Lotusphere Comes to You - Wembley

Originally Posted by Guy Wakely Wed, April 02, 2008 14:28:20

The event went quite well I thought, although standing up for most of the day has taken it's toll on my legs and feet, fortunately there was enough coffee to keep me going througout the day !

This was the first LCTY event I had attended, and using Wembley as the venue, wow, i will ensure I return !

(I did manage to sneak a couple of pictures on my BlackBerry from a corporate box )

Bruce Morse seems to have an overwhelming knowledge of the Lotus portfolio and I was impressed by this, not all "VP types" have this kind of dedication to the technology. I guess that's what ultimately sets IBM out from the rest of the crowd, that and the emerging products that are clearly leading the way in the collaboration field.

The opening from Bruce was pretty good, clear and concise, covering the entire Lotus portfolio. I made some frantic notes to ensure that anything I felt i didn't know enough about I would then make sure I did over the next few days...Sametime seems to be taking a interesting route, but I guess we all knew that this would be the case, IM seems to be the hot topic these days, that thrown in with Connections and Quickr, following a mobile and unified/community route. Total Forms is an interesting one, I really must try and read more on this, with dashboards and portals being the way forward this is a really hot topic for the next few months I think !

We were all aware of the new capabilities of ND8 (or we should be), but there was also mention of ND8.5, some interesting points there, such as;

• ID Vault

• Freedom of Directory use

• Email mangement changes, duplicate attachments not stored etc

• Designer Client (for Web 2.0 apps)

• SAP Integration - "Atlantic"

• Lotus Protector was also mentioned for email security, I need to look into that a little more before commenting online...

After chatting with customers and other business partners during the lunch break, the afternoon sessions soon began, business or technical, business or technical…hmmmmm, I had to make a decision at some point so decided to fleet between the two, picking up the bits of information I saw relevant.

Sessions from the likes of Darren Adams and a mixture of business partners gave a clear outline of not only Notes and Domino but also other collaboration tools and offerings from the myriad business partners that exist in the Lotus world.

There is clearly a certain hype and buzz around the Lotus world at the moment, I think it shows that the hard work and dedication we have all put in over the years has been rewarded with the latest offerings. In summary, as a collaboration industry, Lotus sits on the best side of the fence, in fact it owns the fence and can make anything out of the fence, but I guess we all knew that aready ;-)