The meeting was held at the ISO building in Newport Center, Jersey City, New Jersey.

Over 120 members/users attended this session which reviewed technologies from the IBM Tivoli and the IBM Message Broker organizations. Special thanks go out to Anthony O'Dowd, chief architect of WMB at IBM Hursley Lab, who came specifically for our meeting in order to present WMB V6.1 news and updates. Anthony was quite entertaining as well as informative!

In addition, real world user experiences were presented including managing WebSphere Message Broker projects, Linux clustering for high availability MQ environments from Bristol-Myers Squibb, and an overview of deploying WebSphere on zLinux from ISO. Other presentations included BPM and WMB Version 6.1 beta experiences.

We would like to thank ISO for once again donating the site location and managing the security for the attendees. We also want to thank IBM Tivoli for sponsoring both breakfast and lunch!

Door prizes were provided courtesy of the WebSphere Global Community. The following is a brief synopsis of the presentations:

By Dhiren Mehta - Principal Architect, Satyam Computer Services Ltd

By Barry Lamkin, Consulting IT Specialist

Today's rapidly evolving environments need comprehensive management to achieve the goal of business flexibility. Understanding all the services, components, and flows in the environment and how they are connected is required in order to support both management and the change processes. In this session you will learn about managing such an environment, as well as understand the capabilities available from IBM to provide this active management.

1. Shobha Railkar, IT Consultant, System Associated Info, Inc.

Design and plan for failure are keys to survival part II. Here are some lessons learned from the trenches and tips recommend for WebSphere Message Broker projects.

2. Kris Murali, Sr. Advisor, Technical Services, Bristol-Myers Squibb

3. Mike Goodside, Enterprise Architect, ISO

Anthony O’Dowd, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, WebSphere Message Broker Architect and Strategy, Hursley Lab, UK

Message Broker 6.1 continues to offer users an unparalleled range of integration opportunities. Covered are all the new features in Message Broker 6.1. It's a major new release with new capabilities including support for Web Services WS-Security and WS-Addressing. There are new nodes which provide built-in support for SAP, Siebel, & PeopleSoft EIS systems. The new File processing nodes provide high performance file processing capabilities for gigabytes files. There's also a new support for ESB security identity mapping, authentication and authorization with TFIM and LDAP. We could keep on listing the goodies in 6.1.

WebSphere Message Broker Version 6.1 Beta Experience

Robert Kaskel, Head Information Services, XTG, LLC

XTG is one of the Betaworks participants for Message Broker 6.1, using WMB as part of an SOA end-to-end business solution helping to make the solution extensible, scaleable, and recoverable. We will also discuss our experiences with V6.1, the new features we have implemented, and the new features we plan to implement along with the how's and why's.