Here we go: yet another Lotusphere 2007 wrapup. My takeaways from the week were:
This is not Ray Ozzie's Lotus Notes
I can't take credit for making that little saying up, but after seeing everything at Lotusphere I think it's right on. Hannover/Notes 8 is not that weird, clunky Notes client that everyone is used to seeing. It's a total overhaul, with interface design at the front and center. You will be proud to show this new client to your boss. And all of us Notes developers need to start learning how to design better UI's now, because our old single outline 3-pane displays are going to look even worse in about 6 months. Nathan Freeman and Chris Blatnick gave some great starting points in their session -- keep checking their blogs for downloads and tips if you didn't make it to the show.
Social Software is the new Knowledge Management
I know, I said this already, but you'll be saying it soon too. There's a new KM in town, and it uses tags, aggregators, and wikis. Plenty of people are saying "it will never work in business", but I think you're going to be surprised. With anyone under 30, that's how they're managing their personal information already so it's a natural fit. "Older" workers may need to be convinced with some business justifications, but that won't be much of a stretch. It may just be a matter of semantics in the end -- call an aggregator a "news feed" and a tag a "bookmark" and there you go.
Giving Quickr away for free is a great move
I have no numbers to back this up, but I firmly believe that when Lotus offered the Sametime entitlement in 2004 (where Lotus 6.5 clients got a Sametime server and basic Sametime functionality for free) it was a huge move towards getting Sametime accepted and deployed throughout large enterprises. All of a sudden, you no longer had a decision to make about running Instant Messaging in the office. No budget concerns, no competitive analysis. It was free and it was already on the client, so why not use it?
Now that Lotus is doing the same thing with Quickr Personal Edition, they're setting the stage for the same thing to happen. What is Quickr, you ask? It's a lot of things, but most of all it's this: Quickr is a document management system. That's the killer piece of the product. You start using it (for free), and you tell two friends and they tell two friends, and the next thing you know your company is using a document management system. It even has integration points with WebSphere and SharePoint.
Notes 8 is the ONE AND ONLY strategic e-mail platform for Lotus
No more confusion over Workplace versus WebSphere versus Notes/Domino. Notes e-mail is it. You will NOT be forced to migrate off of the Notes/Domino platform at any time in the forseeable future (contrary to closed-door statements from other vendors over the past 3 years).
The Lotus team is trying very hard to make the new products "developer friendly"
Time will tell how developer friendly the tools end up being, of course, but that is definitely a solid and conscious focus in the new product line. I attended a session on how you can use Component Designer to create composite pages, with wiring, using only drag and drop. I was told how you'll be able to call external web services natively from LotusScript in only a few lines of code. I saw how there are "Web 2.0-ish" widgets available for use directly from the Designer clients. As much as I love writing code, I love having it written for me even more.
Unified Communications may actually gain traction
This one is going to be interesting to watch: a new push for unified communications in the enterprise. The concept has been around for years -- combining e-mail, voice mail, and phone service -- but IBM is making a big new push with Sametime 7.5 and some of the addon technologies. Sametime Rendezvous (yet another great tool to come out of the IBM Research Labs) is especially cool, because it manages all of your Sametime-based teleconferences for you, and instead of having to figure out which 800 number to call for each conference, it assigns you a unique telephone number that you dial in to from anywhere, and that number connects you directly to the correct conference call.
One of the analysts at the Unified Communication keynote mentioned that decisions on IM, phone systems, and e-mail are all becoming convergent. Again, it'll be interesting to see if/how that plays out.
Finally, extended coffee breaks!
Okay, this is a non-technical point, but I've complained about the short coffee breaks so much in the past that I need to step up and acknowledge that the problem seemed to have been addressed this year. In years past, I've literally had coffee carts rolled away from me by Disneybots, before the coffee breaks were over and while I was about to grab myself a cup. Lots of other people have reported this too. This year though, there were at least two times that I was able to get water/coffee at least 10 minutes after the break was supposed to be over, with no rushing or evil Disneybot stares at all.
I don't know if that's something that was truly fixed or I was just lucky, but it was a great improvement.
That's all for now. There's a lot more commentary on the other blogs and news channels, to cover all the things I missed. All in all, it was a great show, and it will be a a very interesting year to come.
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