Using Activities to plan your Lotusphere Session

This past week has been spend finalizing Lotusphere presentations which are due in today.  Chris Whisonant and I are presenting SHOW302 Getting Your Feet Wet with IBM Lotus Connections.  Our session will provide detailed steps to install and configure Lotus Connections, which we will be doing live on stage. Preparing the presentation itself was no small feat, we had the process broken down in to nineteen sections which we split up between us, and then we both checked each others work for accuracy, spelling, etc.   Each section on average went through three revisions, some went to as many as five revisions.  When it was all finally done we had to assemble it all together into one master to submit. Needless to say to do all this and not drive ourselves or each other crazy we needed the right tool to manage all this enter Lotus Connections and Activities, (actually we used Activities not just to plan our session, but to submit our abstract and get our session). Here is a screenshot of our Activity To give you a better idea how we used it, here is a breakdown of what was in each section Abstract – the final version of our abstract as a reference to make sure we delivered what we pitched Presentation – this section contained all of the drafts we submitted as well as the final version Presentation Sections – this is where we gather the various sections, and comments, and tracked corrections that needed to be made, without giving away all of our secrets here is a screenshot of part of this section Random Thoughts – this was a section to gather ideas that did not necessarily fit a section of the presentation, as well as ideas we need to come back to later on for the actual delivery of the presentation e-mails – using the Activities sidebar plugin in Notes 8 we dragged and dropped all the e-mail related to our session in to the activity, so as we were working we had everything in one place, here is a screenshot from the Notes client Useful Information – in this section we kept Conference numbers, Links to Unyte meeting rooms, etc so when we had to work together we had all that information in one place. Of course we also used To Dos in the Activity to keep ourselves on Schedule, and in Notes 8.5 you can easily incorporate Activities To Dos into your Notes calendar If you have not yet tried Activities and you want to head over to Bleedyellow and give them a try, and of course come see our session at Lotusphere and learn how to build your own Lotus Connections environment.