Lotusphere 2008 Opening General Session
Lotusphere 2008 Opening General Session
Pseudo live blogging to follow. In other words, I'm going to post once it's all said and done, but type it in live. The WiFi is on at full strength for once, nice work by the Lotusphere staff, there shouldn't be any whining about network access this morning.
I'm installing the Notes 8.5 Beta Mac client, so is Mooney, and Declan already finished it. Update: Finished. Faster and easier than the 8.0 Beta was on WinBlows. Left goofy icons in my Application/Lotus Notes folder for some reason, though. Loads damn fast, by the way. Of course, this is a MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM and top end Intel processors. So it shouldn't suck. But it's good, and better than I expected. Under 10 second launch time. Looks exactly like the PC version, too, for the first time in, what, ever? Nice to see.
The Orlando Symphony Orchestra is kicking it into gear. They're rocking out with the warm-up band, and they're nailing it. Very Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Sweet, this is how an OGS should start, classy and kick-ass all at once.
Who's the mystery guest speaker?!? Wacked-out Mac addicts (I can say that, 'cause I am one...) have been rooting for Steve Jobs, since we have the 8.5 Beta coming out this weekend AND the Notes on iPhone rumors running rampant. Not freaking likely, he's waaaaay too cool for this. Mike Rhodin's telling us it's a sports figure. Bob Costas. Sweet. I love that guy. His teleprompter notes are a very vague outline (yeah, I looked backwards to see them on the screen). The European perspective on him, from my neighbors, is that he's an unknown, talking about sports that only Americans care about (American football, in the context of the Patriots, and Baseball). He's onto the Olympics now, though, so hopefully more appropriate for all.
Mike's back, doing the theoretical strategic thing, which is his gig. The geeks are chomping at the bit, though, for announcements and demos.
IBM and RIM are announcing - what, exactly? The screen showed a Blackberry running Connections. Mike just said "working more closely than ever" or something similar, but no product names. They demo'd this later, it's a Connections client for Blackberry.
SAP CTO coming on stage now. IBM estimates 80% overlap between SAP and Lotus customers. Announcing Project Atlantic. Joint software product allowing access to the SAP business suite, right from within the Notes desktop.
Inside joke: The SAP CTO talks faster than Chris Byrne.
Demo of SAP "Atlantic" with plugin in sidebar. This is what IBM wants from the Eclipse architecture. The SAP details were in context within the email and the sidebar. Looks very powerful. It's probably still vapor, but that's a given at this point.
Alistair Rennie is up to talk about Notes/Domino 8. Jeff Eisen (client) and Russ Holden (server) are up for a Geek Cage Match, fighting over which team is moving faster.
Good to see that Jeff still looks like a geek - in jeans up there among the suits. Showed DWA on iPhone. NOT Notes on iPhone. DWA. As predicted. Adding Ubuntu as a Linux platform. Announcing the Notes 8.5 beta.
Russ is pitching the server performance changes, compression, I/O reduction, CPU optimization.
Yes! Widgets in the sidebar. About freaking time! Ron's demoing. Widget pallet. Can END USERS add them? Damn straight. Widget wizard. Notes views, web page, feed, or Google Gadget. Click a button. Nice! This is what the sidebar should have been from 8.0, this is what I was screaming for right on this blog. IBM is delivering it, in spades. Policies can control this, so we're not turning Notes into the Wild Wild West. Ok, I knew this, but it's been a huge pet peeve of mine, so I'm a happy camper. Live text. Widgets can support Live Text or selectable text, if you have an appropriate widget installed you can click on a stock ticker name to see current charts.
DWA Lite demo. I've seen this before, we have it running at work. It's very nice, AJAX-y. Spell check, rich editing, etc. Can switch to Full DWA with a click. Our users love that piece.
Even lighter version now supports use on iPhone or iPod touch. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, just like you'd expect. I wonder if people could use THIS version on a PC. There are people who'd love the simplicity and speed. Must get to the lab to try that out.
N/D 8.01 ship date announced: February.
Russ is pitching 8.5 now. ID server vault This is cool, you can run Notes without sending the Notes ID to the users manually. The specs for this are very well done, by the way. Now that it's announced, you'll see a lot of the admin bloggers start talking about this and other 8.5 admin stuff: Directory freedom, more compression, etc.
Lotus Protector for E-mail Security - an appliance for anti-spam and anti-virus.
Domino Designer 8.5 announced - this is DDE, Domino Designer for Eclipse. Maureen Leland is on stage to demo it. New 8.5 discussion template showed off. Nice looking AJAX-enabled view. XPage design element. Unfortunately, Jeff, Russ and Ron are blocking the front of the left side of the room from seeing the screen, so we don't know what she's showing. Oops! I've seen it before, though - it's an actual modern IDE UI, really. I know, it's hard to believe. Now showing the Lotuscript Class Browser, to much cheering from Blogger Row. heh. Julian can finally stop asking that question at "Meet the Developers."
No dates for 8.5 announced, by the way.
Kevin Cavanaugh's on stage to talk Lotus Symphony. Ooh, he just called M$ Office "commodity software," very subtle... Announcing Beta4 in Feb with application development finally available. Pitching Symphony as a full competitor to Office and .NET apps? Hm. Lots of road to make up there.
Bruce Morse, Unified Communications. Sametime Advanced, adding broadcast and polls and SkillTap. Sametime Unified Telephony, figures out which phone to call if you click on someone, no need to worry where the person is today. This stuff was announced in August, if you Google VoiceCon Skilltap, you'll see it. Ron's showing rules to let you define what phone Sametime should call you at, depending on your location and your status.
Larry Bowden, Portal. I'm a tough sell on this stuff, I'm afraid. I've worked with Portal, and I'm definitely not a fan. We're at version 6.x now, right? Maybe version 8 will impress me. You're going to have to look for details from somebody who's drunk the Portal Kool-Aid, sorry about that. I'm sticking to Guinness and Lagavulin this week, no Kool-Aid on the menu.
We're on to Quickr, Connections, and Activities now. I don't get the change to play with this stuff at work, because we don't have Activities or Connections. To me, these three products really need each other. Quickr less than the other two, but it's still more effective in a Connections orientation than as a stand-alone. The whole Social Networking play really requires a large set of tools. Getting ALL of those tools into a given Lotus customer seems like an issue to me. Partial implementations are likely to fail and give the individual products a bad name.
Lotus Mashups announced. Business users creating their own mashups.
Mike's back to close up. They're running late, supposed to be over at 10, it's 5 past already.
Big announcement, cue the dramatic music. SMB. Lotus Foundations. New line of servers. This is the Nitix acquisition. Mike pulled a server out of an envelope, playing off Steve Jobs at MacWorld. It's a server the size of a hardcover book, up and running in 30 minutes.
Next - bluehouse - Software as a Service for companies with less than 500 employees. This is news, didn't hear it as a rumor. Designed to allow collaboration between various companies, think wedding planner working with caterer or bands or print shops. They've taken Connections and Activities and Quickr and made it available as a subscription, with new features designed to let you work with people who aren't in your company. Managed beta begins today.
Pseudo live blogging to follow. In other words, I'm going to post once it's all said and done, but type it in live. The WiFi is on at full strength for once, nice work by the Lotusphere staff, there shouldn't be any whining about network access this morning.
I'm installing the Notes 8.5 Beta Mac client, so is Mooney, and Declan already finished it. Update: Finished. Faster and easier than the 8.0 Beta was on WinBlows. Left goofy icons in my Application/Lotus Notes folder for some reason, though. Loads damn fast, by the way. Of course, this is a MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM and top end Intel processors. So it shouldn't suck. But it's good, and better than I expected. Under 10 second launch time. Looks exactly like the PC version, too, for the first time in, what, ever? Nice to see.
The Orlando Symphony Orchestra is kicking it into gear. They're rocking out with the warm-up band, and they're nailing it. Very Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Sweet, this is how an OGS should start, classy and kick-ass all at once.
Who's the mystery guest speaker?!? Wacked-out Mac addicts (I can say that, 'cause I am one...) have been rooting for Steve Jobs, since we have the 8.5 Beta coming out this weekend AND the Notes on iPhone rumors running rampant. Not freaking likely, he's waaaaay too cool for this. Mike Rhodin's telling us it's a sports figure. Bob Costas. Sweet. I love that guy. His teleprompter notes are a very vague outline (yeah, I looked backwards to see them on the screen). The European perspective on him, from my neighbors, is that he's an unknown, talking about sports that only Americans care about (American football, in the context of the Patriots, and Baseball). He's onto the Olympics now, though, so hopefully more appropriate for all.
Mike's back, doing the theoretical strategic thing, which is his gig. The geeks are chomping at the bit, though, for announcements and demos.
IBM and RIM are announcing - what, exactly? The screen showed a Blackberry running Connections. Mike just said "working more closely than ever" or something similar, but no product names. They demo'd this later, it's a Connections client for Blackberry.
SAP CTO coming on stage now. IBM estimates 80% overlap between SAP and Lotus customers. Announcing Project Atlantic. Joint software product allowing access to the SAP business suite, right from within the Notes desktop.
Inside joke: The SAP CTO talks faster than Chris Byrne.
Demo of SAP "Atlantic" with plugin in sidebar. This is what IBM wants from the Eclipse architecture. The SAP details were in context within the email and the sidebar. Looks very powerful. It's probably still vapor, but that's a given at this point.
Alistair Rennie is up to talk about Notes/Domino 8. Jeff Eisen (client) and Russ Holden (server) are up for a Geek Cage Match, fighting over which team is moving faster.
Good to see that Jeff still looks like a geek - in jeans up there among the suits. Showed DWA on iPhone. NOT Notes on iPhone. DWA. As predicted. Adding Ubuntu as a Linux platform. Announcing the Notes 8.5 beta.
Russ is pitching the server performance changes, compression, I/O reduction, CPU optimization.
Yes! Widgets in the sidebar. About freaking time! Ron's demoing. Widget pallet. Can END USERS add them? Damn straight. Widget wizard. Notes views, web page, feed, or Google Gadget. Click a button. Nice! This is what the sidebar should have been from 8.0, this is what I was screaming for right on this blog. IBM is delivering it, in spades. Policies can control this, so we're not turning Notes into the Wild Wild West. Ok, I knew this, but it's been a huge pet peeve of mine, so I'm a happy camper. Live text. Widgets can support Live Text or selectable text, if you have an appropriate widget installed you can click on a stock ticker name to see current charts.
Mini-rant: Now I need to see that same ease in development for simple Sidebar apps. I can pull in a Notes view with the wizard, that's good. But give me forms, too. And let me set simple form properties to determine the behavior when running in the Sidebar as opposed to in full screen mode. Give me control over the right-click menus in those views you let me bring into the sidebar, so the users can get options that make sense in that context but not the usual huge list. Give me the same control over Actions in that view. Let one sidebar view link to another sidebar form by setting simple properties. The sidebar is part of Notes, not part of some other system, it needs to act like Notes.
DWA Lite demo. I've seen this before, we have it running at work. It's very nice, AJAX-y. Spell check, rich editing, etc. Can switch to Full DWA with a click. Our users love that piece.
Even lighter version now supports use on iPhone or iPod touch. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, just like you'd expect. I wonder if people could use THIS version on a PC. There are people who'd love the simplicity and speed. Must get to the lab to try that out.
N/D 8.01 ship date announced: February.
Russ is pitching 8.5 now. ID server vault This is cool, you can run Notes without sending the Notes ID to the users manually. The specs for this are very well done, by the way. Now that it's announced, you'll see a lot of the admin bloggers start talking about this and other 8.5 admin stuff: Directory freedom, more compression, etc.
Lotus Protector for E-mail Security - an appliance for anti-spam and anti-virus.
Domino Designer 8.5 announced - this is DDE, Domino Designer for Eclipse. Maureen Leland is on stage to demo it. New 8.5 discussion template showed off. Nice looking AJAX-enabled view. XPage design element. Unfortunately, Jeff, Russ and Ron are blocking the front of the left side of the room from seeing the screen, so we don't know what she's showing. Oops! I've seen it before, though - it's an actual modern IDE UI, really. I know, it's hard to believe. Now showing the Lotuscript Class Browser, to much cheering from Blogger Row. heh. Julian can finally stop asking that question at "Meet the Developers."
No dates for 8.5 announced, by the way.
Kevin Cavanaugh's on stage to talk Lotus Symphony. Ooh, he just called M$ Office "commodity software," very subtle... Announcing Beta4 in Feb with application development finally available. Pitching Symphony as a full competitor to Office and .NET apps? Hm. Lots of road to make up there.
Bruce Morse, Unified Communications. Sametime Advanced, adding broadcast and polls and SkillTap. Sametime Unified Telephony, figures out which phone to call if you click on someone, no need to worry where the person is today. This stuff was announced in August, if you Google VoiceCon Skilltap, you'll see it. Ron's showing rules to let you define what phone Sametime should call you at, depending on your location and your status.
Larry Bowden, Portal. I'm a tough sell on this stuff, I'm afraid. I've worked with Portal, and I'm definitely not a fan. We're at version 6.x now, right? Maybe version 8 will impress me. You're going to have to look for details from somebody who's drunk the Portal Kool-Aid, sorry about that. I'm sticking to Guinness and Lagavulin this week, no Kool-Aid on the menu.
We're on to Quickr, Connections, and Activities now. I don't get the change to play with this stuff at work, because we don't have Activities or Connections. To me, these three products really need each other. Quickr less than the other two, but it's still more effective in a Connections orientation than as a stand-alone. The whole Social Networking play really requires a large set of tools. Getting ALL of those tools into a given Lotus customer seems like an issue to me. Partial implementations are likely to fail and give the individual products a bad name.
Lotus Mashups announced. Business users creating their own mashups.
Mini-rant #2: I can't see this flying in the current heavily regulated world we live in, but then that's my whole issue with "Enterprise 2.0" to begin with. Obviously, lots of smart people disagree with me. But I know what my auditors would say if I told them our users were going to create mashups live on my production server, without any documentation, testing, or approval. The argument is that the individual components themselves are controlled and managed, while the mashup process itself is not relevant to those controls. I call BS on that. If every possible component hasn't been tested in every possible combination with every other possible component, running on every possible version of every possible platform? Not gonna fly in my company. I'm surprised to see IBM try to pitch this without explicitly addressing the auditing firms that are going to have veto power over this approach in most enterprises. How will IBM help enterprises lobby the big auditing firms to allow this mashup platform to be recognized as outside the scope of SOX?
Mike's back to close up. They're running late, supposed to be over at 10, it's 5 past already.
Big announcement, cue the dramatic music. SMB. Lotus Foundations. New line of servers. This is the Nitix acquisition. Mike pulled a server out of an envelope, playing off Steve Jobs at MacWorld. It's a server the size of a hardcover book, up and running in 30 minutes.
Next - bluehouse - Software as a Service for companies with less than 500 employees. This is news, didn't hear it as a rumor. Designed to allow collaboration between various companies, think wedding planner working with caterer or bands or print shops. They've taken Connections and Activities and Quickr and made it available as a subscription, with new features designed to let you work with people who aren't in your company. Managed beta begins today.
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