This week a group of us got together in Hursley and started on the next IBM Redbook for MQ. This time it’s about the newly announced MQ V8.
After just two days writing, it’s already taking shape with the contents and scenarios fairly well-defined. Although we know that every project gets to 80% complete by day 3 and stays that way for the next 4 years, so I have to be contained in the optimism!
This could be seen as a sequel to the V71/V75 book I worked on a couple of years ago. It is being done by a mostly-different team, with just a couple of repeat offenders writing on the new book.
Because it’s being run locally, I’m not likely to have any personal travel stories to report on this one. But one of the residents who has flown here to participate has already told us about ceilings falling down in his hotel. When he told us about that, there were a couple of “me too” responses – including a story I’ve not written about before from a month ago.
Diversion to Germany … I was visiting a customer in Frankfurt, checked into the hotel, and after going to bed was woken round midnight by some large industrial vacuum cleaners going in the corridor. A broken pipe or overflowing bathroom upstairs had soaked the corridor. Since I couldn’t sleep while the repair work was going on, they moved me to an executive suite (very nice room) on the top floor. But then it was nearly time to leave so I didn’t get to enjoy the extra facilities and had to do the meeting with limited rest. Another of those joys of business travel.
Returning to Hursley …
And we may say more about the broken foot and broken locks later.
In 4 weeks time we hope to have several hundred pages written about many of the major enhancements in this new release, with demonstrations and scenarios to show how to make best use of them. The normal timetable for these books means that there should be an unreviewed draft available fairly soon after that, with the official final copy in maybe September (though that’s not a guarantee).