Live from the Lotusphere 2009 OGS

Live Blog, will fix it up later. OGS room is filling up Blueman group is taking the stage (The real Blueman group not Carl) Bob Picciano just took the stage to kick off the OGS, turns out thatt his wife is a Lotus Notes developer. 16 Quarters of substantial growth through Q3 2008, 12, 236 new customers since ND8 was released. And….. the guest speaker is………   Academy nominated actor…… Writer, awad winning musician Dan Akroyd who gave a nice humorous look to how collaboration is what it takes to make films, movies etc… Bob Picciano is back on stage now, talking about the Lotus Community, and customer attendance is up 2% over last year. Bob talking about the theme of Lotusphere being Resonance (and ended up with a shattering window) Bob is now introducing 3 customers who will participate in the OGS Jean Michael Ares, CIO of Coca-Cola is now on stage, (wondering is the Disney Bots will try to drag him off the stage).  Talking about implementation of SAP, Notes 8, Connections, Sametime, and integration of SAP and Notes with project “Atlantic”.  Ease of use, same performance in the office and Mobile.   Next up is NetJets a company that specializes in Fractional Jet Ownership John Dunning CP  Planning and Architecture is talking about the challenges of managing a fleet of 800 planes in 173 countires and all the daily challenges of weather, mechanical problems, and how collaboration and the ability to share information solve these problems. Netjets uses Websphere portal, Connections, Quickr, Omnifind to create a solution to manage their fleet and all the logistics. HSBC is the third customer, exploring social software to differentiate themselves from their competition.  Ian Haynes, Head of Staff, Collaboration Infrastructure on the stage.  300,000 employees in 9500 locations around the world who need to work together to provide customer service. Notes, Sametime, Websphere Portal and Connections are the key components of their collaboration strategy. Bob Picciano back on stage now, talking about optimizing mobile platforms to meet the demand for informatuon on the go..  Jim Balsillie Co-CE Research in Motion introduced on stage. 10 years ago today first Blackberry launched Officially announced support for Blackberry on Domino 8.5 10 days after 8.5 shipped RIM providing Mobile solutions for Sametime and Connections Blackberry’ phones are the #1,3, & 5 most popular smartphones in the US Four new blackberry clients for Lotus Solutions New Connections client supporting ALL of the Connections features. New Sametime client supporting file transfer, multimedia, public groups Symphony and Quickr support for Blackberry view and edit Symphony Doc Support for Domino Designer with Xpage to make it easy to write applications once and have them supported on Blackberry. Bob is moving on to hosted services talking about Bluehouse introduced last year, not branded LotusLive.   Allistair Rennie now taking the stage, Notes celebrating it’s 20th Birthday in 2009 Kevin Cavanaugh now on stage, one way Notes is not like your average 20 year old, it can save you money.  3,000,000 plus Symphony downloads replacing Office Licenses.  Not just free, free and innovative. SAP Atlantic now officially named Alloy and Ron Sebastian is on stage so looks like a demo coming up. Working on a LinkedIn sidebar plugin to integrate Notes Contacts and LinkedIn Forward Contacts as vCards Drag and drop sametime groups to e-mail addressing. Ron is now demoing federated calendars in Notes 8.5 with off line access.  PlanetLotus gets a mention! Suzannes is now demoing how the features Ron demoed appear in iNotes as well.  Quickr Connector integration now available in iNotes as well. Demo of Domino Designer 8.5 and Xpages. Demoing one application in Browser and on Blackberry. Ron is now demoing Symphony support on Blackberry (in BES 5.0) Quickr with Xpage support?  More on that later apprently IBM and OpenNTF working together to release open source code samples and templates. Kevin now talking about appliances.  Foundations will soon ship a release supporting running VM. Bruce Morse now taking the stage for UCC, talking about the UC strategy centered around the Sametime Platform. Sametime Unified  Telephony and  Sametime 8.5 to ship this year. Ron and Suzanne demoing Sametime Unified telephony, integration of different PBX vendors and systems, and integration of a softphone in to Sametime.  Rules to send your calls where you want them, and use a single number to be reached regardless of your location. Showing call control and ability to seamlessly transfer a call between phones on the fly. Video demo, blueman group on the other end of the video. SUT to ship mid year in beta now. Bruce back on stage introducing Sametime 8.5 (including Sametime 8.5) New architecture (WAS)  eliminates Java Applets, and is HTTP making it more firewall friendly. Ron now back on Demoing Sametime 8.5 New web client no Java Applets, as well as a Rich Client experience via a Sametime plugin. Ron working in the client while Suzanne demos the web version. Ability to have persistent meeting rooms, including content either stored in the meeting or integrated with Quickr Standard formats for meeting recording! Jeff Schick coming up on stage now to cover Social Software. Lotus Connections & Quickr the leaders in Social Software for business. Lotus Connections 2.5 shipping in Q3 Easier to deploy Easier to brand and customize Two New Serivces in COnnections 2.5 Wiki being added to Connections/Quickr Connections Integration with LinkedIn Mobile support for Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia Suzanne demoing Connections 2.5 New news feed (similar to news feeds in LinkedIn, Facebook) Microblogging on Profiles Communities – co authoring of blog entries for a community Activity integration Wiki Integration with the new Wiki Service with co-authoring of documents Improved discussion forum. Customization of communities via drag and drop of widgets Ability to post files in Communities integrated with the new file sharing service. Ron demoing new blackberry client for Connections, looks good, when can I have this? Jeff back to talk about Quickr Quickr 8.1.1 (J2EE) shipped in december with ECM integration, Ron back on to Demo Quickr 8.2 for Domino shipping in Q2 Lotus Connections integration Domino 8.5 Support Quickr Next integrate with the Connections Wiki ECM Integration for Domino Linux and Mac support Larry Bowden on stage talki
ng about portal…. where is that coffee break ( I though Ed Brill was providing waiter service for the bloggers) There is a lack of purple on the stage for the Websphere portion There is a band setup in the corner of the stage, wonder when that comes in to play? (it’s been there all morning I am just mentioning it now) Word on the street (well Twitter) is they are running a little late….. but stick around for more announcements. Allistair Rennie is back on stage now. talking about LotusLive expanding the Lotus brand out to companies of any size and introduced Sean Poulley to talk about Online Services. Bluehouse is LotusLive Engage (wonder how many times Ron goes up and down the stairs during the OGS, he is back on Stage) Ron is demoing LotusLive Engage (LotusLive.com is well ….. live) Suzanne demoing iNotes in LotusLive LotusLive can be used on it’s own or integrate with existing products.  Lotus products will contain plug-ins to connect with Lotus Live.  Ron is now demoing. Ron is demoing joining a meeting from Blackberry with slideshare. Three new partnership for LotusLive Salesfoce.com LinkedIn – integration with LinkedIn network Skype Partnership will extend Lotus Live to 400 Million people. Allistair back says we are five minutes from the best finale ever. Kristen Lauria VP Marketing coming up on stage now. Redefine the Collaboration Category Increase the impact of Lotus Collaboration give the Air Cover! Showing a Lotus Commercial lots of yellow in the commercial Working Smarter Together is the them Bob Picciano back on stage.  OGS is close to wrapping up. Band is coming on the stage as is blueman group Instant Technology Wins best Showcasw award Elguji takes the CTO Award, Congrats to Bruce, Gayle, and Matt Blueman back on Thats a wraq… OGS over more later, more later