Tomorrow morning, I spend the Irish Bank Holiday on a plane to St Louis for IAMLug.  This is my second IAMLug and I am very much looking forward to meeting all the guys again.  After that, the Teamstudio Mobile Technology workshop will be held on Wednesday.  It’s gonna be a busy week.

See you all there.

Before my vacation, I presented at the Admin2011 conference, which was linked to/scheduled with Paclug 2011.  Although I did not have any involvement with Paclug, from what I could see it was a successful event.  Admin 2011, was, as ever, a technical deep dive with excellent speakers and quality of content.  This is a technical event with meat on the bones, and the content exceeds most other events, including Lotusphere in many respects.  It also has minimal marketing sessions, which makes me happy.

While en route to Las Vegas, I had mentioned on twitter that I was looking for a new headset for my desk.

By pure coincidence and with great generosity, the organisers of Paclug has a Plantronics Voyager Pro kit for me when I arrived.  Very much appreciated, thank you.  I shall give it a test run and blog about it later.  Additionally, the first  IBM Collaboration Solutions (i.e. Lotus) Champions were announced.  I was fortunate enough to be on that list.  It is a veritable who’s who of contributors to the technology and “community”.  The vast majority of them contribute a lot more than I.   I was also happy to not recognise everyone on it.

As said before, Las Vegas is not an ideal place for a smaller conference, as there are way too many distractions.   Aside from that, the Planet Hollywood venue is excellent.  After that, we went on vacation.  Some thoughts:

• Vegas for vacation is great for a few days.  I wouldn’t stay any longer.
• Cirque du Soleil “Love” was amazing, and visually exhausting.
• There are certain things you have to do in Vegas when single, other things when married.  Enough said
• I am not (or ever will be) a fan of Garth Brooks, but a guy that can sing solo with only a guitar for 2 1/2 hours deserves respect.  Everyone else went nuts, so I guess he was great.
• Grand Canyon.  The only place I have ever been that is visually bigger than I could ever guess.
• It’s a long drive from Vegas to San Francisco.
• Highway One is stunning, so are many of the places on the route.
• San Francisco is hands down, the friendliest place in the USA I have ever been to.
• San Francisco is also living, breathing advertisement for Apple.
• Boston is fantastic.  I heartily recommend the duck tour and going to a redsox game.
• 4th July fireworks are big.  Very big.

Tomorrow, I start heading to Las Vegas again, but this time for an IBM/Lotus tech conference.  I missed last year’s Admin event in Boston, and am looking forward to meeting the organisers and delegates again. Time time around, I will present four sessions.

• Domino as a web server
• DAOS
• Traveler
• BES clustering

I’m sure I will see some of the PacLUG attendees lurking around too!  The Admin conference is much more technical than Lotusphere, and has very little to do with marketing.  As much as I am not looking forward to the commute, I know it will be great.

After an all-too-brief stay in Larvik, I am back in an airport waiting for a Ryanair flight to London to meet customers tomorrow.  The team at LSBG put together a fine event, and should be very proud of themselves.  The hotel is fantastic, and it is hard to beat such stunning scenery.  A relaxed atmosphere, magician, good fun (and beer) with Ron Sebastian made for a great night.  This morning I presented the adminblast session and a session devoted to clustering recommendations.  Good questions, good conversations.    A return visit must be planned, with an extended stay.

In between customer meetings in London this week, I will be heading to Oslo to present at the Norwegian Lotus User Group event.  It is a new one for me, as I had to sadly cancel my attendance last year.  On the Thursday morning I will be presenting the Lotusphere 2011 Adminblast presentation and then a separate session on clustering.  Oh yes, and I get to take my first Ryanair flight this year!  Joy.

• Vegas is an impressive place to host a conference.  Cheap, massive capacity, lots to do, but a *lot* of distractions that easily fragment the attendees.  If you want to maximise your education at an event, I don’t think Vegas is for you.  If you want to entertain (or be entertained) it’s impossible to beat.
• Symantec Vision is a very well organised event.
• The bags and swag are way better than Lotusphere
• At IBM events, I typically know a lot of people.  Some of them know me.  At this event I am a total newbie.   Strange feeling.  It is easy to say there is no sense of “community” here, but there are gangs of people eating and drinking together.  There is a “community” but I’m just not a member.
• It’s hot.  Very very hot.  That said, going outdoors rarely happens.  I miss fresh air.
• Everyone is polite to the nth degree.
• Mobile device management sessions were standing room only.  Symantec are entering this space very soon.
• I introduce myself as a person working with Enterprise Vault first, then IBM technologies.  I don’t mention Lotus as (to be honest) it is embarrassing with this crowd.
• Most people discussing Lotus notes include “we are thinking/planning migration” in the sentence.  When I ask why, the answers are vague.
• Everyone admits there is massive amounts of data still in Domino applications on thousands of sites.  Enterprise Vault would be wise to leverage the ability to archive this data.
• I’m very used to travel, but a 2-day trip to Vegas from the UK is harsh.  A 10 hour flight awaits me to Gatwick.

Well done Dennis!

From my door in Belfast to my hotel room in Ceasar’s palace in Las Vegas.  Best guess wins the traditional prize.

Kicking off a few months of heavy travel with my first ever Symantec Vision Conference where Bluewave have been asked to speak twice regarding their experiences with Symantec Enterprise Vault for Domino.  If you are an IBM/Lotus/Domino person and will be at the event, drop me a line and we can meet up.

The UKLUG agenda went online this morning.  A lot of sessions have been crammed into a two day geekfest.  Take a look and register.