She was a showgirl (or LoLA Day 1)

The first full day of LoLA is finally wrapping up for me at almost midnight.  Today’s schedule had one session for all attendees in what felt like an all day Opening General Session, Bob Picciano started the day off with an overview of the Lotus Strategy, followed by Alistair Rennie delivering a report card on the status of Lotusphere 2008 announcements (since LS08 ND 8.0.1, ND 8.0.2, Quickr 8.1, Connections 2.0, Lotus Mashups, Symphony,  Sametime 8.0,and Sametime Advanced have all shipped, with Samtime Unified Telephony, Atlantic, and ND 8.5 still to come before LS09).  Charlie Hill then followed with a glimpse in to the future of the products.  While many of the concepts and ideas he showed might not be in products for a year or so, one thing clear is that Lotus is hearing the message loud and clear that across the portfolio products must integrate seamlessly, and provide a consistent experience for the end user. Following the overall strategy each product group presented their strategy and roadmap, each segment was followed by a brief customer interview conducted live, to get a customers perspective on how the products are used. As Ed and Mary Beth twittered, I was on stage interviewed in the Social Software segment.  It was a good opportunity to highlight for other customers some of the successes that I have had with Lotus products, as well as provide the Lotus team with some very candid feedback on where improvement is needed. The day wrapped up with guest speaker Chris Gardner whose story was told in the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness, he delivered a very entertaining, and compelling story about his life, family, and how his life was turned in to a movie, I definitely need to check out the book or movie. Tomorrow the day begins with a town hall style meeting to allow the audience to comment or ask questions on today’s presentations, followed by breakout sessions for the remainder of the day (so now would probably be a good time for me to figure out which sessions I am attending tomorrow. More from LoLA tomorrow.