Today ended our (IBMs) very first Social Business App Dev Workshop.  Overall the workshop was a huge success for both IBM and the attendees.  Over the first 2 days of the workshop we covered various topics including IBM’s new Social Business Toolkit and SDK,  Domino and XPages, OpenSocial, and even mobile app development.  Best of all attendees got to work through numerous “labs” which demonstrated all the capabilities of IBM’s Social Business Platform.  It was quite the site to see 40 developers heads down hacking away and learning all kinds of new technologies in the process.  The last day of the workshop was dedicated to the attendees where everyone got one on one time with IBM developers to work through the use cases they have for their apps.  This is invaluable since one on one time with the developers who are experts on IBM’s Social Business Platform is very rare.  When we asked if attendees found the workshop useful the answer was a resounding YES!  This was validation that we are heading in the right direction and that there is a demand for these types of events.  Of course, this being the first workshop, we had some hickups but we will be reviewing all the problems we had and all the feedback we got and making improvements to the labs and all the content presented making each subsiquent workshop better than the last.  The next workshop will be held in Dublin on December 3rd.

For those partners that cannot make it to these workshops do not worry.  We will be posting the different labs over time to the Social Business Toolkit community allowing anyone to walk through them on their own time.  The first lab will be posted to the community VERY soon along side the first release of the Social Business Toolkit.  Make sure to join the community on developer works to keep up to date with everything involving the toolkit.  Also follow @ibmsbt on Twitter to keep up to date there as well.


Ryan J Baxter

Husband, Father, Software Engineer