Messaging and Collaboration Strategy Session

Majority running 8.5x with 70+ percent using it.
Lotus Live Notes is doing well.
Ed was probably speaking way too fast for non-English speakers.
Most likely due to the huge amount of info he wanted to get across.

Ah the Future:
So 7.0.x is at End of Life April 2011 start upgrading already, what are you waiting for?
Mostly fixes/updates but likely to only be one point release, 8.5.3.

Lotus Knows Productivity will get rolled out in the US as a new marketing campaign.

LotusLive Notes in 2011:
Domino utility server to be used for apps so you can get apps and mail in LL sometimes this year.

GSX is now monitoring your LotusLive Notes. Why would they do this if no one has control from a client side? Because to ensure SLA's and quality of service issues.

Mobile:
NO Windows mobile


Notes Next:
Concept is done, planning is done, now to get it done.
Ease Cloud integration and Hybrid.
SAML authentication
Automated provisioning

New teamroom template has been posted to openntf.org.
What changes?
inbox no longer the focus
Web/mobile are priorities

The OGS was Interesting

The opening act as you probably heard by now was excellent, I didn't catch their name but very impressive stage show and instruments. Talking Heads man in the big suit type theatrics from Stop Making Sense.

Guest was Kevin Spacey who gave a truly inspiring talk and was well keyed into the 500 students visiting us today.

Group Business Systems and IBM made it possible for 500 local college students to come to Lotusphere today and I am really happy someone did it. The expense and the effort by Group should not be lost on everyone in the Yellow Bubble or at Lotusphere, thank you to them. So stop the students and talk to them, answer questions, do whatever you can because they need to see the past and the future and why it is all important in the context of a social business and world.

Alistair was much better today than yesterday, but still something seemed missing. Maybe it was the oddly worded teleprompter speeches but it did not seem he was comfortable up there, IMHO.

There were not one but 2 customer panels. Why? And the bad scripted Q/A had people reading the teleprompters which was odd to me. Not a very exciting thing to do and why wasn't that part of the CIO events or the Customer Evangelist sessions?

On top of this no mention of numbers, we know the financial ones came out, but were there NO gains? Could the data inside IBM not be correct? Surely we had some good growth somewhere?

Demo's were okay. Northstar is now available in beta as LotusLive Symphony and it is cool, great, fast and from when I played with it, better than Google apps. Your mileage may vary.

The most impressive demo to me was not Vulcan, which was run as an embedded browser in Notes. But the  IBM Software Experience. Go check it out in the showcase floor. The ability to drag and drop followers from Facebook into this suite and just move page items around and all via GUI no IT involved, no special code is truly what every marketer wants. Amazing!

So a mixed morning, but one thing which I and others noticed was a distinct lack of Lotus branding and execs being IBM Collaboration or IBM Social executives. Not saying it means anything, it was just interesting to note.