Lotusphere2007 Opening General Session
Tags :Lotusphere2007 Lotusphere
First things first. There was a signal but no connection to the Internet from 3 attempted places in the room. While we could see access points, there was no way to get to LotusphereLive or any other site. I managed to hit one or two pages and then it went away again. So this was what happened all morning in my eyes.
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After a nice live band opening the show, Mike Rhodin took the stage for the introduction and 2 minute recap of 2006.
- Sametime is over 1M seats since Sametime 7.5 shipped!
- 7k people here in Orlando, up 11% since last year
- 85 reporters and a ton of analysts
- 1869 certified professionals
- Second Life opens tomorrow online for Lotusphere. Ed gave the link last night
The guest speaker was... Neil Armstrong. He received a standing ovation from everyone in the crowd. His immediate tip is why Orlando International is the title MCO. I never knew why. It was named for McCoy Air Force Base, which turned into the airport. It was here they did the X1 rocket work if I heard correctly. He joking stated that once they got the idea to race the Russians into space, no one was quite willing. Until they chose pilots. The Americans fell behind the space race with the 3rd person in space behind the cosmonauts. Neil made the first spacecraft docking in space and made a good joke about setting a landing record, for the farthest away from the aircraft carrier.
Mike Rhodin took the stage once again after Neil closed with another standing ovation. He made a good joke about not having to worry about being in the "Office" and the removal of the word "Office"
- Access should be easier to information through better and faster ways
- the mailbox needs to be tamed
Mike turned it over to Akiba Saeedi and Bruce Morse to talk about Sametime 7.5
- 3500 customer downloads of Sametime 7.5. Huge demand shown for new technology
- Customer case studies were mentioned about DOD, GE and Intellicare (a Connectria customer). While they provide a quick clip, there is always the murmur to hear more about how they did the implementation
- Sametime 7.5.1 is announced with video chat in point-to-point connectivity. I heard the giant vacuum of bandwidth sounds. But what a way to bring
- Tabbed chat
- Linux server
- Mac client platform support
- Microsoft Office and Outlook integration
- UC2 is the new theme for Sametime and Unified Communications
Ron Sebastian then jumps in with live demo and Sametime 7.5 and video
- you can invite devices and people for multi point video
- tabbed chats is now integrated (I remember asking for that one in the beta program)
- Smart Tags in Office sees the names and start chats from within the Office docs
- the softphone integration was a nice touch but a lot, I mean a lot of clicks for voice calls
- Blackberry integration showed off click to call
Ken Bisconti then was up next
- 130 million seats of Lotus Notes with competitive wins worldwide. If this doesn't say growth and market position, then people in other shops don't understand simple math of true collaboration software.
- The name Hannover is now officially dropped as a project name and it is fully Notes and Domino 8
- ODF technology is built into the Notes 8 client. This brings a whole new solution to the SMB market for large cost savings.
- He tossed it over to Ron again for a demo
- Ghosted entries show in the calendar show to let you choose to accept an invitation or not without being in the mailfile.
- He also showed the ability to import calendars based on standards right into your own with a couple clicks. I would like to see this easier for the users, but this is still in beta. Having certain business applicaitons serving RSS feeds would make notifications much easier and you can work with the streams.
- Threaded mail messages click open with ease from right in the inbox with a simple arrow.
- The simple click RSS reader will be an excellent enhancement. Now can you push pre-configured feeds down? That would be awesome
- Sametime integration is full and complete. All the side items can be floated or docked to let the user drive the interface with ease.
- Convert to PDF built into the client, that will be huge for all enterprises.
- Message recall ability is being made available. I imagine this will be an on/off feature controlled by admins through policies. This also means some new mail template changes in store.
- tighter integration with Websphere Portal, Larry Bowden covers that further below.
- Then it was moved beyond Notes 8
- alternative directory support for authentication
- the move to support 64-bit platforms without mandating them.
- Domino Next will have more content management abilities integrated.
Allister Rennie announced Lotus Quickr software
- There was a note to a Personal Edition to share and store your own content. Think about this storage as a place people will back up harddrives and share content everywhere. Storage concerns will be an issue here. I did like the RSS and Atom feeds built in. We aren't talking companies hosting family photos, we are talking content that can be shared and replicated locally. An interesting twist to security controls and policy management
- Every licensed Notes or DWA user will be able to use the Personal Edition for free. Yes, no additional charge.
- Quickplace license holders will be able to use the Standard Edition of Quickr for free. This has more built in capabilities and controls that the personal edition,of course. Information on that will be forthcoming as they did not fully cover that.
- Microsoft Sharepoint repositories will be included with the purchase that IBM preformed of FileNet
Larry Bowden comes on next to discuss Portals and collaboration
- Google gadgets will be available as mashups within Portal 6
- Forms handling capabilites were integrated this past year to increase speed and redice errors
- There is a new Workflow Builder
- IBM Websphere Portal 6 Express ships on January 30th
- A personal Portal mode to work offline and disconnected will be available
- Using the Google gadgets they showed how AJAX will allow only portional Portal screen updates for better performance for the end user
Allister returns to talk about how Notes 8 based on Eclipse can run Domino apps online and online
- A common runtime wrapped with Lotus Designer allows Domino 8, Sametime and Portal to allow you to build and depoly components that can be shared without writing Java code
- Lotus Expeditor 6.1 and Portlet Factory provide some foundations for SOA, J2EE and a slew of other opportunities
- The Composite Application Editor in Notes 8 allows you to mix all of the above
- The demo was a portlet built in Component Designer, then have it run offline. Move it over to to Sametime and pray for more.
- Now call me silly, but in the lower right of Ron's demo computer it sat there trying to retrieve a wireless connection. Just call that humorous
- Quite an impressive demo actually. One tool, one solution, one product. Wait, that is a movie line.
Mike Rhodin was back to provide more product news
- He announced Lotus Connections and passed the stage to Jeff
Jeff Schick, the new vp of Social computing took the stage to talk about Lotus Connections
- This was a terrific announcement on how Socaial Computing will change the workplace with the integration of blogs, dogears and basic profiles about individuals to get better response and ease of finding knowledge in your enterprise.
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On Monday, January 22nd, 2007 by Chris Miller
