Firstly, Ben Langhinrichs has once again provided the Lotusphere agenda and session planning database. This is a Notes application which you can store locally, and then inspect the sessions and add them to your personal calendar.

The Turtle Partnership have taken Ben’s application and hosted in on their server, so you can get up-to-date information via replication. You can open the application from lotusphere.turtleweb.com and then grab a replica.

If you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry you can also access the session information from native mobile applications (created by The Turtle Partnership) on these two devices. Check the Turtle Partnership’s blog for instructions, but the easiest way to grab them is to go to the respective app stores for either device and search for ‘Lotusphere’.

Many thanks to Ben and the Turtle team for providing these resources to the Lotus community. I hope you’re kept in free drinks for the duration of Lotusphere.

Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called Twitter, apparently it’s quite popular. The Lotusphere team will be updating the Lotus Knows Twitter stream with information about the event. So if you’re attending, or if you’re stuck somewhere less interesting and want to keep up with the latest news, you should follow LotusKnows.

Before I start talking about Lotusphere 2010 I just wanted to mention that today is the 18th anniversary of me joining what was, at the time, Lotus Development Corporation. I know what you’re thinking, I must have gone straight from junior school. I turned down an offer to join Borland and made the long journey from Shepperton to the far end of Staines, and took up a role in Customer Support. Later that week, when they found a spare computer for me, I installed Notes version 2.0a.

But that was last century, and now we’re looking forward to another decade of wonderful Lotus solutions. The perfect way to kick off a new decade is to attend Lotusphere 2010… a chance to immerse yourself in the latest technology, to find out how other business are benefiting from their investments, to meet new and existing contacts, to experience some weather that’s probably better than where you live, and to go to the mall to satisfy your wife’s shopping list (but perhaps that’s just me).

Although the details on the track sessions aren’t available yet, the main agenda is. For anyone who’s been to Lotusphere before, the agenda won’t be a huge surprise. Monday features the Opening General Session – I have no idea who the guest speaker will be, but I’m sure the William Shatner rumours will be surfacing again… and here’s a thought, the Lotusphere budget probably could accommodate Harry Hill. The rest of the week is the usual break-out sessions and labs, along with Lotusphere Idol, speed-geeking, customer panels and bird-of-a-feather sessions.

I note that this year the agenda states ‘continental breakfast’ – and I’m wondering which continent they’re referring to.

Anyway, I hope to see you there – I’ll be the guy with the black and yellow rucksack.

I got to Orlando on Sunday afternoon, checked in, registered at the Lotusphere desk and then headed to some top secret internal Lotus sales training on LotusLive. Okay, it was top secret then, but wasn’t after the opening session (more on that in a second). Sunday night for the time for the opening party, and it was considerably warmer than last year.

I’ve already covered the opening session, so no need to go over that again. And I was going to focus on the announcements rather than Tuesday-night karaoke. I thought my renditions of ‘Sweet Caroline’ (accompanied by Lewis) and ‘Daydream Believer’ (accompanied by Chris) were rather good.

Anyway, the important stuff. I mentioned in another post that there were very few announcements about Notes / Domino, but there were lots of sessions and aspects of the product as such XPages, DAOS and ‘Alloy’ (the Notes / SAP integration) caused a lot of buzz. The reason for few Notes / Domimo announcements is simple… we’ve just shipped 8.5 and it’s too early to focus on version 9. Come to Lotusphere 2010 and it’ll be a different story.

So what were the big announcements? There was a lot of focus on Sametime, both the forthcoming version 8.5 and Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT). Version 8.5′s big focus is meetings – a new rich client, a new browser experience which loads in seconds and a new approach to meetings using always-available and favourite rooms. Add to that a new browser-based client, iPhone support and new contact list views and it’s quite an update.

SUT also received a lot of airtime, with demonstrations of a huge array of features (call management, routing rules, call transfer, conference calls, and a lot more). Expect it “mid-year”.

Connections 2.5 was the other big news. Despite the 0.5 version increment there’s a lot of new stuff… more display options for home pages, a ‘wall’ for profiles, and (I think the most significant) collaborative file sharing. This file sharing is also planned for inclusion in Quickr later in the year, so either product (Quickr or Connections) will give you that capability.

As I mentioned in the opening session overview, RIM’s Jim Balsillie joined Bob Picciano on stage to announce more Lotus / BlackBerry integration… mobile access to Open Document Format documents (spreadsheets and presentations to come at a later date), support for Quickr, and a new Connections client supporting Activities, Blogs, and Communities in order to augment the access already available to Profiles and Dogear. He also announced integration with Domino Designer and XPages in order to make Domino-based applications more accessible on a BlackBerry device.

And finally (although there was a lot more) the announcement that all things hosted or software-as-a-service would be branded as LotusLive. This includes Bluehouse which becomes LotusLive Engage, Sametime Unyte which becomes LotusLive Meetings and hosted Notes which becomes LotusLive Notes. The acquisition of OutBlaze’s messaging solution was also discussed with more details to come after the acquisition is finalised.

That’s all for now… although I’ll be speaking at various Lotusphere Comes To You events for the next three months.

The big announcements and the most visible glimpses of the future have been around Connections 2.5, Sametime 8.5, Sametime Unified Telephony, LotusLive solutions and various bits and pieces surfacing on the iPhone.

However, if you know where to look you’ll find some info on the future of Notes. Yesterday I attended a session on new features in Notes 8.5 – although I knew most of it I picked up some new info, such as how to install and wire in a new plugin to integrate with LinkedIn. But the whole session was made really worthwhile with the brief tour of some future ideas. Jeff Eisen demoed a preview of tasks (to-dos) on the Notes sidebar, showing how easy it was to create and manipulate tasks. The really cool part was when he went into a new e-mail and inserted a new task (could be plural… tasks) into the body of an e-mail, explaining that the recipient would see those tasks moved into their own to-do list and become part of a task workflow process.

Right now I’m sitting in a session about e-mail archiving – important stuff as it relates to cost of ownership and also personal productivity – and as well as covering the current options they’ve spent a lot of time talking about things being done to make archiving easier, making the archives more seamlessly integrated with the user’s mail box and making it easier to find and access archived data. It’s great stuff and shows that the development teams are constantly pushing ahead with improvements in so many aspects of the product.

Bob P announced that since the release of Notes 8 we’ve added 12,236 new businesses to our user base.

Guest speaker is actor Dan Akroyd.

Bob P came back to the stage and talked about the theme of resonance, descrbing it as the elements of our collaborative solutions working in harmony.

Next up were customer reference stories – Coca Cola talked about the important factors – ease of use, extended enterprise, openness, mobility and partnerships. NetJets talked about their portal-based customer interaction solution for managing worldwide scheduling of private jet resources. Ian Haynes from HSBC spoke about the bank changing their culture with a comprehensive collaboration suite, with Lotus being their key partner.

Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research in Motion – announced BES support for Domino 8.5 and forthcoming BlackBerry offerings for hosted Notes. RIM provide three of the five top smartphones in the US. Announcements of a new BlackBerry client for Connections (supporting all of the Connections applications), a new BlackBerry client for Sametime, and Symphony and Quickr on BlackBerry. And finally, a plug-in for Domino Designer to provide Domino applications directly onto a BlackBerry device. Wow.

Bob P announced that Bluehouse has become LotusLive – which in itself includes a wider brand for hosted and Software as a Service solutions.

Alastair Rennie spoke about Notes celebrating it’s 20th birthday. Kevin Cavanaugh then came to the stage and described Notes as a 20 year old rebel hanging out with disruptive friends (Mac, Linux and open standards solutions). Notes 8 is being deployed quickr than previous releases. ‘Project Atlantic’ – Notes 8 and SAP integration – was announced as ‘Alloy’… demo from Ron and Suzanne which included a LinkedIn plugin for Notes and widgets in iNotes.

Kevin then spoke about application development and XPages – another demo covering the new functionality and a rich internet application running on a BlackBerry storm (and how to display it correctly on the smaller screen). Kevin then covered the value of moving to Domino 8.5 in terms of performance updates and cost of ownership reduction.

Bruce Morse – Sametime and UC² (of course) and discussed it’s role in speeding up business processes. Announcements for Sametime 8.5 and Sametime Unified Telephony. A great demo followed showing aspects of SUT in action. Sametime 8.5 includes many enhancements including iPhone support and new browser and rich client meeting experiences.

Jeff Schick – wins the award for most enthusiastic speaker and announced Connections 2.5, including wall and micro-blog features in Profiles and LinkedIn integration. A new wiki for Connections and Quickr, new content sharing capabilities, and support for the iPhone. Quickr 8.2 for Domino announced and mentions of Quickr Next.

Larry Bowden – portals are critical to better business outcomes. Mashup Center allows line-of-business people to construct their own applications – IBM leads in this field, and remains #1 in the portal market.

Back to Alastair to talk about LotusLive, followed by Sean Poulley. Bluehouse becomes LotusLive Engage, available in Q1. Demo shows Engage integrated into Notes 8 and how to collaborate with extended enterprise contacts. It also showed joining a live meeting from a BlackBerry device. Three new partnership announced – Salesforce.com, LinkedIn and Skype – that covers over 400 million people.

Kristen Lauria previewed some of the new marketing plans aimed at showing Lotus as the leader in redefining the collaboration category.

That’s it for the opening session – maybe I’ll blog more during the week. The wireless network is overloaded and so is my diary.

I have an annual problem, and this year (i.e. for Lotusphere 2009) it seems that it’s going to be worse than ever. Over the course of the week, and not including the opening general session, I will have time to attend twenty sessions.

Yesterday I downloaded the Lotusphere 2009 planning database from Genii Software’s site (big thanks to Ben Langhinrichs for providing this once again). The database is a Notes application which lists the sessions and their abstracts, and allows you to add the sessions to your Notes diary. So I started adding the sessions I was interested in… and here’s the problem… I’ve ticked off eighty three (yes, 83) sessions that I’d like to attend.

But as I’ve said before, this is the mark of a great event. It would be far worse to spend four days at Lotusphere and not find anything interesting.

Personally I was worn out after live-blogging the Opening General Session – the announcements came so fast there was scarcely time to note all the details and take it all in. However, the following three days provided some opportunities to gather more details. I’ll just quickly mention the Lotusphere grand night out to Universal Islands of Adventure where we achieved the impossible… four major rides in two hours. Imagine doing that during the day in a school holiday. Four major rides in eight hours would be a more realistic expectation. Those rides were the Incredible Hulk (0 to 40 mph in two seconds), Spider-man (that was the best by far), Jurassic Park River Adventure (steep drop, wet jeans), and the thankfully over-quite-quickly Dueling Dragons (the mere memory turns my stomach). And the experience wouldn’t be complete without myself and a colleague threatening to kill another colleague for insisting we went on the second two rides after eating.

Anyway, back to Lotusphere. If I had to pick some highlights it would be the following:

• Russ Holden’s presentation on Domino 8.0.1 and ‘Next’, now known as 8.5. As Chief Architect Russ deserves the plaudits for the continued improvements (database compression, space saving on file attachments, native Active Directory authentication, to name but a few) while maintaining a consistent upgrade-able architecture. Yes, an architecture that has a roadmap and doesn’t require rip and replace migrations for every upgrade. Microsoft Exchange customers take note.
• Quickr 8.1 – fantastic update to an already fantastic product. Anybody who believes SharePoint Services to be the pinnacle of collaboration needs to broaden their horizons very soon.
• Sametime futures – near futures in fact. Some of the guys from Sametime Product Management and development showed some things that will hopefully ship this year… an Ajax web client, local client proxy, on-the-fly translation, an ad-hoc meeting place. All this in addition to Sametime Advanced (expected within a couple of months).
• Connections 2 – awesome. If the new home page and the improvements to Community pages weren’t enough, the next version of Activities will blow you away. Loads of new options to make management of an Activity more flexible, and best of all, customised forms (boy, do we have some great Ajax skills in the development team). I was sitting next to a customer from the UK, and he was bowled over (as was I). Watch out for this mid-year.

I mentioned that Ed Brill suffered a verbal attack from a blogger… Dan Lyons is a writer from Forbes who also masquerades as Fake Steve Jobs. Normally I find the blog amusing, if not a little foul-mouthed, knowing that the author actually works for a serious business publication. For some reason Mr Lyons found it necessary to launch a tirade against Lotusphere and Ed in particular. He called Ed a “marketing f***wit” and referred to other people who work for Lotus as “retards”. So suddenly this went from amusing to insulting. Lyons went on to write:

“What really saddens me, however, is the idea that somewhere out in some forlorn sad corner of the world someone is actually following this live blog and actually cares what Lotus announces and maybe even wishes he could be there in Orlando to experience the rock concert excitement in person. To those people I say this: I will pray for your souls.”

Given that Lotus is in the clear second place position in the messaging and collaboration market, leads the market for real-time collaboration and enterprise portals, has over 46,000 customer companies using Notes / Domino worldwide, and gained market share during 2006 (source: IDC and Gartner Dataquest), I would say that many businesses do care about what Lotus announce. Mr Lyons however demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge about the Lotus portfolio, and as he is a journalist I would suggest he does some research before publishing such as article in the future… even if it is done under a pseudonym distancing himself from his employer.

Furthermore, Ed runs a blog which attracts thousands of hits per day. He doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else to get that attention, because what he writes has value to the people who read his content. Consider that Mr Lyons. You can insult the Lotus brand, and anyone with any sense will see it as ill-informed crap. The Microsoft fan-boys will find it amusing and join in, but that’s to be expected. Now go and get a life, rather than hanging on the coat tails of someone who probably wouldn’t give you twenty seconds of attention.

And by the way, the real Steve Jobs loves Notes 8.5 for the Mac.

(11:21 EST, 16:21 UK) – the symphony (ho ho) orchestra have completed an outstanding set and preparations are being made for Mike Rhodin to enter the stage.

(11:23 EST, 16:23 UK) – Mike arrives and cracks the symphony gag. He then says that the first run of the session this morning was a rehearsal, and goes on to explain the theme of ‘Emergence’ (getting the big picture from patterns and using it to your advantage).

(11:27 EST, 16:27 UK) – the guest speaker is Bob Costas, a sports commentator. Well done to everyone who said it was going to be William Shatner.

(11:43 EST, 16:43 UK) – Mike Rhodin has returned to the stage and is discussing modes of collaboration.

(11:55 EST, 16:55 UK) – no announcements yet, but the ground has been set for Lotus Connections, composite applications and mobile working. Oh, an announcement that Lotus and RIM will work more closely on content and applications.

(11:58 EST, 16:58 UK) – Dr Vishal Sikka, the CTO of SAP comes to the stage. ‘Atlantic’ will allow Lotus Notes to access key SAP applications. Ron Sebastian (of course) provides a demo of a composite application.

(12:03 EST, 17:03 UK) – Alistair Rennie arrives to talk about Notes and Domino. He is joined by Russ Holden and Jeff Eisen for a light-hearted debate. Jeff talks about Notes on the Mac, Ubuntu Linux and Traveler (including iPhone support).

(12:07 EST, 17:07 UK) – Russ counters with improvements on the Domino server (storage and performance), and the new Domino Web Access Lite. Jeff then talks about ‘My Widgets’ which Ron demos along with Quickr integration and new calendar scheduling options.

(12:15 EST, 17:15 UK) – Ron demos Domino Web Access Lite and the iPhone edition.

(12:17 EST, 17:17 UK) – Russ discusses Domino 8.5 – directory freedom, Notes ID vault, and reducing file attachment storage. Also, a new appliance for Domino virus and spam protection. And then, Web 2.0 for the Domino server. Maureen Leland comes on to talk about improvements to building and rendering web applications, and demos improvements to the Domino Designer (which will be an Eclipse application in 8.5).

(12:25 EST, 17:25 UK) – Kevin Cavanaugh arrives to talk about Symphony. He says that it allows businesses to move away from proprietary document formats and strangle-held budgets. He then announces that beta 4 will provide new APIs to extend Symphony’s functionality.

(12:30 EST, 17:30 UK) – Bruce Morse wishes Sametime a happy 10th birthday. Outlook users made up a third of new Sametime customers in 2007. Sametime Advanced and Sametime Unified Telephony are discussed, and Ron provides a demo.

(12:42 EST, 17:42 UK) – it’s Portal time with Larry Bowden. He says that Websphere Portal has been #1 in the market for a decade. Larry talks about portal-based dashboards providing content to Quickr, Sametime and Notes. And another set of demos from Ron – Portal / Connections integration, embedding of rich media, tear-away portlets, integration with Forms, a Forms web-based designer (Total Forms)… crikey, loads there.

(12:53 EST, 17:53 UK) – it’s Jeff Schick to talk about social networking (and probably Connections). He also talks about Quickr – clearly a move to couple the two more closely – and says that version 8.1 will add more value, especially to Lotus Domino customers. Integration with FileNet and Content Manager is discussed. Ron gets a break from the demo and Suzanne Minassian takes over. ‘My Files’ and the media library are demoed.

(13:04 EST, 18:04 UK) – back to Jeff for an announcement of on-the-fly language translation for Connections, And here we go, Connections 2… customisation, attention management, widgets and mash-ups, Atlas for Lotus Connections (visualisation), off-line access / synchronisation, and mobile access. Suzanne demos.

(13:14 EST, 18:14 UK) – Jeff talks mash-ups. “Makes SOA work the desktop”. Jeff announces Lotus Mashups, a graphical browser-based tool for application assembly.based on open standards. Suzanne demos, building an application that starts as an organisation chart but then includes salary and HR data. Funky.

(13:19 EST, 18:19 UK) – back to Mike. Big drum roll followed by a big SMB announcement… Lotus Foundations, a collection of integrated servers for all-encompassing services. Mike then pulled a Domino-configured Nitix server from an envelope. And then ‘Bluehouse’, solutions for small businesses. Another demo from Ron.

That’s it… a lot there, I could hardly keep up.

Also of note this year is the fact that the opening general session (featuring Mike Rhodin and his team, a guest speaker – last year it was Neil Armstrong – and a heap of announcements) is having to be repeated to accommodate everyone – a happy symptom of the ever-increasing attendance. Let me just repeat that – ever-increasing attendance.

My frolleague Brendan Tutt and I will be live-blogging again this year (in our IBM-internal Lotusphere blog), and I’ll paste the highlights into this blog too.

Addendum: ooops, I nearly forget to thank Ben Langhinrichs of Geniisoft for once again providing the Lotusphere session application for Notes, a nifty tool which lists the sessions and what else is going on at the same time, and then adds the selected sessions to your Notes calendar. Thanks Ben.