Lotusphere Keynote
Opening gambit - audience rocked to the core by slightly worrying popular beat combo, complete with glitzy light show. Actually, the quality of the broadcast graphics and lightshow is pretty good 
Think Top of The Pops.
Big surprise (not really) in the choice of Neil Armstrong, who is giving the keynote address. The audience is generally bewitched to have the self-confessed Installation Technician addressing them. A major coup played by Lotus Group on the choice of speaker? Perhaps not, according to seasoned hacks at the show - as the number of retired Astronauts doing the speech rounds in Florida is pretty high still.
Still, from a personal standpoint, it was a moment I would have never expected to have had and even though I prefer my unmanned exploration science to manned missions, I was quietly in awe.
Mike Rhodin gives his opening address. He seems a little impatient to ge the message across - perhaps becuase Lotus have turned a corner in terms of the products they are putting out to market - inspite of themselves. There seems to be a great deal of momentum around the company at the moment - a palpable sense of positivism from the staffers around in the Halls (even those with the 6AM start of day shifts).
A few product details coming up:
Sametime updates - confirmed update will include Video calling and addition of a Mac client. Expect that the Sametime platform will also be available to run on Linux back-end.
Demo of Sametime happening with Cisco’s softphones. A cocophony of ringtones happening. My ears are bleeding.
Other stuff:
- Integration with Office ribbons (tick)
- Integration with RIM & Blacberry - multiuser chat (tick)
- Convert to call feature for voice communication (big tick).
Ken Bisconti coming on stage.
Lotus Notes for SAP delivered. Converted 500 companies from other platforms. 92% of customers using 6.5 or 7. 7.2 : Notes on a stick etc. Notes shipment up 30% by q4. Hannover now officially Domino 8 / Notes 8.
It’s damn hot in this room.
Demo of Notes 8 happening. new interface is SOOOOOO much tidier than the existing client templates. Showing threaded views at the moment, so the Groupwise fanboys will be kept happy.
Intenal Browser and RSS feed reader being shown. Hope it’s better than the current one which throws javascript exceptions for accessing DWA etc.
Client includes all the IBM editors for PPT /Doc /Xls etc., and can export to PDF
Thumbnail view added to navigate through the open tabs.
Domino ‘Next’ beyond 8. 64-bit support, more authentication methods. Content Management integration.
New product announcements - Lotus Quickr content sharing. Store/share/search content and information. Personal document management. Bascially filesystem available through RSS or Atom Feed - therefore multi-platform support. Expecting to provide connectors for desktop applications (guess Office). Take content offline in an .nsf file. later this years very Notes user will get a personal edition at no additional charge.
Quickr standard edition - team workspace, DB2 content integration, content workflow, etc. Ok - so this is the replacement for Quickplace then. Thank goodness for that. Quickplace will be replaced automagically with Quickr Standard Edition. YAY! Anyone reading this at work - DOWN TOOLS NOW AND STOP FURTHER QUICKPLACE DEV.
Will support MS Sharepoint repositories.
And note, an hour in to this I have yet to see the Webtop paradigm. These guys are *ALL* using clients.
Hurrah! Nag box has just appeared in the demo to say do you really want to send that document, or just send a link to it.
Showing some of the templates. ‘My Ideas’ ‘Team Ideas’ and Ideas development. Built-in wiki templates with Quickr Standard.
Larry Bowden taken the stage. Now on to Websphere Portal. Good to see that the HeyDay site has been shown on one of the slides
Google gadgets in WS6.0. Hmm…MORE stock tickers available then WS Express will ship this month on Jan 30th. SMB / Department sized.
‘Web 2.0′ Portal. Oh dear. back to Google gadgets again. Do they not realise that if they continue to push GG they may as well give up on WS and just tell everyone to go and use Google’s personalised home instead
Single composite application development framework for all applications niw. Lotus Expeditor 6.1 - used to build Samteime Client/Notes 8 client. Take Portal 6.0 apps offline using Expeditor.
Moving on to overview of Domino Designer 8. Visual editor for WSDl. domino develoeprs can write apps for Portal without writing Java. Pity we don’t have any Domino developers
Composite Application Editor Demo.
Lasers everywhere. Here we go with Lotus Connections.
Dogear + Blog + Profiles (a la BluePages). Looks really good. Activities in there, but they’re not covering it in depth in this session. More on this in a bit.
Tags: connections, lotus, mac_client, neil_armstrong, quickr, sametime, softphones