The IBM Collaboration Solutions UKI (that’s UK and Ireland) Technical Sales team are hosting a number of events through April and May 2011. The TechJams are focused on covering many parts of the IBM Collaboration Solutions portfolio, including:

• Customising and extending Connections 3
• Cloud-based messaging and collaboration (that’ll be LotusLive)
• Exceptional web experiences
• Collaborating using mobile devices
• Unified communications and collaboration

Two dates are set so far, 5th April and 20th May – both in Lotus Park in Staines – but more dates and locations will be added soon. If you’d like to attend, add a comment and I’ll give you a contact e-mail address.

If you are an IBM Business Partner we’d love to see you there, but the entry fee is to escort a customer whom you have invited. IBM customers can attend free-of-charge.

It’s about this time of year that daffodils start to emerge and our thoughts turn to Lotusphere Comes To You. But this year the events aren’t billed as Lotusphere Comes To You – instead they will go under the name of ‘Get Social, Do Business’. We’ve announced five (yes, five) dates:

• 13th April – Warrington – hosted by Polymorph
• 4th May – Edinburgh (hopefully without the added delights of a volcanic apocalypse this year)
• 18th May – London

Polymorph’s event (which is actually still named LCTY) is open for registration. I spoke to Polymorph’s Head of Sales and Marketing, Andy Dunbar, today – the draft agenda is looking great and the final tweaks and confirmation of speakers will make it even better.

Registration and further details of the remaining IBM-hosted Get Social, Do Business events will be posted here soon. In the meantime, mark your diaries and check my Twitter updates for further news.

Update: click here for venues, the agenda and registration.

If you haven’t discovered the This Week in Lotus podcast series yet I suggest that you check it out. This week would be a good time to start – joining regular hosts Stuart McIntyre and Darren Duke are Suzanne Livingstone and Mac Guidera from the Lotus Connections product management team (discussing Connections 3, which will feature here on dadams.co.uk very soon).

Also featured in episode 26 – and I apologise for this appalling act of self-promotion – is one Mr Darren Adams, talking about notesiscool.com. Like so many other people I hate listening to my own voice, I think I sound like Jools Holland and say “errrrm” and “you know” too much.

Regardless of my own shortcomings as a broadcaster the podcast was great fun to record, and thanks to Stuart and Darren (Duke)’s enthusiasm and informal style it’s always a great listen.

Episode 26 is available to listen to on-line and is also available on iTunes.

To start with, I think this article has an amusing opening line…

Once the neglected stepchild of IBM’s colossal services business and systems unit…

Presented in the style of a slide-show, this article describes why software is now big business in IBM (which I’m rather relieved to hear). The Lotus brand gets three slides right at the end, describing Project Vulcan, LotusLive Labs and the expanding support for mobile devices. So, head straight to slide 25.

Here’s a chance to register for some Lotus  webcasts during June…

• A deep-dive on building Lotus Domino applications with XPages (17th)
• Drive growth and deliver outstanding business results through exceptional web experiences (22nd)
• Harness a changing workforce and drive growth with social software (23rd)
• Collaboration in the cloud: grow your business and reduce costs (24th)

To register go to this page and then follow the links to the individual webcasts.

If you missed the UK LCTY events, or you attended and want to enjoy the sessions all over again, you can go here.

It has been noted that the audience looks a bit sparse, but that’s because the camera captures the first few rows. And as you all know, people tend to avoid the front rows. I don’t know why – I know you get wet when you sit at the front at SeaWorld, but that doesn’t tend to happen at software events.

This promised to be a busy week – two LCTY events, and in the middle I had to go to Dublin for a day to provide some Lotus strategy / portfolio training. That involved flying from Heathrow to Dublin, Dublin to Edinburgh, and then Edinburgh to Heathrow. Mother Nature had other ideas, but more on that later.

LCTY London was a knock-out – I don’t know the final attendance number but the place was swarming with customers and business partners. I spent a lot of the day with the film crew from our PR agency, ensuring that we were capturing the thoughts of customers, partners and IBM staff. You can see the results here… of course I managed to get my handsome mug on camera, but unfortunately the edit gives the impression that I repeated myself (probably because I did).

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the closing talk by Professor Brian Cox, discussing the vast and tiny aspects of the universe. To say that he had the audience mesmerised was an understatement. I had the chance of a brief chat with him before he went on, and I asked how long the ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ series took to film (answer: from March to November 2009) and if he really went to all those places just to film some relatively small excerpts (answer: no, because while there they took the opportunity to film content for other programs). Professor Cox, like so many of our favourite speakers over the years, stuck around to chat afterwards, and even autographed Wild Bill’s iPad.

Click on the picture of Professor Cox for a larger version.

After a day in Dublin I boarded a plane (with propellers) to Edinburgh. Twenty minutes after the cabbage crate was due to take off, the pilot informed us that we would now be leaving (good) but would be making a brief stop in Glasgow so that they could drop off an engineer and some spare parts (oh, great). Upon landing at Glasgow, the stewardess said “ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Glasgow”. Like we wanted to be there… which, of course, we didn’t. The subsequent short hop from Glasgow to Edinburgh was over before the plane could get above thirty feet.

I then joined some colleagues in a sports bar to watch Tottenham versus Arsenal, and the least said about that the better.

Thursday morning started with news of the volcanic apocalypse, and after breakfast with my frolleague Richard Bye I checked whether the hotel could extend my stay. Seconds later a text message from British Airways arrived, stating that my flight had been cancelled. Very efficient BA… and the text message arrived at 7:47 (yes, 747, how ironic).

I quickly investigated the possibility of returning home via train, and in a matter of minutes the 16:30 and 17:00 trains became fully-booked and unavailable. So I booked the 17:30 train. After another successful LCTY (with more filming) I boarded the train and got home around midnight. Some of my colleagues arranged a convoy of rental cars and arrived home a lot later.

I guess I have to thank Mother Nature for delaying the ash cloud by twelve hours… I think a journey home by ferry and train from Dublin would have been a lot longer and more stressful.

One more snippet of info, discovered by Mike Smith of The Turtle Partnership. There was one other LCTY event going on that day, the 15th of April. Do you know where? Rekyavik… that’s in Iceland.

This was announced on Twitter today, but I wanted to provide some more information. Following nine months in the role of Messaging & Collaboration Business Unit Executive (North East Europe) I’m moving back to a role with Lotus UK & Ireland (UKI as it’s known). In the this new role I’ll be looking after the growth markets of Unified Communication & Collaboration and software-as-a-service. In other words, Sametime in all it’s flavours, Sametime Unified Telephony, and LotusLive.

Perceptions are interesting. I received a great many ‘congratulations’ messages today – thank you for those. I also received a few messages along the lines of “what happened?”, “was I happy about it?” and “was I pushed?”. I know the reasons for these questions – essentially the North East Europe role could be seen as senior to the UKI role. I’m returning to a role very similar to my previous role, albeit with different aspects of the portfolio.

To answer those questions… yes I am happy and no I wasn’t pushed. I instigated the move. I was asked to re-consider, and I received a great many internal e-mails citing disappointment (and best wishes) and an acknowledgement that I’d done a great job.

So why did I make the move back? I’m not going to discuss it fully here, but one of the main reasons was travel – multiple days away and arriving back late at night was not suiting me or the family. I know some people relish it and find the travel exciting, but I didn’t realise the impact it would have.

My new title will be something like ‘Portfolio Manager, Unified Communications and On-Line Collaboration Services’ – let’s see if that will squeeze onto a business card.

An update on the guest speakers… not William Shatner, not Leonard Nimoy, and certainly not Harry Hill (I admit defeat). In Edinburgh we have Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller DCB, who is described as the former ‘real-life M’. Or for those of you less familiar with the 007 franchise, James Bond’s boss (if he existed). Given the events she handled during her career, this should be a fascinating talk.

For London I’m very excited by the prospect of hearing from Professor Brian Cox – unfortunately I missed his closing session at Lotusphere as I was on the way to the airport. I’ve been a fan of Professor Cox’s television work – his Horizon program on nuclear fission was riveting, and I’m loving his new series ‘Wonders of the Solar System’. I do wonder how he managed to convince the BBC to send him around the world to many exotic locations in the cause of talking about our solar system, but I guess that when you’re extremely clever you can do that. Did he really need to go to Alaska just to collect a bag of methane? I know of sources slightly closer to home.

Whether you’re North or South of the border, you can register here.

One more thing – I said that I wasn’t speaking at this year’s UK events (that may change, it’s always a possibility) but I will have another role to play. More on that soon, and if you’re attending LCTY in London maybe you can be involved too…

It’s that time of year again – registration for the UK-based Lotusphere Comes To You events is now open. There are three events this year – London (13th April), Edinburgh (15th April) and Warrington (13th May), the latter being run by our excellent Business Partner Polymorph. One great attraction this year is the fact that I won’t be speaking (for the first time in many years) so you won’t have to listen to me… instead you will have the pleasure of hearing from Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President of Messaging and Collaboration.

The usual fevered speculation about the guest speakers can now commence – we were going to book William Shatner, but he did the Orlando main event so we had to drop that idea. I can tell you that Harry Hill is too expensive (I didn’t bother suggesting him again this year after discovering the cost last year). I’m not going to drop any clues this year, basically because I have no idea myself.

Anything else? Oh yeah, you’ll want the links – click here for the London and Edinburgh events and here for Polymorph’s event.