At Lotusphere 2006 I reported a problem with directory assistance to IBM. It took some time but now the issue not only has an SPR# (SLED6LRN9K) but it now also is present in the knowledge base as technote #1237167.
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
The final session for today was the blogger's BOF. Since attending last year's blogger's BOF (and reading many of the blogs for some time before) got Hans-Peter, Henning and me started blogging, it was great to go there again this year. One of the subjects that were being discussed was that being in the Lotus blogger's community can give you the feeling of knowing the other bloggers like friends, even though you may have never seen them personally. I think the Lotus blogger's community is special (and I share this feeling with many of the other bloggers, I think). It is a true community with respect for each other, but also with a great share of honesty among each other. The community though is not a closed circle, the opposite is the case every new voice is welcome. Even though our blog has by far less hits than most of the other blogs but we do have the feeling of being welcome as a part of that community.
To wrap it up it was nice to see the faces of so many people we have listened to and have communicated with and I do hope that the session does inspire some of the attendees who not already have a blog to give it a go.
After the BOF we met up with Mikkel Heisterberg to discuss his great LotusScript.doc documentation tool. We have a database it does not work on but some futher testing shows that probably the DXL exporter of Notes Domino seems to have a problem. A simple agent which exports all the databases design elements to DXL crashed my Notes client with a red box of death. I will investigate further into this to nail it down to (hopefully) one design element.
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I saw a lot of cool new stuff today. The announcement of Sametime 7.5 is promising, and to get my hands on the Hannover client later this year or at the beginning of next year will be great. The sessions gave me some more insight into AJAX and Web Services and the CERT701 session by Jason Collier was entertaining and should be of great help for my release 7 recertification.
After a quick dinner at the showcase reception we went to the Jamfest. At first only a few people found their way there. But as more and more people came into the Swan dining tent it became more and more obvious that there are some great musical talents among our fellow geeks. I had expected something like a talent show or karaoke but actually it turned out to be a really great jam session of various people. I saw many fellow bloggers there and even the senior Lotus management droppped by for a few minutes.
vowe must have taken some nice pictures which he will hopefully post has posted.
Hopefully the Tuesday night Jamfest will have an even bigger audience and again so many talented performers. The Swan dining tent is definitely the place to be tomorrow night.
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For some reason the majority of the sessions I attended were about Workplace. All of them were quite informative and I did again learn a lot today. The beach party was nice, too and
much warmer
than last year.
The band was quite good as was the food (as always). All in all a good start for yet another 5 days among our fellow 'Spherians.
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Karen Hobert and Bob Balaban gave a nice comparison between the two collaboration platforms of IBM pointing out the strengths and the weaknesses of both architectures. As a conclusion of these existing strengths the IBM collaboration roadmap will bring the two architectures closer together. This will happen on the client side first, followed by the serverside (post Hannover) and the development tools side (post Hannover).
"Hannover will be the next Notesclient, just better", Bob said, "and it will support the workspace."
Enhancements will be:
I guess the official timeframe for "Hannover" will be announced during opening session tomorrow, by the way there were rumors about in the beginning of 2007...
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