As said in the last post, I’m on the way home. Sitting in Orlando
airport trying to compile all the information gathered over the past week.
Lotus did a great job of putting most minds at ease in relation to
Notes. Talk was rampant about Notes 8 and 9, let alone 7. Notes
7 Beta 3 is a feature completed build of 7.0 now (what you see now is what
will be in the 7.0 release, nothing more) and is available right away.
As Richard
Schwartz said, this is the
first year that IBM really "got" Notes, and stopped trying to
force Websphere down user’s throats. It focused on the Lotus suite
a lot more then last year. Funnily enough though, this year, there
was a lot of interest in Websphere and Workplace. I found myself
skipping the ND7 presentations and heading to workplace ones… and I was
far from alone on this. Note to IBM.. carrot works better then
stick, and the activity explorer is a big carrot.
The Workplace message made more sense then ever, and the workplace client,
tied into ND7 really impressed many people. It still needs a lot
of work, but this product is definitely on the way. I hope to play
with Workplace and express over the next week to see what I can do with
it for the next Blue Wave presentations.
Ask the developer session went well, with some interesting points made
by many people. The one that stands out in my mind was the complaint
on renaming Quickplace, Sametime, iNotes, Aptrix etc. to "mad"
names received a huge round of applause from the crowd. Ed
Brill came up and dealt with
the statement in the most honest way possible. Lotus are not going
to undo the name change as that would look worse but the focus should be
on the IBM brand name in all the products (quite a few people shouted up
"IBM Sametime then"!).
The power and respect of the blog scene really got a lot of attention over
the week. The session on blogging and the BOF session were both full,
and in almost every other breakout session, blogging was mentioned in one
way or another. Ed and his "congregation" are now public,
and all the blog sites were advertised (my hit count this week was five
times more then usual). Richard posted his issue with the Activity explorer
not supporting doclinks after the opening day. Within 12 hours, he
had an email from the technical architect and a response to his blog agreeing
with him, stating that they will add it in. Powerful stuff.
The blogging BOF discussed many thoughts on blog sites, not least of which
is the possibility of implications of putting your thoughts "out there".
The internet has a very long memory, and to a point "you are
what you post". My site is primarily technical, as I don’t
really put much out on my private life. As discussed on the day,
I imagine that the idea of having a personal and professional blog site
and keeping them separate will really catch on in future.
I found out what is wrong with the IBM learning software (LMS and workplace
collaborative learning). They are being developed in Ireland….
’nuff said. 
. LVC as a product is now finished (wasn’t that good
really anyway).
The showcase products available were amazing, and I have many to research
over the next few months. Some of these I will demo in Irish sessions
in the near future. From a Lotus Education perspective (I do teach
from time to time) I got to meet the IBM education team and discuss some
of the product ranges coming along in the near future. Over the years,
the IBM courseware has been average-ish and this time I have offered to
SME review the ND7 official courseware in my own time before release. It
will be interesting to see if they come back to me on this. If they
don’t, and the courseware is poor again, there will be phone calls made.
Above all that, I got to meet some incredibly smart, friendly people over
the four days, and leave with many good memories. ("in times of adversity…..is
that right Ayaz?"). Universal studios park was amazing.
Some final points on the week:
- Bring cold weather gear next time
- Notes as a product is not going anywhere.
Workplace is another product suite that will tightly integrate with
it, if you want to.
- Lotus staff hate those bloody denim
shirts (especially the women).
- Sleep is optional. Drinking very
late and then up for a 7am breakfast session can be done.
- Scotsmen should not be let in the US
- I don’t mix with Roller-coasters
Update – Just home to see that I missed out on Steven Wright. Bummer.
Was he any good?
See you all next year
