Lotusphere Day 2 Wrap Up

I should really be sleeping not blogging, so I will be brief. Started the day with the OGS, and I think the blogger program participants definitely had a unique seating arrangement at the OGS.  The chairs were comfortable, but not really the ideal sitting position for two plus hours of live blogging.  My live stream of the OGS is here, I have not really sorted back through it yet, but I will clean it up a bit at some point, and blog my overall impressions. Exceeding my total for all of last year I managed to attend two sessions today INV 103 Social Software Deep Dive ID304 What’s Next with IBM Lotus Connections In addition to the Connections sessions I spent an hour with members of the Connections UX team going over plans for 2.5 and providing them with some feedback.  That was followed by a get together of the GCPC one of the two times a year we meet face to face. Next up was the Blogger Exec Q&A, followed by a quick stop at the North America customer reception, the Blogger/Press Reception, and finally Jamfest Another busy day tomorrow, time to get a little sleep. For those of you reading this that are at  Lotusphere please do me a favor and if you happen to see Ted Stanton please tell him I have been trying to find him for the last two days, but have yet to spot him anywhere.

ID304 What's Next with IBM Lotus Connections

Suzanne Minassian and Scott Prager gave a more in depth look at what’s new in Lotus Connections 2.5.  After some introductory slides on Social Software and the services that make up Lotus Connections they introduced the focus areas for Connections 2.5 – New Wiki Capability – Enhancements to Communities – Improved Discussion Forum, Widget components to incorporate Blogs, Activities, and File sharing with in a communiy – Redesigned home page – streamlined news feed similar to Facebook or Linked in with user control over content – Profiles Enhancements – Microblogging, Wall Postings – Mobile Access – Blackberry Clients and iPhone access as seen at the OGS this moring The most common question I heard today about Connections 2.5 is “When can I get my hands on it”

Blogger Q and A with Lotus Execs

This evening the participants in the Blogger Program had the opportunity to participate in a Q & A with the Lotus Executive Team.  I did actually manage to blog the Q&A for about the first 20 minutes, then the conversation took off, and I seem to have stopped typing.  Fortunately Chris Miller was typing and recording away so I will let you read his version of the Q&A and give you some of my impressions from the session. The IBM folks who organized this event had one idea of how it should be run, unlike in years past where the panel sat up front and took one question at a time from the bloggers, (while this is the first year for the blogger program there have been previous blogger Q&A sessions with the execs) they were going to have the execs at tables and let people go from table to table and talk one on one.  Well the bloggers (as far as I can tell) unanimously expressed that we preferred the old format so everyone can hear all the Q&A.   Well just like that Tables and Chairs were moved and the format was changed.  Here is the assembled panel. IMG_2121 This is the second time I have been fortunate to be able to attend this session, and while it seems so obvious that it is a good idea for the execs to take some time out of what is a very busy day for everyone to have an open  dialogue with a group of bloggers, the fact that they have done this consistently for a few years now really shows that the value they place on the  Lotus Blogger community to maintain this dialogue which really only begins at Lotusphere it carry’s on through the year in various ways.  

Blogger Q&A With Execs

Bloggers change the plan! Bob Picciano Jeff Schick Bruce Morse Sean Poulley Doug Heintzman Kristen Lauria Allistair Rennie Kevin Cavanaugh Bruce Elgort, complemented the video from the OGS.  Kristen – been filming customer stories since Sunday to be on You Tube, and a media plan around it. Will it be in Europe too? 14 customers from Germany and the plan is to replicate the setup to tape customers at LCTY Events. Jack Dausman Marketing been impressive, Skype, Linked In, MacWorld… will we see more of this throughout the year, Sean Poulley – many more partnerships in the pipeline.  Meeting expectations well, announcing and delivering not just creating pressware. Is the economy part of why customers are coming to you now? Companies are looking to cut costs, and disparate pieces are being put together to optimize people.   Bruce morse, for 12 months again significant portion of new ST customers are not Notes Shops. Nathan, at this event last year engineers talked about being blocked from releases by legal, you were suprosed, twice this year you made cracks about legal.  Allistair…. My sister is a lawyer.I remember the convesation, we seem to be making progress in that area, and legal is adapting to the dev cycle. Legal is getting better at an Agile clearance process. John Head – came with a checklist of things he wants to hear…. how are you going to compete in 2009 with Sharepoint, he sees alot of sharepoint integration with Office etc… not neccasarily doing well, but doing cheap. Jeff Shick…. Deep Breath… Substaintial improvrements in Qucikr capability, and ECM..   Pricing aggressively, while not giving away. Kevin…. xPages plays heavily in this space.  Allistair we know we have to do better in that space. Building towards common components in Qucikr and Connections, Open NTF…. way of getting code out their faster trying to get licensing changes in a way that large organizations can adopt Duffbert….. HAving to implement Sharepoint……needs the cover. Kevin, we didn’t wait for the spoiler last week, we got out there Kevin… we consciously….. sometimes you do things stupid consciously re foundatons and lack of banch office solution which will be in 1.1 foundation

INV 103 Social Software Deep Dive

Chris Lamb and Peter Van de Graf presenting an overview of the Social Software strategy, followed by a preview of Profiles in 2.5 Showing more of what we saw in the OGS this morning with Profiles 2.5 including Micro Blogging and a personal Wall for people to leave comments. Showing Integration of Connections with SuccessFactors for increased productivity in people and career management iEnterprise integration of their Notes CRM application with Profiles allowing a sales force to search profiles from the Notes application including alerts for profile changes. Atlas for visualization of the social structure on an individual and organizational level Peter Van de Graf talking about information overload with 900 exabytes of data or enough books to stack from the earth to pluto and back or something like that (or one weekends read for duffbert) Now on to Personal File Sharing & Document Management , showing more screens again building on what we saw at the OGS this morning, ability to rate and comment on documents as well as selective sharing.  Personal File Sharing is based on IBM internal implementation. Wiki, shipping in Connections 2.5 and subsequent versions of Quickr. (yes finally a REAL Wiki in Quickr!) Connections 2.5 looks good I can’t wait to get my hands on some Beta code to start testing. Off to Lunch and some meetings….. more later today.

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) IMG_1924 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… IMG_1941 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 IMG_2020 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

Blogger Seats at the OGS

IMG_1894 IMG_1898

Lotusphere Day 1 (Jumpstart Day) Wrap Up

Wrapping up Sunday here at Lotusphere, and getting some much needed sleep to rest up for the OGS tomorrow morning.  On Jumpstart day I always try to attend a session or two that is out of the bounds of what I normally do, it is a good opportunity to learn something new.  To accomplish this I started the day with two dev sessions JMP201 AJAX and JSON, followed by JMP203 JMP203 Getting to Know XPages.   After lunch it was off to the show floor to watch the finalists present their solutions to the judges.   Before heading out to the beach for the welcome receptions a stop at The Turtles Guide to Lotusphere. Welcome reception, followed by some socializing at Kimono’s and the Dolphin Rotunda.  I really think people need their Twitter ID’s on their badges, but it is great to meet people and put faces to names and twitter id’s. Lots of people using IdoCheckin, making it a little easier to find people or connect with people you know, but don’t know in person. CIMG0778 Time for some sleep now, will be Live Blogging the OGS right here starting at 8:15 tomorrow morning.

Live from the Turtles guide to lotusphere (updated with photos)

Live blogged on the iPhone (Now cleaned up with Pictures Kudos to IBM for letting The Turtle present this fun filled session, that contained both lots of humor, and well good advice for surviving Lotusphere.  I know there is still a lot of great stuff to come this week, but nothing quite like this session will be repeated any time this week. CIMG0794 No food fight, William Shatner not showing up for a food fight (I don’t know this was promised in the abstract!) Your backpack at the parties don’t do it! It’s a marathon Don’t burn out on Sunday night Party like it’s 1699? (throws more candy into the crowd) What to Look for this week Mashups Connections Foundations Xpages Anything else that ends in the letter S Bluehouse Anything your boss told you to look for Ideajam Social Events ” the parties find me they won’t find you because you are young and you suck” Weather forecast for the week ( pours a cup of water on his head to remind us about the animal kingdom party 2 years ago) Special guests Bruce Elgort up ok stage talking about ideajam CIMG0798 Matt White on xpages CIMG0800 Libby Ingrassia talking about the Nerd Girls and Yoga CIMG0802 Bill Buchan words can’t capture this segment (but I think I saw someone taking some video)  Bills advice for technology to focus on this year – liposuction CIMG0803 Get in to the labs and make sure to attend ask the developers Why are the cows on the podium – Disney staff views us as catle Turtle rick rolls the crowd CIMG0806 Thats all folks off to the beach for the Welcome Reception

Lotus Awards Judging on the show floor

This afternoon the group participating in the Lotusphere Blogger program has the opportunity to visit the show floor as the two groups of judges viewed presentations and demos from finalists for the Lotus CTO Award, and the Lotusphere best in Showcase Award. Lots of excellent candidates in both categories, and the judges had lots of questions for each vendor.  It was also a chance to take a unique look at the show floor as many vendors were still setting up their pedestals to get ready for tomorrow. Here is a shot of Bruce Elgort presenting ideajam to the Judges IMG_1885