I Notes

Update:  
I did my first attempt on Live Blogging, and found out that ever now and then if I try to save the document it would warn me, that another version of the same document has been saved, while I was editing it, and a conflict version is being created. I ended up with 4 or 5 replication conflicts, and then in the end i invoked the "update site index" agent, wich somehow mus t have corrupted this documents, because they were all gone :-(

Thanks to Steven Cannon and Vítor Pereira who responded to my call and have send me the last parts i was missing.
The last 10 minutes (with a lot of text actually) is still missing, so i try and recreate it from memory again.  

Good Morning!

This year I am going to live cover the OGS of the Lotussphere 2010 in Orlando.
I'll try to not to blog in the manner of "Someone just said XY. Then he said 25%", but rather try to deliver my observations.

Oh, one more thing: this is Speed-Blogging, not Speed-Proof-Reading ;-)

Enjoy!

[5:55am] The day start was way to early, since I was the only one here who misread the 6:15pm as 6:15am - and headed for the BOF only to find the floor in the Swan being only inhabited by Disney Bots.

[8:00am] The Band begins to Play - Interesting combo of two fiddler and three percusions - since I am sitting at the Bloggers couches right in front of the sub woofer - my whole body shakes

[8:06am] The special Guest is SHATTNER!



[8:14am] William Shattner is a good actor! He is delivering the text from the tele-prompter true to a world, but does not sound at all like it.

[8:20am] Bob Picciano: You should jump the collaborative cloud. ( I am smiling by vividly imaging doing that)

[8:23am] Yepp. Volker is right. 18.378 new customers (and they had like 50k customers before - so are we now at what? a 75k customers?)


[8:27am] Bob Picciano explains, Lotus will focus on industry specific solutions, namely starting with insurance, banking, and health care. This is called the "Collaboration Agenda" and partners are invited to join. (of whom by the way he announced are now 20% more since 2009). I think it is good that some people inside the software group turn heir focus toward products and specific solutions, but also somewhat skeptical that this will play out somehow positive and not just the big opportunity to get very confused. (and than, out of my customers I only have two insurance and one bank, and none in health care)



[8:38am] RIM is deploying Lotus Conection enterprise-wide and is speaking as a customer, not a partner. Besides, that IBM is now allowed to resell RIM through its channel. (So IBM is now a partner for RIM. I sense, there is an m&a on the horizon)

[8:46am] Sylvia Steinmann from Zurich: "Why is it still being called 'Out of the Box'? when was it the last time you have had enterprise software shipped to you in a box? It is just one of that examples where legacy sticks" (Oh, and they cancelled Exchange/Sharepoint migration because Lotus Notes had more value)

[9:00am] Demo time. Ron Sebastian is on the phone with the lawyers. of cause.
[9:00am] Quickr can now store emails as .eml files and can drag and drop them from the sidebar. That's cool. It also can handle iCalendar feeds now and integrate team and personal calendars within quickr places.

[9:10am] Quickr introduce a layer called CMIS = Content Management Integration System. It allows to speak to whatever backends - Filenet, IBM Content Manager, Documentum, Sharepoint and the open source Alfresco CMS. (This last one would become very interesting to a lot of my customers)

[9:15am] New partnership with GIST - As it seems it let you aggregate contacts and other information from multiple sources. I just signed up, but there is no Lotus Plugin yet. But it is immediately seems very useful even now. (Update: you need to sign up for the Lotus Plugin Beta as well: http://www.gist.com/lotus )
 
[9:32am] Rons demos Sametime 8.5 connected with the Radvision Server and showing a web-conference with multiple HD-Video streams. Looks neat, but how many truck-loads of Hardware and server do I need for that? I'll investigate and keep you posted.

[9:35am] now for LotusLive.
Announcing Connections for LotusLive being delivered in Q2. Cool thing. Also a new "ACME" company in the screenshots - "ZETA Hospital" (I guess it is a spin-off from Zeta-Bank, or perhaps they just switched industries :-)

[9:40am] Anouncing Lotus Live Labs available to partners in Q2. It allows slide library, event maps, and recorded meetings.  

[9:40am] Allistair invite a panel of Business Partners on stage - Interesting is, that Xerox provides a sollution that integrates neatly with Lotus Foundation (called OfficeNow! Solution). I am asking myself - if it is for Foundation, it is for the normal Domino as well, right?
Group is seeing a lot of deployment opportunities for the cloud.
iEnterprise: Lotus knows we need to work where we are.
Xerox: Lotus knows how to do integration.

[10:03am] Now for something new: What is the vision for the future? Innovation taken to the next level. Announcing "Project Vulcan" What is it about? we soon will know, as Ron is again on the stage.
So -it is looking stikingly similar to Google Wave ;-) So it is about a real-time editing and collaboration. It also looks a lot like Portal. Espetially since a browser version of it exist.



Project Vulcan is targeted on Google not Microsoft. I think Microsoft is not having anything even remotely similar in the oven to compete with it. Allistair said - "it is for people who does not use tools for their business that were made for advertisemnt". It is also looked pretty much like the next version of Notes, even if IBM has not announced it as such. It looked like it will be delivered sometimes pretty soon - later on Ed Brill admited, that it is targeted to release a beta to partners in 2H 2010 - so I would expect a product release of it just before Lotusphere 2012.