Day 3 @ Lotusphere

Wow, thats cold. Can´t remember temperatures below 0 Celsius at Lotusphere. But thats not the only thing that is different this year.

No customer meetings, no partner meetings. I am out of business. Not that bad at all. Can see all whats happening here from a different and much more relaxed perspective. No need to turn the stuff I learned into money immediatly.

Twitter. The use of Twitter has become essentially for me. Can´t believe it, because I was so sceptical about microblogging. But Twitter is THE source of whats going on at Lotusphere. I am not sure if really someone outside the Lotus community here reads Live Blogging streams from one of the sessions, but to stay up to date its perfect. When I look around on Laptops nearly everybody checks Twitter streams all the time.

Content: No big bang at the Opening Session. But a continuous information flow all over the week. I think much better than the years before. I liked the smaller keynotes. The Unified Communication & Collaboration keynote was the best I have attended. The only disappointment was the Social Software keynote. I don´t like that style. But some people find it funny. For me it was naiv.

Products. Lotus portfolio has grown too much. To many separate products. They should consolidate the product set. Just remember Allan´s great thoughts on that topic. But: I am happy to see many products becoming more and more mature. Most of the things that were promised at Lotusphere 2008 are now there and usable. Huge improvements for the social software product portfolio Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. Hiuge improvements in the UCC product portfolio: All the things coming up in Sametime 8.5 will help IBM gaining new market share and deliver what they promised. Zero footprint web clients, no plugins, streamlined UI, many usefull new functions – Sametime Meeting Center is now a real competitor to WebEx & Co. Foundations: Hmm, still no idea when people in Germany will hop on that train. My thoughts on LotusLive remain unchanged. Necessary step, looks great, lets see how it evolves. Will test it in a real world situation this year.

Finally living in my Mac world without Lotus Notes as an one man company is still possible, even at Lotusphere. But learning from David Allen using Lotus Notes as his GTD tool makes me feel I will use Lotus Notes in the future again. Until then it would be great if Marco will release ebf.caldav server plugin to get what IBM should deliver: a calendar feed from Domino sources to use iCal even with an Domino backend.

See you at Universal Studios tonight.

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