COMMON Fall Conference & Expo

This isn't your typical case study, this is the reality of open source: One hundred percent of organizations use varying degrees of OSS, yet we still focus on one particular package or layer when it comes to sharing best practices. The reality is, when we get stuck, it's the configuration and operational interrelationships between packages that matter.

This session takes open source support data across multiple organizations to examine three different scenarios that represent the most common issues we see today (in fact, 80% of the cases we see are due to configuration and package interrelationship issues). Justin Reock covers e-commerce, mobile PaaS, and high performance computing examples to illustrate top problems and solutions for stack selection, infrastructure implementation, and production troubleshooting.

If you use or are planning to use Apache web server, ActiveMQ, CentOS, Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx, OpenSSL, Puppet, or PHP, these stories cover how most organizations use them. Even if you're not using these specific packages, the information presented here also applies to other technologies.

Learning Objectives:

In this talk, Alan will share techniques that can improve web performance within minutes. Alan recently helped a company's site speed up by 10x with a single tip. Alan will focus on free tools that help diagnose performance bottlenecks, how to configure the Apache web server for speed, and demonstrate the techniques on live sites.

Learning Objectives:
How to identify possible performance bottlenecks at a glance
A few easy changes in the Apache web server configuration that can improve performance
What to look for after the initial, quick improvements

You have a wealth of experience and expertise. Have you thought about sharing your know-how by speaking at COMMON? Speaking at COMMON is fun and a great way to get involved with other members as well as the organization at large. Come join this Question and Answer discussion with members of the Volunteer Excellence Committee. Let's talk about your questions, ideas for sessions or whatever is on your mind. We will share experiences about what it is like to speak at COMMON, successful speaking techniques, preparation steps, etc. You may be the next outstanding speaker at COMMON!

Learning Objectives:

Application Security is more important than ever, but as enterprise architectures grow in size and complexity it continues to increase in relevance, making process and standards more important than ever. John Saboe got his start in application security from a developer perspective and has continued to be an advocate for building architectures the right way – including security concerns from the start – throughout his career. John will cover application security basics, demystifying some of the common terminology and standards, and introduce resources for further learning. He will also discuss examples from his own experiences as an application security consultant, as a developer, supporting architectures, and designing new architectures with security in mind.

Learning Objectives:

As the “glue” that holds the LAMP stack together, PHP is used both as the language to represent the business logic of a web application as well as leveraging data from various data sources including relational databases. The session will start out with a look at the basic database access and manipulation functions provided by PHP. From there we will explore the PHP language extensions for accessing and working with data resident in DB2 on IBM i. Additionally, we will take a look at how PHP accesses MySQL/MariaDB data and how that data can actually be stored in DB2 without any code changes. Finally, we will take a look at how the PHP language can be used to build solutions from multiple disparate data sources – specifically in our case we will look at how data from DB2 and data from MariaDB can be represented together to deliver holistically (from a data perspective) solutions.

Learning Objectives:

Come see how easy it is to build fast, accurate, and responsive web UIs using the React library. Even if you’ve never written Javascript before, React’s straightforward syntax can get you started with your UI project quickly. In this session, you’ll learn about React’s declarative syntax and state representation, explore some of the basic components that are used to build sophisticated UIs, and leave with a foundational application you can continue to build on.

Learning Objectives:

The Notes client hasn't had significant enhancements for a few releases now. This has changed with the release of Notes 10. The development team was busy listening to customers and partners to find out what the top needed have been and implemented those! Come to this session to learn about why you'll want to get your users on the Notes 10 client ASAP and how Sametime became much more usable and friendly across devices in Sametime 10.

Learning Objectives:
Learn about the plethora of enhancements made available to the Notes client with version 10.
Learn about how much more usable Sametime is in version 10.

The cloud is the shiny new toy that everyone is moving to. As a system administrator, you’re thinking I’m gone - time to update my resume. STOP…Breathe…It’s going to be okay. I have good news for you. You still have value to your company. Think about it: The CIO is not going to stop asking a slew of questions, such as:
• What’s wrong with the system?
• What happened yesterday at 4 PM?
• Why is disk space growing at an alarming rate?
• Why did night batch processing run long last night?
• Are we going to have enough processing power for our peak period?

And so on

Did you know that managed service providers (MSPs) don’t always think about performance? It’s true. In this session, we will not only layout a performance management roadmap to ensure your move to the cloud is a smooth one, but we will prove to management that you now have the most important role in your company.

Learning Objectives:
1) We will introduce a mission-critical "Cloud Provider" checklist and discuss the steps that need to be done in a project of this magnitude.
2) We will talk about performance implications when moving to the cloud.
3) We will talk about performance best practice SLAs - especially the one that MSPs don't want you to think about.
4) We will talk about capacity planning and answer the question: Do I need to worry about that anymore?

Ok, maybe we're setting the bar a little high by saying EVERYTHING, but did you ever feel like all the people around you seem to just KNOW things, things you don't? Sure, you're a wiz with SQL, and no one codes RPG like you do, but when it comes to people skills, to working in teams, to communicating well, to building your career... Well, they never taught you THAT! Come to this session to learn everything you've been missing out on.

Attend this session to learn to:
* Collaborate more effectively with other team members
* Resolve conflict with coworkers
* Improve your relationship with your boss
* Negotiate to get what you want
* Effectively market yourself in your current position
* Communicate better with everyone
* Understand EVERYTHING THEY NEVER TAUGHT YOU!

"Hey, do you have a minute?" We're asked that question many times every day, and while we say yes, the sad answer is... NO! Our lives and our careers are busier than ever. Feel like you're barely keeping your head above water at work? You're not alone. We struggle to keep up with the demands of our careers while retaining some semblance of balance between work and personal time.  

If you had an extra week - or more - every year, how would you spend it? Come to this session and learn the life hacks you need to supercharge your productivity!

Learning Objectives:
You'll leave this session knowing how to:
* Focus on the right things at the right times
* Better manage the constant interruptions
* Always have the information you need at your fingertips
* Automate repetitive tasks
* Use technology to your advantage

By the end of the session you'll have the tools to save over 168 hours - that's one full week - every year! What will you do with all that extra time?