Lotusphere Comes To You - Portland 2007

It's been quite a while since I've posted. Hello again everybody!

I attended Lotusphere Comes To You in on March 22. I took a bunch of notes and I was thinking: "I'm finally going to start posting on my blog again." Here it is two weeks later. Where does the time go? Anyway, here's brain dump from the general session.

Alan Lepofsky! Giving us, as he says, the fluff. He did a great job of explaining the increasing importance of Lotus to IBM.

He talked about how teams are increasingly geographically dispersed. It's not about finding the right person in your office, it's about finding the right person regardless of their location.

Lotus is really developing this idea of the virtual team and how social software is so important in solidifying these teams.

The most effective teams are when everyone shares their skills and you function as a unit. The claim/hope is that this and the coming generation are and will embrace this idea.

* Sharing
* Finding expertise (how many people using social network today? (Do you have kids? They use it already.)
* "Email, that's what my grandparents use."

IBM wants to bring social networking into the company.

It's all about keeping up with the culture. First it was VCR, then it was email, now it's social networking (Kids learned them first)

The development of ND8 is a great example of how this is changing. Look at how the new interface was developed in public using blogs, etc. People and companies are starting to share information that would previously have been kept private.

Web 2.0: Lots of definitions. It's all about people and knowledge and sharing. The community. The power of crowds.

Talking a bit about what they're doing with the Eclipse framework. Opening up the platform. Allowing others to build new solutions on it.

Open Document Format: Again; opening up the standard. Don't want to get locked into a certain document format. New IBM tools will use this format.

Out in the future...

Talking a bit about IBM's involvement in Second Life. IBM is very interested this more immersive interface and how it can be used for business. IBM is starting to conduct virtual meetings inside Second Life. Alan talked about leading a training session or a meeting in Second Life. He likes to start by asking everyone to sit down and then he asks everyone: why did you choose to sit where you sat? Interesting question...

It's not that IBM is interested in Second Life specifically. They are exploring the 3D interface. Looking to the future...

IBM is also looking to future interfaces. Getting away from keyboard and mouse and looking toward new ways to use touchscreen. Again, they're looking at how this can be developed for business purposes.

Now, talking about the new products:
"Industry's richest continuum of communication and collaboration tools for business" He accented "for business"

He asked: How many people have downloaded Notes 8? In the room, only a few hands were raised. Surprising. Hopefully everyone will go back to the office or home and immediately get it.

It's about a brand new kind of client. "Now an integrated high performance work environment"

ND8 will bring much of what users need into one common interface. Eclipse has allowed them to build a Notes client that is completely extensible.

Alan gave a great explanation of what RSS is. Hmmm. Are there still people out there that don't know what RSS is?

He talked a bit about composite applications and how it brings ND8 into the SOA future.

He is often asked if there is continuing investment in Notes. His response: With ND8 they have opened the waterfall!

Of course he discussed the productivity applications. Talked about how all of this will allow us to build incredibly different types of applications.

Unified Communications

Video, voice, data

Sametime is no longer just about text chat. It's an extensible collaboration platform.

Portal
Moving beyond content aggregation.
Executive scorecards

Mashups

Employee self-service dashboards
manager self-service dashboards
performance management dashboards

Quickr

All about taking the different forms of content in your company and bringing them together. The evolution of quickplace, domino.doc, portal doc mgr. The automatic storing and linking of attachments in emails is going to be so great. Domino administrators rejoice.

Quickr is not a stand alone product. Users don't necessarily think of going to Quickr to do something. It integrates into work they already do. Into Notes, windows file manager, Sametime client. A lot of the integration is about centrally storing files in Quickr and sending links around. Quickr handles this and makes it easy. This all happens via connectors.

There are two versions.

First version has content libraries, team work spaces, team blogs, wikis, calendars, content workflow. This is the standard edition. Quickplace customers are entitled to use the product.

Content repositories supports nsf, FileNet (not first release) and java jsr environments. Looking to add stellant, sharepoint, etc.

The personal edition has content repositories and document sharing. This is part of Notes. No extra licensing involved.

Notes is now...
* Notes client
* Word processing, spreadsheet, presentations
* Quickr personal
* Sametime chat

All for the cost of the Notes client.

Lotus Connections

There are five capabilities: profiles, communities, blogs, bookmarks, activities. Profiles are a way of sharing and finding expertise. More than an address book. Much more information about relationships and capabilities. Tagging will be a big part of this.

Communities are about common areas of interest with other people in your organization. Creating virtual groups of people with common interest.

Blogging. 'nuf said...

Bookmarks. People store and share their bookmarks. In IBM they call it dogear. They dogear websites and Notes databases that they use. Alan says he, as an employee, uses their dogear system before he goes to Google.

The IBM Lotus collaboration strategy

Is to surface all of these capabilities to many different inferfaces: rss/atom, office, eforms, rich client, browser, portal, mobile

Bringing consumer concepts to the business world.

And that was all in the opening session. I attended a great technical session on activity-centric computing and then I started getting interrupted by work.

If Lotusphere Comes to You is in your area and you're on the fence about going, I'd say Go for it! It's well worth your time.