with the Document Object Model (DOM) as well as adding fancy effects and performing Ajax calls.

jQuery is mostly focused on the user of selectors to uniquely identify content in a similar manner to CSS selectors.  This selector behavior is awesome for greasemonkey scripts because you cannot always easily parse a site’s HTML with standard Javascript and the code becomes extremely complex.  jQuery allows you spend your time on improving the user experience rather than deal with the plumbing.