I've been blessed just this past month with a half dozen or so existing apps to add to our supported portfolio. I'd love to hear ideas about how best to efficiently deal with such inheritance!

I have some applications that we need to upgrade, I understand what they do but it would be great to have a method to see what they do and plan on improvements.

Done right, this could be an interesting session.

Great session idea Stephan. Having inherited and overhauled more apps than I've built I can well appreciate what a daunting task it can be to make sense of often very poorly written code. My own approach depends entirely on tools like Teamstudio and Ytria, without which I would probably have switched careers long ago.

If I were to give a talk on this subject I could never avoid talking about these tools, which is problematic given how much we are discouraged from mentioning vendor products during sessions. So my question is will you be mentioning such tools anyway or do you have other non-vendor tools with the same or greater usefulness?

As to whether Stephan finds that filling 50 minutes of content on this topic requires inclusion of 3rd party tools vs those of his own, clearly that's up to him.

Personally, I think it's fine to mention free vendor product features. I don't think Teamstudio tools include any free features, but Ytria's ScanEZ and MartinScott NoteMan both have very useful free features that one would use for analysis purposes. I have routinely mentioned relevant free features of NoteMan in some of my previous Advisor, View, and Lotusphere sessions, and I've received only positive feedback.

@Jamie - Thanks for chiming in. I have no doubt Stephan can fill the time without covering premium features of vendor tools, but my question is this:

"If you avoid talking about the best approaches to a problem because those approaches involve buying additional tools, is that fair to the audience?"

This is of course a totally separate question from the one about fairness to competing tool vendors. Yes I happen to use Teamstudio and Ytria tools, but I do still point out the MartinScott NoteMan toolset as another great option very similar to Ytria's ScanEZ (even though Ytria have sponsored me for ILUG, btw). There is also the NotesHound toolset, which is arguably the best overall value as tools go, although the actual tools do mostly different things than the others.

Putting myself in the audience's shoes, I would want to know exactly how Stephan approaches this problem, regardless of whether his approach involves commercial tools. Sure I'd like to know about similar tools to the ones he might use (commercial OR free), but I'm more interested in how an expert on the topic does what he does. If as in my case a presenter has a "conflict of interest" (however small) in the form of ties to a specific vendor, full disclosure is in order, but that would not diminish the value of the content to the audience as long as the session didn't devolve into a sales pitch.

**** A Good Compromise? ****

If anything, I think ALL tool vendors would benefit simply by getting the word out that these various tools exist and can save TONS of time. If you provided a comprehensive list of tools (with booth numbers) to the audience, even if you didn't cover all of them in any detail, that might be a be the fairest and most beneficial approach.

As for just a list, I attempted a "comprehensive list of tools (with booth numbers)" which I handed out at LS05 and 06, but it was a ton of work. And many vendors have products in different categories. There was a website that was essentially an online catalog, with all vendors filling out their own tool profiles. That's really the way to democratize it and give equitable visibility to all who want to participate.

Putting 3rd party vendor tools into a session at IBM's own conference (to which all these vendors are partners) is perhaps not the most equitable channel for that info, because it's too easy to omit or misrepresent something if one is not intimately and completely familiar with it. Maybe just an appendix of tools that audience may find useful, without spending time on them, would be more appropriate. If this topic is not coverable without extensive comparisons of such tools, then perhaps it's not a good session topic.

That said, it's been done before. Francie Tanner did one on admin tools at Admin2008 in Boston, with the same goal of spreading tool awareness. But that was a 3rd party conference, not an official IBM event.