excluse the typos, will clean it up later – constantly updating so refresh for the latest The band and Symphony Orchestra were rocking, Mike Rhodin took the stage with his Connections Profile on the screen.  Bob Costas introduced as the guest speaker.   Bob it a little to pro the New England Patriots for me,   Mke Rhodin is back on stage, taling about Collaboration and the changing workplace.  History of collaboration to where we are now Community Centric Collaboration, talking about  his daughters Facebook page and how kids today air their disagreements are sorted out online, not in the school yard like when he was a kid ( I think he used the same story at the NY Lotus Collaboration Summit last September) .  Now on to how Collaboration leads to innovation which leads to growth, and also helps attract and retain talent.  Mike is now talking about how we need to move from Search to Discovery, search provides results on what you ask, discovery lets you find new information for example using tagging in Connections allowing people to find information, and people with common interests or the skills they need. First announcment – new agreements between IBM & RIM for increased development of mobile solutions for  Blackberry. Mike is now talking about Open standards, vs proprietary formats, and takes a nice shot at Microsoft Office in the process. CTO of SAP Dr. Vishal Skika just took the stage with Mike, announcing “Atlantic” to deliver SAP tools in Lotus Notes, the first co-developed soltuon between Lotus & SAP, the tool is designed to drive utilization of SAP by providing data in the familiar Lotus Notes environment.   First product will ship in Q4 this year.  Travel and expense management, as well as vacation and leave requests will be in the first release, as well as access to reporting. Ron Sebastian – the demo guru on stage now for a demo Allistair Rennie VP of development and support now on stage talking about Notes and Domino.  Now running a showdown between Jeff Eisen (Notes) and Russ Holden (Domino) almost in a take off of the Macintosh vs. PC commercials.  Lots of good stuff about the client – key points iPhone is DWA access, Ubuntu Linux will become a supported platform;.  Macintosh 8.5 Public beta is now going.  From the Server side increased performance, reduction in I/O and Storage, optimized HTTP to support new DWA interface. Ron is back on stage now demoing the clients, and showing Widgets in 8.0.1, support for Google Gadgets, and creation of widgets from feeds, web pages, and notes views.  Showing widgets that use live tags i.e stock quotes, flight status etc.  Ron is now showing DWA Lite designed for faster web access to mail and day at a glance.  Rich web client designed for performance.Now demoing DWA on iPhone. Russ Holden now intorducing Domino 8.5, starting with better ID management, centralized vault where ID’s can be stored.  Notes Client can retrieve ID at runtime.  Opening up the directory, and new data storage model to reduce duplicate attachments.   Domino Designer 8.5 built on Eclipse announced, Maureen Leeland on stage to demo, with the new designer you can both design web2.0 applications and re-skin existing applications to use the new look and feel. Kevin Cavanaugh now on stage talking about Symphony.  Symphony is more then an IBM distribution of Open Office, Beta 4 will ship soon with support for API, and the ability ot leverage applications and mashups in Symphony that will also run in Notes.  Kevin mentioned the completely sold out Symphony boot camp at Lotusphere, look for the sympny boot camp on the road at http://symphony.lotus.com. Bruce Morse is now on stage to tale about Unified Communications, happy anniversary Sametime 10 years 1998-2008.  Now showing a customer video on Sametime, I was filmed for a similar video which will be shown at the Unified Communications keynote tomorrow morning.  Bruce is walking through Sametime Entry, Standard and  Advanced as well as Sametime Unitifed Telephony.  Ron is back on stage demoing Sametime Advanced, community broadcast tools and skilltap, as well as persistent chat rooms.  Screen sharing without launching full meeting.  Sametime Unified Telephony adds presence awareness for phone and IM, not only Click to call, but integration with external phone systems.  Ability to provide a single phone number to a user which can follow them and ring where they are when they want it to. The screen which has been yellow all morning just turned purple which means Larry Bowden has taken the stage to cover Websphere Portal.  Websphere Portal is not an area I focus in, going to stretch the fingers and let others cover this section in detail.   Jeff Schick now on stage to discuss Social Software.  Social software is changing the way we collaborate, work and play.  Looks like we are getting close to some Connections and Quickr announcements.  Quickr 8.1 shipping in March,, making it easier then ever to  share documents.  Full integration with Notes, Symphony, and Outlook, and Enterprise Content management integration coming later this year..  Demo of Quickr Personal File Sharing template.   Quickr futures beyond 8.1 watchlists, document rating, access control to limit data to groups and individuals, and the ability to recommend a document   Demoing integration of Quickr and Connections, and the new Media Library for sharing podcasts and videos. Jeff has now moved on to Lotus Connections and is working his way to Connections R2 announcements, even more language support, and language translation services.  Integration to Yahoo answers, Facebook, easier customization of Profiles and Communities..  My Connections home page which utilizes widgets and mashups.  Offline support for Activities, and moble device support for connections.  Demo of Connections R2.  Profiles is integrated with links to Quickr Personal file sharing.  Demo of Connectons on Blackberry looks GREAT!.   Communities now contains a discussion forum, and includes integration with Sametime Advanced to save chats.  Communities also integrates with Wiki;s in Lotus Quickr and other wikis.  Demo of Atlas for Lotus Connections. Jeff just introduced Lotus Mashups, a web based  graphical tool to design mashups, and maintain a catalog of mashups.  Mashups will ship with many prebuilt components.  Mashups will work in Connections, Portal, and Notes. . Mike Rhodin back on stage, big dramatic fanfare for the SMB announcement.  Lotus Foundations shipping later this year using technology acquired in the recently announced Net Integration Technologies. Mike is now introducing Bluehouse software as a service for collaboration complimenting Lotus Foundations to support the external collaboration needs of SMB.  Ron is back on stage to demo Bluehouse.  Bluehouse is in Managed Beta today. Mike is now wrapping up the OGS. More later

You might recall this story a while back about IBM using RFID to track conference attendees.  So no big surprise to see the RFID readers outside of the session rooms today. I know this bothers some people, I have no objections.

Off to Florida, should be boarding the plane in about 15 minutes.  Heading a little further south then Orlando to see my parents, and will drive up to Orlando on Saturday night.  Right now the forecast for the week looks like cool weather, packed the Giants sweatshirt for the beach on Sunday evening (no Hawaiian shirt or me). More later from Florida.

I decided to take the Notes design team up on their offer, and will be teaming up with Notes calendar designer John Lance in the 3rd annual Lotusphere Boat Race!.  Looks like there are still a few spots available in the race, so find your crew and sign up before all the slots are gone.  John and I will be out racing at 1:05 on Monday.

I received my e-mail this morning with my log in information for Lotusphere 2008 online.  A quick look at this years site and it is using three of the Lotus Connections components.  Profiles, Dogear, and Communities. It would be nice if for those of us who already have a profile (and other data)  in the Greenhouse if that information would be pulled over, that might be something for next year as I mentioned when the Atlas announcement was made there is certainly the hint of announcements coming on aggregation of data from across different social networks.  Should be easy to do if in this case both  networks are running the same platform.