The Premium Support Seminar was a mini Lotusphere (minus a few miles of walking each day). Over the course of 3 days I had the chance to attend numerous technical sessions, and meet a number of IBMers as well as other customers. There were a number of sessions focused on ND8 (though at this point I suppose I lost the pool on the date it would be released). There is definitely great anticipation for the Notes 8 release, most of the people I spoke to had plans to test and pilot with ND8, but wait for 8.0.1 early next year for their deployments. I had the opportunity to meet Ted Stanton and discuss Lotus Connections, I also met with some of the Connections design team and got a look at some of the concepts being considered for Connections 2.0 next year. One of the sessions I attended was Chris Pepin’s presentation on IBM’s implementation of the Lotus products at IBM, I have seen this one at Lotusphere before, but wanted to see how it was update for Sametime 7.5.1. IBM has updated the web conferencing side of their Sametime infrastructure with 7.5.1, however the chat side is still at 6.5.1 since IBM has a custom implementation with the buddy lists stored in DB2, not in a notes database. Once of the questions I am always asked when we make changes to systems is if we are running the tools the same way IBM does. Sure is hard to answer yes to that one when IBM is not running the same version they sell. The PSM Seminar is in Boston every year which makes the travel real easy. I took the Acela Express, the train takes 3.5 hours from Boston to Newark Penn Station, and you avoid the hassle of security at the airport, and only need to show for the train a few minutes before it is scheduled. Since my last few flying experiences out of Newark have been horrible, it was nice to travel without being delayed for hours.
I definately few that the move of their data stores to DB2 is a good one. From a developer’s point of view, it opens the doors to many new creative uses.