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You are here: Home › Blog

Blogging Live - Lotusphere Comes To You (LCTY) in St Louis


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From the very opening breakfast the attendees were discussing the lack of heavy technical and directional content.  Two rooms of sessions to cover a bit more content would have been great.   With only 3 session and the keynote it left holes.  But saying that..   attendance looked towards 70 on a quick count.  Great for St Louis.

Keynote: John Dunderdale, VP of Worldwide Sales in Lotus SW (who we had lunch with yesterday as Business Partners), was the keynote speaker.

  • He covered the resurgence in attendance at Lotusphere and the solid double digit growth of Notes.
  • Market share is solid and growing.
  • Kids today don't email, they use social software
  • The agile business embraces change (me: how many companies are still fighting not to upgrade?)
  • We then jumped into the Domino 8 announcements - all you have seen online already
  • Sametime 7.5 was up next..  Point-to-point video, tabbed chat, Office Integration and Outlook, Mac client, Linux server and the list goes on
  • Kraig Vanderbeek jumped up to continue Sametime 7.5.1 demonstrations.  Overall he had about 15 plug-in loaded. (me: this leads me back to my March LotusUserGroup.org newsletter's editor section on making these available with no support to give us wow factor for demos).
  • He demonstrated all the pieces you would expect to see in all the new areas.
  • Portal was next on the list..
  • Lotus Quickr discussion came up to talk about Lotus' document management space.  80 sites are testing this product now
  • Lotus Connections came to close the keynote (the restlessness of slideware was starting to show).  Dogear got it's do mention and then Activities.  No one seemed to notice that Activities is Lotus Connections and not Domino 8.  475,000 profiles exist with 6 million hits per day on their internal BluePages.  IBM Community Map has over 700 communities now.

You need to read on for the Quickr comments.....



PORTAL
I managed to miss the Notes/Domino 8 slides for a conference call but made it back in for Portal.
Jon Raslawsi, technical and sales guru and friend of mine, took the stage.  He does a heck of an awesome job presenting any topic across any product Lotus offers.  He made Portal 6 and the new enhancements actually look fun.

At lunch, humorously most of the vendors sat with the attendees so the booths sat read to pounce but not much traffic.  Kind of defeated the purpose.

LOTUS CONNECTIONS
Social Computing was done by Laurisa (new married name I missed) from IBM in Texas and covered Lotus Connections.  Quite a few of the people had left after lunch since Domino 8, Sametime and Portal were complete.  Information on hardware and system requirements was terribly missing from these presentations and the demos were all canned Flash.  I would presume those would be backup incase of network issues but it was the basis the presenters were given.  So the demo walked through rather nicely

QUICKR
Jelan Heidelberg, Offering manager for Lotus Quickr, came last to talk about..well Quickr.  Now she went live with demonstrations and stated the managed beta just began.  Due to the aggressive schedule there is not a public beta scheduled.  She stated they are trying hard to make late June 2007 release.  The Connectors look great for hooking into data stores.
  • The new menu item in Notes is instead of the old File-Attach and sending to a ton of people, you can link to a folder or document in Quickr with a new File menu option.  The navigation pop-up is like navigating the C drive in Windows.  The link will grab the document and start the program.  The web link will open the document over the web and see the context it around it.  Awesome!
  • WOW!  If I do file-attach and do it the old way, a new pop-up comes up (with the Quickr Connector installed) and prompts the user to 'Send as-is" or send it to a Quickr library.  Now you talk about productivity, storage and bandwidth gains!
  • Let's take it a step further to have a Quickr plug-in for Sametime 7.5.x.  You can start a chat, invite people and talk about a commonly linked document.
  • There is even Office integration (like Sametime 7.5.1) with a new toolbar menu called Lotus Quickr - Add to Library, Open for Library, Create from Document Type of even tools around being checked out.
  • Windows Explorer has a menu integration included to move documents around.  Like the libraries in Domino.Doc.
  • Outlook integration is coming - might be a partner doing this she said - Carl?
  • Lotus Connections/Activities is in the future, but no connector right now.  Weird to me since hooking to documents in Activities is a part and then Activities is part of Connections.  You can dogear a link to a Quickr doc or whatever, but not my first thought.
  • Quickr Personal was like a shock to some of the people.  Which let's you see how out of touch some are in marketing and new products.
Excellent presentation!