Lotusphere Wrap-Up
After five buzzing days at Lotusphere and a little chilling at the Florida keys we headed back to Germany on Sunday. The office happily awaits us with loads of work but we went home from Lotusphere tired but energized.
We've been to a lot of very interesting sessions. I had wanted to blog about all of them but didn't quite get to. So many things to see, so little time...
The Workplace Designer will be the tool to easily enable us Domino developers to create applications for Workplace Collaboration Services and - in the next release - also for the WMC. I did a usability test of Workplace Designer 2.6 and it was not hard at all to work with it. The document model and the @functions which were implemented for JavaScript will be of great help to create document and forms bases applications.
The acquisition of Bowstreet (portlet factory) and PureEdge (now IBM Workplace Forms in 2005 bring valuable additions to their software portfolio.
Sametime 7.5 will be a major release and includes a bunch of new functionality like rich text, time stamps (e.g. last chat), spell checking, type ahead support for names, voice chat and location awareness using Google maps.
So, what do I take away from Lotusphere this year? Even more than last year IBM has made it clear that NOTES IS NOT DEAD. This message is not new but this year we could feel it more than ever. Lotusphere was yellow again. Many more of the sessions were about Notes and Domino and the overall feeling I left with was that Notes and Domino play a much more important role in IBM's strategy than the years before. This is important since all Lotusphere attendees are multipliers of that message. When we will be doing or Lotusphere Comes To You event in two weeks I will feel very comfortable telling our customers their investment in Domino is not only protected but has been money spent well.
In my opinion IBM is doing the right thing in bringing together many different products to create solutions with the combined power of these products. Having a Notes client which can easily integrate and leverage applications written for the Workplace Managed Client (WMC) like Activity Eplorer or Workplace Documents will greatly enhance its productivity.
Surjit Chana gave a good speech in the closing session and made it clear that IBM will go to market in a more aggressive way and I think that this is a message many companies have been hoping for. Business partners need that commitment to ensure their business and customers who may have been hesitating using Notes and Domino as a strategic application platform will hopefully have more confidence now to do so.
Technorati tag: Lotusphere2006
