General

A visit to the new Oslo offices

LudoLeave a comment

Entrance of ForgeRock Oslo officeI’m just leaving Oslo after a short visit to our new Oslo offices and meetings with my colleagues from Sales and Business Development.

It was nice finally meeting with many of the ForgeRock employees I’ve been working with through Skype, phone and email. And also meeting with some visitors from other ForgeRock locations. Working in Oslo office feels very similar than working in the Grenoble ones : there is a friendly and relaxed atmosphere, although with a deep concentration and intense work going on.

I’ll be coming back to Oslo on a more regular pace starting from September, but as I’m leaving, I wish I could come back with my whole family during the summer time, as it’s probably the best season to come to Norway : the light is incredible, the weather great and it feels so relaxing. Hmmm, this sounds like a plan for family vacation for next year !?

We’ve moved office !

Ludo1 Comment

As we’re growing the team in the Grenoble area, we’ve finally moved office to the “Silvaco” building in the Montbonnot tech area.

ForgeRock France new office building

We now have enough space for the whole team, interns and for the coming new hires (and yes, we still have positions opened). The facilities include a small cafeteria, some showers for the cyclers, soccer players or runners, and a well air-conditioned machine room that we haven’t fully taken advantage yet. Here are a few photos:

ForgeRock France office buildingInside office
ForgeRock France Office meeting room

We’re still in the progress of decorating the office, adding a more relaxed and friendly atmosphere, with certainly some “Rock attitude”.

If you’re in the neighborhood or you plan to pay us a visit, here’s the google map to come:


Don’t hesitate to drop by, we have coffee and may be more, especially if you are a developer with a passion for code and Java.

Finally, I’d like to have a special thank Mancala Networks and its CEO Marc Rozier for having hosting us for the last year, as we were building the team.

Mexico, Mexiiiiico !

Ludo2 Comments

I’m just back from a week of business trip to Mexico City. This was my first time in Mexico and I’ve heard all the rumors of it being a very dangerous city. I must say that I’ve seen a very very big city, vibrant, busy, with a lot of car trafic, but at no point I had any fear of being robbed or molested.

Two things have marked me during my stay. First, the city is very green. There are lots of trees, plants, flowers everywhere. All main avenues are borded by trees. It’s like mother nature is trying to tell us that she still exists despite the concrete and buildings.

Trees in AvenuesTree in flower

The other thing is that at any time of the day or the night, there are people in the street, trying to earn a little bit of money, selling water, tissues or balloons.

Globero


The food was amazing. I enjoyed tacos, fresh fruits, some argentinian bife, jalapeños… Spicy, but not “mucho picante”. As well as beers like Victoria, Bohemia, Dox Equis, Modelo… And tequila of course !

Other photos from my trip are on Google+

By the way, we did work this week in Mexico.

Below is a photo of the screen as we’ve finished importing the customers’ data in OpenDJ (the data includes a few hundreds of groups, each averaging 40 000 members). I like this kind of performance number ! And I will probably say more about the hardware and settings to achieve that in a future post.

I shall say a big thank you to our partner in Mexico and Latin America : NoLogin. They’ve made everything to make my stay safe and comfortable, including with jalapeños and tequila !

I hope the few companies I visited will turn into customers. I’d like to come back again in Mexico. These 5 days have just gone to0 fast. And I’ve just started to get into lutta libre 😉

Mexican Wrestler

Tab sweep, Easter edition, and upcoming events

LudoLeave a comment
cc by http://www.flickr.com/photos/noukorama/

Articles and links

Action Identity has posted a couple of articles about ForgeRock products:

Our friends at ProfiQ have posted an article describing how to use OpenDJ with Red-Hat Certificate System.

While talking about using OpenDJ with LDAP enabled applications, we try to maintain a page on OpenDJ documentation wiki with different tutorials on how to configure OpenDJ client applications.

Upcoming Events

ForgeRock will be present at the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC), April 17-20 in Munich.

We will also be participating to Devoxx France, April 18 to 20 in Paris. I will be co-speaking on Thursday 19, 7pm about Open Source in France, and will be available for individual meetings from Thursday morning to Friday end of afternoon. So, if you want to discuss about ForgeRock products or job opportunities, send me a mail, or leave a comment.

Open positions at ForgeRock

LudoLeave a comment

In the Grenoble officeDo you want to work with open source projects, build highly scalable identity middleware products, enjoy an international environment in a fast growing company and have fun ?

Check out our open positions.

We are seeking for a number of highly motivated and skilled software professionals to grow our engineering team, in Development, Quality and Technical writing. Our engineering teams are based in the Bay Area and Portland (USA), Bristol (UK) and Grenoble (France). We also have positions opened in Support, Sales, Account Management and Business Development.

View of Grenoble

A view of Grenoble, France. (c) January 2012, Ludovic Poitou.

Tab Sweep March 20, 2012

LudoLeave a comment

Few articles posted on the web recently regarding ForgeRock and our products:

Rocking @ForgeRock !

LudoLeave a comment

I’m a great fan of @gapingvoid, and if you haven’t done it yet, I’d recommend you read his books.

Most of the times, his cartoons are hitting so right on that you’d want to believe they’ve been made specially for you. Like this one:

A @GapingVoid cartoon

blogs.sun.com/Ludo : 404 !

Ludo1 Comment

It looks like Oracle has put another dent in Sun blogging platform. First, when they moved blogs.sun.com content to Oracle’s platform, they got rid of my blog design, breaking some of the layout, but more importantly removing the Creative Common license notice that I had explicitly used.

A few days ago, someone asked me if Oracle thought that my 6 years of blogging at Sun were not worth the storage, as he hit a 404 while trying to access my blog at blogs.sun.com/Ludo/. I checked, and it appears Oracle has made some changes and the redirection is broken. The blog and posts are still on Oracle platform, and you may search for them.

But when I moved out of Oracle, I had archived and restored all of my posts here at ludpoitou.wordpress.com. You can search through it, or use the Calendar to go back in time and retrieve those old posts (some of which still have value for anyone who has some interest in LDAP).

Time to update the old bookmarks ?!

Productive meetings !

LudoLeave a comment

Last week, I’ve spent 3 days in meetings in a remote location in UK. We had our product management get together event, reviewing our product strategy and plans. These meetings have been long, intense, lively and highly productive.

One of the reason for being productive, and also a major reason for me to have seemed to disappear from the surface of the earth, was that we were in a location with almost no network connectivity. No Internet, no wifi, and barely enough telephone bandwidth to check email status for the few lucky to have roaming option. Even mobile phone connectivity was random depending on the room in which we were.

But the place was great, we had plenty of space, some distractions [1] , some of which we kept until the very end of the meetings [2] and we enjoyed the master cooking of our VP [3].

[1] 

[2] 

[3] 

Of couse it did help that there was no way we could have escaped : 

The outcome of the meetings is a huge task list, which does include more blogging. And it’s easier with a network access !

Big news for ForgeRock today…

LudoLeave a comment

I’m sure most of you have seen this already… I’m posting it here for posterity !

ForgeRock secures $7M in a series A funding from Accel Partners

Let’s pop up the volume now !!!

 

Happy New Year 2012 !

Ludo3 Comments

2011 is gone and we’re back to work. Welcome in 2012. We ended the year beautifully and we’re hoping the new one is starting the same way. So far the signs are good.

On behalf of ForgeRock and more specifically ForgeRock Grenoble Engineering Center, I’d like to wish you a very Happy New Year ! May the year be even better than last one…

Hot balloon over lake with Mont Blanc in the back.

Seasons Greetings…

LudoLeave a comment

Xmas picture
2011 has been an amazing year for me and ForgeRock. I’m so thankful to ForgeRock for offering me the opportunity build a strong engineering team in Grenoble, and to Matthew, Gary and Mark for taking on brilliantly the lead on so many fronts. OpenDJ is a very strong product, successfully deployed in production at many customers. Matthew is driving excellence in the project development and there’s been more contributions to the project in the last 6 months than in the 4 years of the life of OpenDS. The quality of all ForgeRock products is improving under Gary’s leadership. And the documentation is thickening under Mark’s pen.
I’m looking forward to the new year as we will, with no doubt, continue to thrive and have fun. And we will grow our engineering team worldwide and more specifically in Grenoble.

But now it is time for some vacation and quality time with the family. So I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012. May peace, love and prosperity follow you always.

Upcoming events

Ludo3 Comments

I’ve been pretty busy at ForgeRock and haven’t found much time to post here. I’ll try to improve in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, I’d like to share a number of events in which I’m participating:

October 10, 11. LDAPCon in Heidelberg, Germany. I have a couple of presentations on the first day, and will be around until the end of the conference. If you want to meet and discuss, drop me a note.

October 26, 27, 28. fOSSA in Lyon, France. I will be attending the 3 days of the conference, presenting on Thursday 27th in the Development track. FOSSa is a free conference, that focuses on open source communities and projects, without any marketing spin. Register now.

November 8th, OpenIDM Summit in Darmstadt, Germany. I won’t be able to attend that summit, but it’s a great opportunity to learn more about ForgeRock open source Identity Management solutions.  Registration is already open, don’t wait !

We’re also working on a one day broader ForgeRock I3 Open Platform event, some time late November. I’ll let you know when it’s finalized, but I will be presenting OpenDJ along with the other ForgeRock product managers.

I hope to see you soon, here or there.

What’s up ? Doc !

Ludo1 Comment

It’s been a few very busy weeks and I haven’t found the time to properly introduce a new member of the ForgeRock Grenoble Engineering Center : Mark Craig.

After Matthew who joined us as Architect for OpenDJ, Gary who is covering Quality Assurance for our products, Mark Craig has joined us on the 1st day of April to cover a very important part of any real Product : the documentation.

Mark comes from Sun Microsystems (and a few months at Oracle) where he has played different roles, from technical writer, to manager for all technical writers in the Identity Management BU, to managing the Directory Integration Team responsible for customer interactions and audits, performance benchmarks and assisting POCs. At ForgeRock, Mark goes back to his roots and things he enjoys and excels in: writing.

You can read Mark’s prose on his new blog (Margin Notes 2.0), OpenDJ blog or already on ForgeRock documentation wiki.