Lotusphere Recap: Wednesday – We Interrupt this Program, TWIL, and The Hulk

Wednesday morning and once again I made it to a 7 AM BOF, this time it was Customizing Lotus Connections, facilitated by Clayton Coleman, and Mac Guidera.  Another impressive turnout for a 7 AM session, and more good conversation about Lotus Connections.

Next up was the final keynote session of Lotusphere 2011 “The Future of Social Business” (live blog of The Future of Social Business). This was a terrific session, especially Dr. Andrew McAfee’s portion.  If you missed it, it’s worht taking a few minutes to watch, Dr. McAfee comes on about 2 minutes in.

Watch live streaming video from ibmsoftware at livestream.com

Following the keynote, in another Lotusphere first for me it was time to go “off campus” for a bit, I never knew before that IBM has a briefing center in Epcot Center, where I had the pleasure of spending a few hours on Wednesday.  The briefing center is about 10 feet from here

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They also have a “Smarter Data Center” with used to run some of their exhibits in Epcot which I was taken on a tour of during the visit.

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Back “on campus” where I finally found some time to spend in the Meet the Developers, and User Experience labs, as well as finally making it down to the Vendor Showcase before they all packed up and went home.

Before heading off to Universal there was time for another Birds of Feather session, this one facilitated by Luis Benitez, the topic was Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field.  The session had a standing room only crowd (remember this was an hour before Universal), and was a terrific discussion on deploying Lotus Connections and driving adoption.  Sacha Chua was in attendance and sketched notes which you can see here.

At the same time as this session the live edition of This Week in Lotus was recording a few doors down the hall, I managed to get in there for a few minutes as well, and somehow wound up on the panel for the last few minutes as well.  If you haven’t yet listen to this episode, and others, Stuart and Darren somehow find the time to deliver a new episode every Friday, give them a listen.

Finally time to head off to Universal Islands of Adventure for some fun, The Incredible Hulk roller coaster is one of my favorites (though 4 times was a bit much), and while I am not a Harry Potter fan I did make it on to the Forbidden Journey ride, great ride, but I prefer the plain old roller coasters not the ones that include all the 3D effects.

Thanks to GBS for adding a little extra fun to the evening, I was a finalist in their $10,000 drawing, though I didn’t win.

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Back to Disney, another fun evening at Kimonos, and a precious few hours of sleep before the final day of Lotusphere 2011.

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