Let’s just ignore the man from Plymouth who two years ago said it was a four hour journey so Lotusphere didn’t exactly come to him (which I actually thought was quite amusing but not useful feedback for planning future events). LCTY ’09 (the UK version) is now open for registration. As in previous years you have a choice – Manchester (the Radisson SAS hotel at Manchester Airport, 28th April) and London (Hilton on Park Lane, 30th April). Well, actually you have three choices (see below) and hopefully soon to be four.
We have the agenda finalised, but it’s not on the web site yet – the session abstracts are currently being collected and reviewed, and will be published soon. There will of course be a keynote speech covering the major Lotusphere announcements, there will be some customers speaking about how Lotus solutions have enhanced their businesses, and then there’ll be the usual two tracks in the afternoon. The days will be capped off with a guest speaker – I’ve put in the same suggestion as the last four years, this year someone is investigating said person but we believe he’ll be too expensive. It won’t be Jeremy Clarkson because as Paul Mooney knows the budget doesn’t stretch anywhere near as far.
As you would expect, we’re using Lotus technology to manage the events (you’d hope so wouldn’t you). Lotus Activities, part of IBM Lotus Connections (available from your Lotus reseller or sales rep right now), is the perfect solution – we’ve already captured ideas of content, links, presentations, to-dos, comments, instant messages, agendas (from a Notes application) and registration data. The wonderful thing is that no-one has to ask where things are posted, and it cuts down on the e-mails. Apart from one (sent before the activity was created) there have been no e-mails containing file attachments. That alone makes people very happy.
The image on the right shows the activity itself, accessed via the Notes 8.5 client and displayed by section. Note the ‘Online’ indicator at the bottom… in Notes 8.5 you can takes activities off-line just as you’ve always been able to do with Notes applications.
Do I hear the Welsh and Scottish among you complaining that both events are situated in England? Fair enough, let’s start with news of Lotusphere Comes To Wales (19th March) which is being run by Codel Software in conjunction with our good friends at Cardiff University. Scotland? We’re working on it.
