Our last NY/NJ WMQ & Application Integration User Group seminar was held on January 13^th 2009 at the ISO Building in Jersey City – many thanks to ISO for the generous donation of the facility for the past years!  The CIO of ISO, Roy Nicolosi, gave an opening welcome. This is Roy ’s 7^th year sponsorship for this User Group meeting site. Without Roy ’s support, we would not be able to conduct a large event like this as a non profit User Group organization.  

This event’s meals were sponsored by IBM DataPower, a firmware device for security and ESB that is the dominant player with its line of devices that provide wire-speed SOA integration capabilities.  DataPower manager, Norm Hirsh, also donated many raffle prizes for the meeting attendees.  

Despite the current economic environment, the event was a huge success - over 160 users attended the meeting, showing the resilience of the WebSphere MQ and Application Integration community.  

This meeting was highlighted by the presentations of 4 top hotshots from IBM’s WebSphere line of products, as well as an insightful presentation on MQ security from Prolifics.  

Subjects in the presentations were highly interesting, informative, and insightful. Every presenter was bombarded by the audience with enthusiastic questions and discussions. Afterwards, quite a few attendees wrote to our committee to express their appreciation of the effort and the value of the event.  

We encouraged users to download and view the presentations generously made available by the presenters.  

To ensure the continued success of our community, we appeal to users to come forward with experience / insight for sharing in the coming events in the form of short presentations or even discussions.  

A brief summary of the presentations are as follows and available for download:

-  Guy Hockestetler, ISSW Senior Consultant, gave an Integration WebSphere Services Registry and Repository (WSRR) with Message Broker pitch.  He explained how you modify your WebSphere Message Broker bar file properties each time you deploy to a new environment. Do you hard code in your message flows the http destinations or have you devised a custom database for them?  If so, this session is for you.  You learn how you can use WebSphere Services Registry and Repository to enhance broker processing.  This session described and demonstrated examples of how you may use WSRR to manage your broker environment and affect the behavior of the flows deployed to it.   

- A.J. Aronoff, Infrastructure Practice Director, Prolifics, presented WMQ Security practices: a series of defenses that stand the test of time. This presentation was based on recent reviews of a dozen MQ environments.  It described security practices and strategies using MQ and free software (such as saveqmgr and BlockIP2) including:
1. Early detection of security problems (using saveqmgr and scripts)
2. Defense in depth (layered/targeted defenses)
3. Security Zones (isolating production and non-production systems)
The focus was on securing an entire MQ production environment.  Additional reference links were given for securing individual queue managers.

- Andy Thurai, IBM DataPower Consulting IT Specialist, gave an IBM SOA Appliances (DataPower) Overview. These included:  
1. DataPower as an ESB and Federated ESB
2. DataPower MQ functionality and use cases with WMQ
3. DataPower JMS/EMS and other messaging support
4. Converting Legacy applications to true webservices - WMQ to webservices and vice versa 
5. How reliable is DataPower MQ - Transactionality, Reliable message delivery, WMQ Clustering, etc.  

-  Anthony O’Dowd, IBM WebSphere Message Broker Architect and Strategist from IBM UK Hursley Lab, presented the updates for IBM WebSphere Message Broker. His session discussed recent additions to Message Broker including all the content in MB6102 and MB6103, which includes support for Web 2.0 REST clients, audit and monitoring (including WebSphere Business Monitor), IMS, PHP, TCP/IP sockets applications, MQ7.0, Windows Vista and ITCAM for SOA, plus many other key items delivered in the most recent Message Broker updates. Many of you, who might have attended Transaction & Messaging Tech Conf or IMPACT Conference in the past, would agree Anthony has the talent to deliver both enjoyable and knowledgeable technical content at the same time.

- Mark Taylor’s speech is a great bonus for us. Mark is the IBM Hursley Lab WMQ Strategist.  He was from UK to visit customers in NYC during the same week. That’s how we got lucky to have him onsite to present in this seminar. His session would focus on MQ File Transfer Edition, a new offering in the MQ Family which provides a reliable, managed file transfer solution for moving files. MQ File Transfer Edition enables files to be transferred across a dual purpose backbone which also handles MQ traffic, and provides comprehensive facilities for automation, audit, and scripting on a wide range of OS platforms.  

Presentation materials are available to be downloaded:

WMB_WSRR_Integration.zip

MQ Security A Series of Defenses.zip

WebSphere_DataPower__WebSpher.zip

What's New in Message Broker 61026103.zip

WMQ + FTE Update.zip

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