Archive for the 'Lotusphere2009' Category

Lotusphere ended with a remarkable Closing Session. I have seen just one other guest speaker on my 11 Lotuspheres that fascinated the crowd like Benjamin Zander this afternoon. Like Patrick Stewart a few years ago people were really touched when Benjamin Zander spoke and sang with us – and made 3.000 Lotusphere attendees sing „Freude, schöner Götterfunken“, most of them not speaking one word of german. He is a fantastic speaker and motivator. Lots of things he said will be on my mind traveling now to the gulf coast.

Lotusphere was great. Still have to think about what the things coming up will mean to me. But now to something completly different…

Wow, thats cold. Can´t remember temperatures below 0 Celsius at Lotusphere. But thats not the only thing that is different this year.

No customer meetings, no partner meetings. I am out of business. Not that bad at all. Can see all whats happening here from a different and much more relaxed perspective. No need to turn the stuff I learned into money immediatly.

Twitter. The use of Twitter has become essentially for me. Can´t believe it, because I was so sceptical about microblogging. But Twitter is THE source of whats going on at Lotusphere. I am not sure if really someone outside the Lotus community here reads Live Blogging streams from one of the sessions, but to stay up to date its perfect. When I look around on Laptops nearly everybody checks Twitter streams all the time.

Content: No big bang at the Opening Session. But a continuous information flow all over the week. I think much better than the years before. I liked the smaller keynotes. The Unified Communication & Collaboration keynote was the best I have attended. The only disappointment was the Social Software keynote. I don´t like that style. But some people find it funny. For me it was naiv.

Products. Lotus portfolio has grown too much. To many separate products. They should consolidate the product set. Just remember Allan´s great thoughts on that topic. But: I am happy to see many products becoming more and more mature. Most of the things that were promised at Lotusphere 2008 are now there and usable. Huge improvements for the social software product portfolio Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. Hiuge improvements in the UCC product portfolio: All the things coming up in Sametime 8.5 will help IBM gaining new market share and deliver what they promised. Zero footprint web clients, no plugins, streamlined UI, many usefull new functions – Sametime Meeting Center is now a real competitor to WebEx & Co. Foundations: Hmm, still no idea when people in Germany will hop on that train. My thoughts on LotusLive remain unchanged. Necessary step, looks great, lets see how it evolves. Will test it in a real world situation this year.

Finally living in my Mac world without Lotus Notes as an one man company is still possible, even at Lotusphere. But learning from David Allen using Lotus Notes as his GTD tool makes me feel I will use Lotus Notes in the future again. Until then it would be great if Marco will release ebf.caldav server plugin to get what IBM should deliver: a calendar feed from Domino sources to use iCal even with an Domino backend.

See you at Universal Studios tonight.

There seem to be two main things people talk about in the hallways about this years news: XPages and „Click to Cloud“. While last years effort to meet the new requirements of a new IT world have been halfhearted this years announcments showed that IBM is serious about the cloud and the challenge to meet Google in the messaging and collaboration business.
With the announcement of the first partnerships (LinkedIn, Skype, Salesforce.com) and the acquisition of Outblaze there suddenly is momentum in the business. I think, this is an important and necessary move looking at the market where lots of companies currently testing and implementing services in the cloud. IBM thinks of these services as an extension of the existing corporate infrastructure to the cloud – so Business Partners and IT staff should not be scared.

But I think they should. The business model is changing fast. And extending an existing infrastructure seemless to cloud services does means its easy to move these services to the cloud too. The next step is only a small step if the first step works. So customers will move completly services like Mail, Instant Messaging, etc. to the cloud – and to the IBM datacenter.

What does that mean for Business Partners? Google has build a whole ecosystem around its cloud services. IBM has not. The Lotus partner ecosystem is mainly a Notes developer / admin ecosystem. They have to change and ask themselves how they can add value to LotusLive. With open standards, customers will not need anymore a „classic“ Notes app to add an CRM service or a DMS service. Suddenly, the closed Lotus shop is an open shop. For many companies that provide today tools for managing Domino servers to its customers there will be no market if the servers are in IBMs cloud.

Again: From an IBM perspective this is a necessary step. IBM is focusing on solutions for its customers and not discussing the underlying technology. It does not matter for IBM if the Meeting Center technology behind LotusLive is Lotus Sametime or the scalable architecture the acquired to build the Unyte server. It even does not matter if Mail services are Notes based or Outblaze based – as long as it has one look and feel and is robust, open, scaleable.

I am very curious where this community will stand in two or three years and which will be the services business partners will provide.

Did not know that front row seating for Bloggers would be THAT special when I read the invitation letter.

Photo by Volker.

Just saw this list for the first time on Ed Brill´s INV102 slides:

Lotus Notes 8.5:
1. Drag/Drop of Text within rich text editor
2. Offline support for Activities
3. Choose from multiple addresses for a person in typeahead
4. Ability to make your own views look like the PIM views
5. Forward contact as vCard (along with better import/export)
6. iNotes improvements (e.g. calendar support in Lite mode)
7. Roaming user available with new file-based option
8. Support of ID Vault and Single Logon
9. Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Ubuntu Linux support
10. Calendar federation

Lotus Domino 8.5
1. Expanded platform choices
2. Increased reliability
3. Dynamic group policies
4. Improved router scalability
5. I/O use reduction
6. Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT)
7. Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE)
8. XPages
9. ID Vault
10. Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)

Ed provided some interesting additional numbers. Will add them later.

I will not try to compete with all the Live Blogger & Twitters this morning. So here is simply my Twitter stream. I will blog about all my impressions this afternoon.

For now just follow #LS09 or @Lotusphere to see all the updates this morning. Got to go now to find my „bloggers´s den“ sign for special seating in the front rows ;-).

Last years trip to Orlando was worse. I had to spent the night in New York due to late arrival. This year I was on time – but I almost lost my sense of hearing. Eight hours of continuos chatting, crying and ranting on my right side.
I thought I had a reservation for a window seat, but when I arrived it was middle seat. Two russians on my right side, and the girl I had noticed before in the check in area in Frankfurt. Well, I love children, but I can not deny having thought about radical methods to stop that child from making me crazy. Her mother did not care. And her father was sitting very far away, different row, window seat of course. Probably my window seat.

So after 21 hours of travelling I arrived finally 2:00 a.m. Today I am not allowed to visit Business Development Day. I am press this year. So I will go shopping with Volker now and meet everybody tonight at the Welcome reception.