Are you going to Lotusphere?

Do you like motorbikes?

Want to engage in a relatively new tradition?  Bill writes on his site, but is not on www.planetlotus.org.

So here’s the deal. Saturday morning, first thing, we pick up Bikes from Harley Davidson, Orlando. We ride out, and stay in a cheap motel somewhere. And then we ride back on the Sunday. Why the overnight stay?

In the last couple of years we found that the 75-150 miles you have to ride to get to anywhere interesting means that we’re spending more time getting to and from places than spending time there.

The plan would be to arrive at in Orlando on the Friday, so we can go pick up the bikes on Saturday morning and (maybe) stay somewhere else on the Saturday night, returning Sunday.  This is all open for discussion.

Last year was great, although slightly disorganised.  I have a skype chat for anyone interested so if you would like to get details, comment or email me with your skype details or just add me on skype.

As many people know, I am a big fan of BES and the devices in the enterprise.  I am also a fan of Traveler.  But these are two very different beasts.

Traveler is free, and you get what you pay for.  It is a fully functional mail / PIM tool for multiple devices.  It does this very well.  For free.  It uses it’s own client and SyncML or Activesync when needed, depending on the device.

Blackberry Enterprise server is also this and a whole lot more.  Much more customisable, much more malleable, much more secure, much more functional in the application space, a web proxy and a total extension of your corporate world.  It routes all messages through military secure NOC’s globally with many certifications for encryption.  It is not as consumer focused as the typical Traveler devices.  Because Blackberry came from the enterprise world.

Many companies only see the word “free” and going down the path of Traveler.  Some are abandoning their BES architcture and license costs for Traveler.  This is fine as long as it suits your business.  On a number (more then 4, less then 10) of times I have been asked the following types of questions by operations teams that now support Traveler.

Q: “Can I control all the devices fully with Traveler”

A: Not really

Q: “I have been told to implement clustering for it.  Does it support it?”

A: Not really.  Or at all, depending on how you look at it.

Q: “I want to push out secure applications to the devices”

A: I hate to disappoint.. but.

Q: “I have been asked to disable xx applications on the devices now.  Can I do this in Traveler?”

A: “In some cases yes, but in many no”

Q: “I want to use Traveler to control all data on the devices, and disable some of its features.  Can I do this in Traveler?”

A: “It depends, but simple answer is you don’t have full control anymore”

Why?  Because you get what you pay for.  If you want the hammer to hit the nail, go with Traveler.  But don’t give your operations team grief when you want to use the hammer to build a fort.  It doesn’t work that way.  Buy a BES.

LoLA is over for another year and although I can say very little about the event content, I doubt the IBM armed response team will plough through the hotel window and have 400 lawyers sit on me for giving my thoughts on the event itself.

To me LoLA is very different to Lotusphere.  The content is less staged and more honest.  (Slightly) Less marketing and more facts.  It is much more about connecting with customers and IBM execs then techie talk.  In many ways, it is a lot more business level productive then Lotusphere due to it’s formality and format.  That said, Lotusphere has much more real world content then LoLA ever will.  At LoLA, new features are not dictated to you, they are discussed.  You are asked your opinion on strategy and get to give feedback on future directions.  You then get to see over the coming years if your opinion was heeded.  In Q&A sessions, IBM’s dilemma as a software company is very obvious.  When an IBM’r asks “Do you think this is a good idea?” and 50% nod and 50% think it’s crap you realise that they will never please everyone.

It is an event that is now a fixture in my diary from now on and I look forward to it next year.

I don’t want to be the dick that blogs “I know secret stuff but I can’t tell you normal mortals” but of course the NDA and (moreso) respect of the request from IBM not to blog means I can’t say what I saw.  But I will say that some of the newer features en route are visually excellent and user-minded.

Tomorrow morning I head to Boston for LoLA.  A 2.5 day mini-conference with open and frank discussions (albeit with some limits on what can be made public).  Looking forward to getting there and meeting some old friends, and making new ones.  I expect a very cloudy 2.5 days.

After that, I head to Delaware (via Philadelphia) on Wednesday to work on a customer site and then back to Ireland on Friday night.

My last trip to the USA was in January, where the US border “audition” was eventful (and not pleasant).  As I have often said, the USA is the only country in the world where I have felt anxious entering their border.  Let’s hope it doesn’t happen this time.