I was not able to make it to St. Louis for IamLUG this year, but since there is a stream available I thought I would take the opportunity to live blog the Keynote from afar. I don’t know if anyone attending live will be able to blog while the keynote is in progress as the keynote session takes place in the theater which is part of the Casino and wifi is not allowed in the casino. Last year I managed to live blog the keynote with my air card, so it is possible that someone inside has network available.
Whoever said “You get what you pay for” clearly never anticipated an event like IamLUG. Looking back on the event last week first off I can’t say enough about the job done by Chris Miller, Francie Tanner, and the rest of the IamLUG team. IamLUG ran as smoothly as any event that had the benefits of a dedicated conference organizer, while being run by people who actually organized the event as an additional responsibility to their day jobs. Then we get to the price to attend FREE! Thanks to the sponsors there was no fee to attend the conference, which included breakfast and lunch every day. Of course topping it all off was the content. Two full days of three concurrent sessions, with it being almost impossible to decide which room to be in. So here is hoping that IamLUG will repeat again in 2010, and I will be lining up early to register because I certainly expect that when registration opens it will fill up quickly. Check out the IamLUG Flickr feed for all the photos of the event, I hope to get the rest of mine uploaded there later today.
As if IamLUG wasn’t enough GSX decided to bring GSX day to America. This event held in Nice, France in the past made the IamLUG experience that much better. There were 30 attendees at GSX day, some like myself already customers of GSX, others were perspective customers, and a few just to take in a third day of excellent content while still in St. Louis. Chris Miller, Mary Beth Raven, Paul Mooney, and Eileen Fitzgerald all presented, Mary Beth wins the award for best session title with her “It’s the Server, Stupid!”. In addition to these presentations. In addition a GSX customer representing a major bank presented on their GSX implementation, which besides demoing some of the GSX monitoring tools impressive capabilities, also showed some unique ways they implemented them to manage and control their Domino environment. Thanks to the GSX folks for a great day, and for making my IamLUG experience last one extra day.
Catching up on blogging, here is the IamLUG day 2 (Tuesday) recap. Bright an early Tuesday morning I presented Connecting the dots of Lotus Connections, in a tough time slot up against Mary Beth Ravens What’s coming in Notes 8.5.1 and why session (and the early hour) it was presented to a small, but enthusiastic crowd. Following a quick meeting I managed to catch the second half of Scott Hooks session A universal use case for the business value of the Lotus collaboration suite. I rounded out the mornings session with Paul Mooneys DAOS – step by step. I should have known better then to attend a development session after lunch but I decided to take in Michael Mastersons session The Redbull fast-track for plug-in and sidebar development and while I personally don’t drink the stuff, Red Bull was served at the session. The final session of IamLUG was Rob Novaks Free American Beer! session Sure people came for the beer (and you will all be shocked to know who got the first beer) but Rob demoed a Domino application titled “MyDomino” which is a pretty impressive example of what a web application can be in Domino. This was featured at Lotusphere 2009 in the Rob and Vikotrs Great Code Giveaway session and can be downloaded here if you want to give it a try. Finally all good things must come to an end A summary of today’s GSX Day event and final thoughts on IamLUG coming up tomorrow, now it is time to finish packing and get a few hours sleep before heading home tomorrow.
Wrapping up a busy day 1 at IamLUG, and getting ready for an early start tomorrow, I present my Lotus Connections session is at 8:15 tomorrow morning. First the pictures I was missing from this mornings OGS Here is Chris Miller opening up IamLUG in case you doubted that “Booty Sweat” was actually included in the OGS, well here is a screenshot Kevin Cavanaugh delivering the keynote One of the concepts shown for the upcoming “Lotus Knows” marketing campaign Following the OGS I attended “What’s ID Vault and why you can’t live without it” presented by Gab Davis if you are even thinking about deploying the ID vault this presentation is the place to start showing you how to create and manage your vaults, and make your clients work with the vault. After lunch I was off to ” Managing your Infrastructure and managers” presented by Paul Mooney and Eileen Fitzgerald, I am sure I missed the real point of the session but all I walked out of there with was the feeling that Paul is somehow obsessed with printers and printing, really go ahead an ask him about it next time you see him. The session portion of the day wrapped up with Ed Brills session titled “IBM Lotus Messaging and Collaboration strategy”. The highlights from Ed’s talk were – Notes 8.5.1 targeted to ship around October 7th – The story around the 8.5.1 release will be application development – Notes 9 themes – improved search, group calendar, RSS subscriptions in the inbox, unified task management – Symphony 2.0 to ship in the first half fo 2010 – Traveler on Linux is being looked at (not committed to a particular version yet) The evening activity was a reception for all the IamLUG attendees, and that wrapped up Day 1, looking forward to tomorrow. –
Photos later due to technical difficulties Chris Miller on stage opening up IamLUG we got tired of everyone internationally having these cool conferences so we brought one here. Why August in St. Louis. – It’s cheap and I live here (Chris) Free Wifi and Free Coffee all day! 170 delegates from the US and 5 others Booty Sweat making an on screen appearance at the OGS (thanks to @greyhawk68) Mary Beth Raven wins the IamLUG YouTube context with “I am a sock puppet” can’t wait to see that later. Kevin Cavanaugh, VP Messaging & Collaboration now being introduced for the keynote, and promises some surprises. Kevin is talking about the Lotus portfolio in the market place, leading off with the analysts recent positive press coverage of Lotus Notes “Microsoft has its Sharepoint-based offering, but this does not yet offer the feature and level of integration displayed by Lotus Connections” Butler Connections is the fastest selling software ever in IBM Software Group “Symphony has the full engineering excellence – reliability, usability, support and maintenance – the we expect of any enterprise product, especially from IBM” Bloor Kevin – “average customer wastes $200.00 per user buying Microsoft Office” we are serious about Symphony and will continue to develop it in the market place. “Sametime presence is the ancho technology that brings IBM’s collaboration and communications components together” Gartner 2009 Marketscope for Instant Messaging Look at what [IBM] is doing with Quickr. It is extremely extensible and gives organizations a lot of opportunity to customize applications, to build new functionality… ” Nemertes “This is a big convenience for Lotus Notes users, who will find value in being able to access popular business tools without leaving the Notes app. More then 43 million professionals connect on LinkedIN while TeipIt organizes trip details, along with directions and weather forcasts in to a master itinerary” eWEEK Every time we announce one of these we get calls from five other companies looking to integrate with Notes, “IZBM is changing the conversation about collaboration and social software. IBM Lotus will be doing this on several levels: extended collaboration, the value the openness brings to the collabroation equation and the importance of using collaboration to optimize talent” Hurwitz Two years running of IBM beating the completion at Enterprise 2.0 Connections over Sharepoint in 2008 Lotus Live over Google in 2008 Kevin is talking about the cloud and while he says Lotus will go toe to toe with anyone on cloud based e-mail it is about changing the model and enabling external collaboration, customers running their Domino environments efficiently are typically at a lower cost per user then google charges. In CRN Magazine Lotus Notes 8.5 defeated Microsoft Exchange 2010 in a competitive product review (originally was a bake off between Notes 8.5 and Exchange 2007 results were to lopsidedd so CRN switched to Exchange 2010 even though it did not ship yet) Kevin is now introducing a new advertising campaign with a minimum 18 month commitment showing a picture of a cab with the tagline “Lotus knows which route the cab should be taking to the airport” Big applause for the Lotus Marketing campaign Kevin is showing. Community input in to Lotus Knows “x” Do you know Lotus? for the marketing campaign look for more information in mid August to participate. Kevin is wrapping up, we are going to work very hard over the next 18-24 months to change the perception of Lotus. Chris Miller coming back up on stage now 175 people watching the stream live of the OGS Paul Steel Manager of Technical Services for the Global Strategic Accounts Team at Research In Motion is now coming up on stage (RIM is platinum sponsor of IamLUG) RIM and IBM working closely together, at Lotusphere and WES IBM/RIM announced a close partnership allowing Lotus technology to be available quickly. BES certified for 8.5 with in 10 days of it shipping, expect to see that again with 8.5.1. Extending Connections, Quickr, Sametime and Symphony down to the Blackberry device. Paul is now getting ready to give away a Blackberry Device, looking for the oldest blackberry device in the room looks like an 8900 is the winner. The 8900 owner is now getting any model they want free from RIM. Nice opening giveaway. That wraps ups the OGS off to find coffee
