Category Archives: LS09

Lotusphere Day 3 Wrap Up

Winding down from another Lotusphere Day, a day in which I might get to sleep before 1 AM which would be a very good thing given the day I have tomorrow. I started the day at a 7 AM BOF  Quickr with the Quickr product management team, a very well attended session given the hour.  Lots of good interaction between customers and product management, with a interesting mix of customers running Quickr Domino, Quickr J2EE, as well as customers integrating with both Notes and Outlook. The Software as a Service keynote as I said earlier was an excellent session, I really felt like a very clear message was delivered on strategy for on premise services compared to hosted services, as well as integration points for the two. Next up for me was a trip down to the vendor showcase mainly catching up with some vendor (and friends) on the floor, and taking a look at a few products, as well as a nice visit with Luis Suarez.  After lunch I spent some time in the UX and Innovation labs, will try to capture some of the innovation lab in another post at a later time. Finally it was time for Lotusphere Idol.  Last year I was not able to make it to this session, and this year I was really torn between Lotusphere Idol and another session at the same time, but I am really glad I chose Lotusphere Idol.  I wonder if any other conference runs a session quite like this. The next session was The Lotus Evangelists – Customer Panel, where in my role as a customer I presented some of our experiences with Quickr and Connections (in less then five minutes).  This is the second year I have presented at  this session, the format is simple six customers present for five minutes each on a particular piece of the Lotus Portfolio, the session then resumes in the back of the room with an open bar and a chance to socialize, and continue the conversation with other customers. Finally the Nachos and News Session for the participants of the Lotus Blogger program.  The big news, which had actually broken earlier was the news of ActiveSync support coming in Traveler sometime in 2009, yes this means the ability to sync your iPhone with notes and use the native iPhone e-mail, contacts, and calendar clients!  No firm dates for beta or release, but this was demoed at a session earlier in the day. The day wrapped up with dinner, and the “Evening with Engineering” event for Design Partners. Tomorrow is my marathon day, with both of my sessions taking place between 12:30 and 4:00 tomorrow. SHOW302 Getting your feet wet with Lotus Connections will be from 12:30-2:15 in SW Osprey ID105 What Were They Thinking? When UX Design Collides with Reality will be from 3:00-4:00 in DL S. Hemisphere II More tomorrow….. sleep now

Lotusphere Idol Recap

As promised here is my recap of Lotusphere Idol, would have loved to blog live, but the laptop battery just was not cooperating. First off congratulations to all the contestants on a job well done. Ed Brill did an excellent job as the host. IMG_2130 Alan Lepofskys cameo appearance as Dr. Paul BuchanElgort was shall we say memorable, and well educational if you are interested in Locust IMG_2157 IMG_2155 The only downside for Alan was I suspect he had trouble finding someone to dine with tonight after spending a considerable amount of time discussing the finer points of eating Locust. The contestants all turned in excellent performances leaving the judges with a tough decision to make, so tough in fact that they decided to award two winners who will each get 30 minutes to present on Thursday morning. Congratulation to Nate Lowry & Matt Rosno from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln for their winning presentation on creating a Symphony plug in for Sharepoint, and to Andrew Brew for his presentation titled “Replaceable Parts” One final thought from the session over the years I have hear many times how is Lotus going to reach out to the younger generation and get them involved in Lotus Technology, I think having a pair of 21 year old college students at Lotusphere on stage presenting work they developed for Symphony is a pretty good sign.

Live Blogging Nachos and News…. breaking news from Lotusphere

Nachos and News is an event being held for the Blogger Program this evening for some news announcements that will be formally announced tomorrow.   Ed Brill is starting off earlier today there was a demo of ActiveSync support for Traveler running on an iPhone.  ActiveSync adds more openness to the Domino mobile platform because of the platforms it is supported on.  Hoping to ship support officially in 2009.  Still need to prioritize which devices to support first with iPhone being an obvious first choice.  Ed is being probed for any indication of how involved Apple or Microsoft was in this decision, and implementation.  Ed says ask Microsoft or Apple. Will you continue to support iNotes ultralite, yes it will continue to be supported and enhanced. Any testing with Android….  no not yet considering what needs to be done on that platform.  Not large interest in business market for Android yet. David Marshak now up to share some highlights from todays UC Keynote.  Sametime 8.5 announced for the second half of the year.   Major overhaul of the server side of Sametime, making meeting reliable and easy.   Introduction of Rich Client for meettings, with comparable feature set for web browser.  Pure http allows joining meetings with no download.  Will still require plugin for sharing.  On the client side full web based Chat client available which will make it easier to integrate Sametime in applications. All current supported platforms will be supported in Sametime 8.5 What is the current migration path to Sametime 8.5 for existing customers, still being worked on. There will be a Sametime 8.5 for Domino (may not be imporved or enhanced), but it will be existing functionality only, new meeting functionality will be on WAS. Caleb Barlow, is coming up for some Foundation news to be followed by a demo.  Starting with a brief overview of the hardware sitting on the table in front of the room.  Foundations is the opportunity to get back in to the SMB market.  Foundations really needs a method of supporting legacy apps when implementing foundations support for VMWare Hypervisor within Lotus Foundations 1.1 alllowing any other application (and OS) to run under Foundations. Announcing Lotus Foundations 1.1 Branch Office  will support integration with existing enterprise deployments, creating an appliance that can run Domino.  From the Domino perspective it is managed the same way as Domino, but from the OS perspective is an appliance making it easily deployable in remote locations. Back live in the demo room. to see a demo of Xerox MFP and Foundations. Xerox device manager running in Foundations, now moving on to using Xerox for Scan to e-mail with Foundation integration. Now showing integration of Paperport OCR running on Foundations scanning a document from the MFP to Symphony on a client machine.  This is very cool….. OK Nathan might have expressed this in a slightly more colorful manner. Off to dinner in a few more later.

Lotusphere Idol

Sorry no live blog due to a basically dead laptop battery but pictures and full report to be posted later

KEY101: Lotus Online Collaboration: Experience the Possibilities (Live)

Live Blogging the Software as a Service Keynote session beginning shortly CIMG0836 Sean Poulley on stage starting with a recap of yesterdays OGS announcements.  Making it clear that LotusLive is an extension/enhancement to the portfolio not a replacement. Today’s Agenda is explaining the portfolio, Demos, early adopter stories, and integration with Lotus products and partners. Why did we create LotusLive?Belief that most organizations have rich collaboration environments that work internally, but they don’t work externally wth partners and vendors. LotusLive is there to extend collaboration outside the firewall Services in LotusLive Engage include Profiles, File Sharing, Activities, Forms, Charts, Instant Messaging & Web Conferencing.  LotusLive pricing for all services will be competitive with Web Confrencing only solutions from other vendors Bredan Crotty on stage to demo how Lotusphere attendees can use LotusLive to connect at Lotusphere and continue the relationship after Lotusphere. Demoing the dashboard with a news feed very similar to what is being implemented in Connections 2.5 Companies in LotusLive  can create public company pages which are searchable for all LotusLive users.   Brendan is now demoing File Sharing in LotusLive, includes “Collections” which he compared to a playlist, it is a collection of files and files can belong to more then one collection. File sharing also integrates directly with online meetings to add files stored in LotusLive directly to a meeti Kevin Cavanaugh coming up on stage now to talk about e-mail in LotusLive.  LotusLive is about market expansion. Industry average cost of a mailbox is about .00 per user per month.  With Domino 8.5 improvements many shops running well below that.  On premise costs for Domino are coming in lower then competition and cloud services, but there are cases for cloud services (but not for everyone) LotusLive allows you to have IBM host your Domino environment to integrate with LotusLive.  Expects that between 1000 and 10,000 users hosted services can provide savings over on premise. LotusLive iNotes is also targeted at employees who need limited access to e-mail (boundary workers) available at a reduced price point. I don’t know if I captured it properly, but Kevin just did an excellent job clarifying where IBM expects LotusLive to provide savings and benefits, while showing clear cases that on premise solutions make more sense for others. Brendan Crotty is now demoing sharing files between on premise solutions. Lotus Notes 8.5 Client with LotusLive files sidebar plugin, and “click to cloud” functionality very similar to Lotus Connectors you can drag and drop files from OS or Notes directly to file sharing on LotusLive.  Activities side shelf can connect to LotusLive with off line access. Meeting plug in, with a single click a meeting can be launched and use the buddy list to send  a link integrating LotusLive meetings with the Sametime client. Sean Poulley introducing a video with clips from Salesforce.com, Prolifiq and Skype the LotusLive partners being highlighted this morning Brendan coming back on stage to demo partner integration Skype integration, Skype integrated on the business card for click to call.  “Click with Collaborators” button to start conference calls with document collaborators, and the ability to add others from contacts n the fly.  One click launch of skype client dialing the parties selected in LotusLive. LinkedIn – Search of LinkedIn from LotusLive, and ability to share files with LinkedIn users with in LotusLive Prolifiq – Integration of LotusLive contacts with Prolifiqs internal messaging system integrated in to LotusLive, and embedded widgets for further action and tracking of the messages Salesforce.com – LotusLive meeting integrated in to Salesforce.com, ability to send meeting summaries from the a meeting back to Salesforce.com.  Meeting Summary captures meeting title, host, any activities or To Do associated with the meeting, files presented,  and attendee lists. Customer stories: Tom Kivell from Nortel talking about how LotusLive has helped them overcome many collaboration issues, specifically run more efficient meetings, and eliminate firewall issues to be more effective and help them bring their products to market faster. Maureen Shaffer from Inset Technologies startup operation with the majority of employees are remote, and manufacturing is done by an external organization.  Issues with VPN Connections, e-mailing of large files, connectivity issues with web conferecing.  With an IT department of zero employees hosting services on LotusLive was an efficient way to implement with zero install or configuration, and eliminated connectivity and firewall issues.  Impressed with response and commitment of the LotusLive team during Beta.  Using LotusLive to deliver training materials on moblile devices with LotusLive and Prolifiqs Darian Hendricks froom Robert R Taylor Network at MIT, network of over 250 individuals and organizations.  Organization memebers were looking for an online home for the organization that provided a way to connect and exchange information when they could not meet in person.  Integration with Skype and LinkedIn enhance their ability to use LotusLive. Sean is back on stage wrapping up what has been a very impressive session.    

Lotusphere Day 2 Wrap Up

I should really be sleeping not blogging, so I will be brief. Started the day with the OGS, and I think the blogger program participants definitely had a unique seating arrangement at the OGS.  The chairs were comfortable, but not really the ideal sitting position for two plus hours of live blogging.  My live stream of the OGS is here, I have not really sorted back through it yet, but I will clean it up a bit at some point, and blog my overall impressions. Exceeding my total for all of last year I managed to attend two sessions today INV 103 Social Software Deep Dive ID304 What’s Next with IBM Lotus Connections In addition to the Connections sessions I spent an hour with members of the Connections UX team going over plans for 2.5 and providing them with some feedback.  That was followed by a get together of the GCPC one of the two times a year we meet face to face. Next up was the Blogger Exec Q&A, followed by a quick stop at the North America customer reception, the Blogger/Press Reception, and finally Jamfest Another busy day tomorrow, time to get a little sleep. For those of you reading this that are at  Lotusphere please do me a favor and if you happen to see Ted Stanton please tell him I have been trying to find him for the last two days, but have yet to spot him anywhere.

Blogger Q and A with Lotus Execs

This evening the participants in the Blogger Program had the opportunity to participate in a Q & A with the Lotus Executive Team.  I did actually manage to blog the Q&A for about the first 20 minutes, then the conversation took off, and I seem to have stopped typing.  Fortunately Chris Miller was typing and recording away so I will let you read his version of the Q&A and give you some of my impressions from the session. The IBM folks who organized this event had one idea of how it should be run, unlike in years past where the panel sat up front and took one question at a time from the bloggers, (while this is the first year for the blogger program there have been previous blogger Q&A sessions with the execs) they were going to have the execs at tables and let people go from table to table and talk one on one.  Well the bloggers (as far as I can tell) unanimously expressed that we preferred the old format so everyone can hear all the Q&A.   Well just like that Tables and Chairs were moved and the format was changed.  Here is the assembled panel. IMG_2121 This is the second time I have been fortunate to be able to attend this session, and while it seems so obvious that it is a good idea for the execs to take some time out of what is a very busy day for everyone to have an open  dialogue with a group of bloggers, the fact that they have done this consistently for a few years now really shows that the value they place on the  Lotus Blogger community to maintain this dialogue which really only begins at Lotusphere it carry’s on through the year in various ways.  

Blogger Q&A With Execs

Bloggers change the plan! Bob Picciano Jeff Schick Bruce Morse Sean Poulley Doug Heintzman Kristen Lauria Allistair Rennie Kevin Cavanaugh Bruce Elgort, complemented the video from the OGS.  Kristen – been filming customer stories since Sunday to be on You Tube, and a media plan around it. Will it be in Europe too? 14 customers from Germany and the plan is to replicate the setup to tape customers at LCTY Events. Jack Dausman Marketing been impressive, Skype, Linked In, MacWorld… will we see more of this throughout the year, Sean Poulley – many more partnerships in the pipeline.  Meeting expectations well, announcing and delivering not just creating pressware. Is the economy part of why customers are coming to you now? Companies are looking to cut costs, and disparate pieces are being put together to optimize people.   Bruce morse, for 12 months again significant portion of new ST customers are not Notes Shops. Nathan, at this event last year engineers talked about being blocked from releases by legal, you were suprosed, twice this year you made cracks about legal.  Allistair…. My sister is a lawyer.I remember the convesation, we seem to be making progress in that area, and legal is adapting to the dev cycle. Legal is getting better at an Agile clearance process. John Head – came with a checklist of things he wants to hear…. how are you going to compete in 2009 with Sharepoint, he sees alot of sharepoint integration with Office etc… not neccasarily doing well, but doing cheap. Jeff Shick…. Deep Breath… Substaintial improvrements in Qucikr capability, and ECM..   Pricing aggressively, while not giving away. Kevin…. xPages plays heavily in this space.  Allistair we know we have to do better in that space. Building towards common components in Qucikr and Connections, Open NTF…. way of getting code out their faster trying to get licensing changes in a way that large organizations can adopt Duffbert….. HAving to implement Sharepoint……needs the cover. Kevin, we didn’t wait for the spoiler last week, we got out there Kevin… we consciously….. sometimes you do things stupid consciously re foundatons and lack of banch office solution which will be in 1.1 foundation

INV 103 Social Software Deep Dive

Chris Lamb and Peter Van de Graf presenting an overview of the Social Software strategy, followed by a preview of Profiles in 2.5 Showing more of what we saw in the OGS this morning with Profiles 2.5 including Micro Blogging and a personal Wall for people to leave comments. Showing Integration of Connections with SuccessFactors for increased productivity in people and career management iEnterprise integration of their Notes CRM application with Profiles allowing a sales force to search profiles from the Notes application including alerts for profile changes. Atlas for visualization of the social structure on an individual and organizational level Peter Van de Graf talking about information overload with 900 exabytes of data or enough books to stack from the earth to pluto and back or something like that (or one weekends read for duffbert) Now on to Personal File Sharing & Document Management , showing more screens again building on what we saw at the OGS this morning, ability to rate and comment on documents as well as selective sharing.  Personal File Sharing is based on IBM internal implementation. Wiki, shipping in Connections 2.5 and subsequent versions of Quickr. (yes finally a REAL Wiki in Quickr!) Connections 2.5 looks good I can’t wait to get my hands on some Beta code to start testing. Off to Lunch and some meetings….. more later today.

Live from the Lotusphere 2009 OGS

Live Blog, will fix it up later. OGS room is filling up Blueman group is taking the stage (The real Blueman group not Carl) IMG_1924 Bob Picciano just took the stage to kick off the OGS, turns out thatt his wife is a Lotus Notes developer. 16 Quarters of substantial growth through Q3 2008, 12, 236 new customers since ND8 was released. And….. the guest speaker is………   Academy nominated actor…… Writer, awad winning musician Dan Akroyd who gave a nice humorous look to how collaboration is what it takes to make films, movies etc… IMG_1941 Bob Picciano is back on stage now, talking about the Lotus Community, and customer attendance is up 2% over last year. Bob talking about the theme of Lotusphere being Resonance (and ended up with a shattering window) Bob is now introducing 3 customers who will participate in the OGS Jean Michael Ares, CIO of Coca-Cola is now on stage, (wondering is the Disney Bots will try to drag him off the stage).  Talking about implementation of SAP, Notes 8, Connections, Sametime, and integration of SAP and Notes with project “Atlantic”.  Ease of use, same performance in the office and Mobile.   Next up is NetJets a company that specializes in Fractional Jet Ownership John Dunning CP  Planning and Architecture is talking about the challenges of managing a fleet of 800 planes in 173 countires and all the daily challenges of weather, mechanical problems, and how collaboration and the ability to share information solve these problems. Netjets uses Websphere portal, Connections, Quickr, Omnifind to create a solution to manage their fleet and all the logistics. HSBC is the third customer, exploring social software to differentiate themselves from their competition.  Ian Haynes, Head of Staff, Collaboration Infrastructure on the stage.  300,000 employees in 9500 locations around the world who need to work together to provide customer service. Notes, Sametime, Websphere Portal and Connections are the key components of their collaboration strategy. Bob Picciano back on stage now, talking about optimizing mobile platforms to meet the demand for informatuon on the go..  Jim Balsillie Co-CE Research in Motion introduced on stage. 10 years ago today first Blackberry launched Officially announced support for Blackberry on Domino 8.5 10 days after 8.5 shipped RIM providing Mobile solutions for Sametime and Connections Blackberry’ phones are the #1,3, & 5 most popular smartphones in the US Four new blackberry clients for Lotus Solutions New Connections client supporting ALL of the Connections features. New Sametime client supporting file transfer, multimedia, public groups Symphony and Quickr support for Blackberry view and edit Symphony Doc Support for Domino Designer with Xpage to make it easy to write applications once and have them supported on Blackberry. Bob is moving on to hosted services talking about Bluehouse introduced last year, not branded LotusLive.   Allistair Rennie now taking the stage, Notes celebrating it’s 20th Birthday in 2009 IMG_2020 Kevin Cavanaugh now on stage, one way Notes is not like your average 20 year old, it can save you money.  3,000,000 plus Symphony downloads replacing Office Licenses.  Not just free, free and innovative. SAP Atlantic now officially named Alloy and Ron Sebastian is on stage so looks like a demo coming up. Working on a LinkedIn sidebar plugin to integrate Notes Contacts and LinkedIn Forward Contacts as vCards Drag and drop sametime groups to e-mail addressing. Ron is now demoing federated calendars in Notes 8.5 with off line access.  PlanetLotus gets a mention! Suzannes is now demoing how the features Ron demoed appear in iNotes as well.  Quickr Connector integration now available in iNotes as well. Demo of Domino Designer 8.5 and Xpages. Demoing one application in Browser and on Blackberry. Ron is now demoing Symphony support on Blackberry (in BES 5.0) Quickr with Xpage support?  More on that later apprently IBM and OpenNTF working together to release open source code samples and templates. Kevin now talking about appliances.  Foundations will soon ship a release supporting running VM. Bruce Morse now taking the stage for UCC, talking about the UC strategy centered around the Sametime Platform. Sametime Unified  Telephony and  Sametime 8.5 to ship this year. Ron and Suzanne demoing Sametime Unified telephony, integration of different PBX vendors and systems, and integration of a softphone in to Sametime.  Rules to send your calls where you want them, and use a single number to be reached regardless of your location. Showing call control and ability to seamlessly transfer a call between phones on the fly. Video demo, blueman group on the other end of the video. SUT to ship mid year in beta now. Bruce back on stage introducing Sametime 8.5 (including Sametime 8.5) New architecture (WAS)  eliminates Java Applets, and is HTTP making it more firewall friendly. Ron now back on Demoing Sametime 8.5 New web client no Java Applets, as well as a Rich Client experience via a Sametime plugin. Ron working in the client while Suzanne demos the web version. Ability to have persistent meeting rooms, including content either stored in the meeting or integrated with Quickr Standard formats for meeting recording! Jeff Schick coming up on stage now to cover Social Software. Lotus Connections & Quickr the leaders in Social Software for business. Lotus Connections 2.5 shipping in Q3 Easier to deploy Easier to brand and customize Two New Serivces in COnnections 2.5 Wiki being added to Connections/Quickr Connections Integration with LinkedIn Mobile support for Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia Suzanne demoing Connections 2.5 New news feed (similar to news feeds in LinkedIn, Facebook) Microblogging on Profiles Communities – co authoring of blog entries for a community Activity integration Wiki Integration with the new Wiki Service with co-authoring of documents Improved discussion forum. Customization of communities via drag and drop of widgets Ability to post files in Communities integrated with the new file sharing service. Ron demoing new blackberry client for Connections, looks good, when can I have this? Jeff back to talk about Quickr Quickr 8.1.1 (J2EE) shipped in december with ECM integration, Ron back on to Demo Quickr 8.2 for Domino shipping in Q2 Lotus Connections integration Domino 8.5 Support Quickr Next integrate with the Connections Wiki ECM Integration for Domino Linux and Mac support Larry Bowden on stage talki
ng about portal…. where is that coffee break ( I though Ed Brill was providing waiter service for the bloggers) There is a lack of purple on the stage for the Websphere portion There is a band setup in the corner of the stage, wonder when that comes in to play? (it’s been there all morning I am just mentioning it now) Word on the street (well Twitter) is they are running a little late….. but stick around for more announcements. Allistair Rennie is back on stage now. talking about LotusLive expanding the Lotus brand out to companies of any size and introduced Sean Poulley to talk about Online Services. Bluehouse is LotusLive Engage (wonder how many times Ron goes up and down the stairs during the OGS, he is back on Stage) Ron is demoing LotusLive Engage (LotusLive.com is well ….. live) Suzanne demoing iNotes in LotusLive LotusLive can be used on it’s own or integrate with existing products.  Lotus products will contain plug-ins to connect with Lotus Live.  Ron is now demoing. Ron is demoing joining a meeting from Blackberry with slideshare. Three new partnership for LotusLive Salesfoce.com LinkedIn – integration with LinkedIn network Skype Partnership will extend Lotus Live to 400 Million people. Allistair back says we are five minutes from the best finale ever. Kristen Lauria VP Marketing coming up on stage now. Redefine the Collaboration Category Increase the impact of Lotus Collaboration give the Air Cover! Showing a Lotus Commercial lots of yellow in the commercial Working Smarter Together is the them Bob Picciano back on stage.  OGS is close to wrapping up. Band is coming on the stage as is blueman group Instant Technology Wins best Showcasw award Elguji takes the CTO Award, Congrats to Bruce, Gayle, and Matt Blueman back on Thats a wraq… OGS over more later, more later