Lotus Connections Customer Community and GCPC recap

Monday was the kick off meeting of the Lotus Connections Customer Community, the community was formed by IBM to help guide the future direction of Lotus Connections, and set priorities based on customers needs.  IBM shared the current plans for Connections 2.0, I can’t go in to any real detail here, but I can say the product looks like Connections will be getting some cool new features, and have tighter integration with the other products in the Lotus Family.   It was an interesting day spent with a number of other Connections customers, all at different points in adopting and deploying Connections, Monday evening the GCPC annual face to face meeting kicked off.  Tuesday the day began with a Keynote by Alistair Rennie VP Development and technical support  and Charlie Hill IBM Distinguished engineer, The began by reviewing last years council recommendations and how they were acted on by IBM.  A good part of their presentation was similar to what was presented last week at the Lotus Collaboration Summit followed by a look ahead at the next product release cycle.  Tuesday was focused on Notes and Domino, with Rob Ingram, Russ Holden, and Mary Beth Raven giving at look at plans for 8.0.1 and 8 Next.  Much of their presentation was similar to what was covered at the  Notes/Domino software design review last week in Westord (Nathan I am no lawyer, but it would seem we can talk), though less in depth. The last session of the day was a feature prioritization session for 8.0.1 and 8 next.  Grouped with other customers we worked through 6 categories of feature and enhancement requests, move the ones important to high priority, secondary priority, and trash the ones that we considered unimportant.  The catch was we had a limit as to the number of high priorities we could select, so it was a negotiation within each group to work out the features that were important to all to see in the next release.  Hopefully we got it right and the design team can work the high priority features in to the next releases. The rest of the week will be  focused on Quickr and Sametime, and at the end of the week, the Council will present the priorities for all of the products to IBM.  Unfortunately I am not able to be there the rest of the week, but I was able to sit down with some of the Sametime and Quickr teams and discuss future direction with them as well.

One Response to Lotus Connections Customer Community and GCPC recap
  1. Tim E Brown
    September 26, 2007 | 11:00 pm

    When meeting with the Sametime crew did they mention how things were coming with the new AJAX/pure http MRC client for Sametime? No more jvm needed! Emoticon

    Tim E Brown