Working with the product as much as I do I encounter some weird little nuances every so often.  Here is a couple for you to ponder and watch out for..

• The Clearinghouse works well for adding @aol.com and @company.com names and does not fare well with @aim.com names
• If you add someone to your buddylist with an alias it does not add the little fancy orange running dude next to their name and instead adds the globe.  This , of course, gives no indication that they are even an AOL person you added.  I need to try this with Google Talk and Yahoo in a few
  
  
  
  
  • If you add someone with an alias to your buddylist from @aol.com, you can never again see their online name from the UI.  You can go local into the buddylist file, but not from the client.

A live podcast at Lotusphere2007 with the bloggers in an open Q&A with Mike Rhodin and his team in the Dolphin Americas room. So enjoy the ambiance of having it sound like you are sitting right there with us at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 27:38 minutes for a file size of 18.9 MB

Overall...  I think that Lotusphere2007 scores a 9.33 out of 10.  Animal Kingdom was a bust from the get go with no animals.  But we weight that smaller.  Al the main scoring comes from content, presence of Lotus and delivery.

• Content - Lotus hit the mark.  No mixed messages.  No tongue twists.  Workplace, a goner in the total sense and they didn't hide behind that.  Lotus Connections, the thing of the future.  The new client, the way you should be headed and yes, they will support all your applications.  Can we be any clearer?  Quickr, while spelled funny and related to Flickr through second cousins (kidding), a killer for Sharepoint contests.  Sametime, well take that all other perpetrators of enterprise IM  9.8
• Presence - Lotus made it a point to be in your face while there.  From product managers being all around the "Sametime all the time" area to the labs.  If you did not schedule a time to take yourself and testdrive one of the new and upcoming releases, you wasted some time down there you shouldn't have.  No vaporware here, real products coming out the door to a desk near you. 9.6
• Delivery - Clean, clear, crisp.  A refreshing change from some years past.  Keep Mike Rhodin short and from using large analogies and show more demos.  Done.  Put sessions that talk not just about futures but how it all fits together.  Done.  Use the same darn software online for attendees for the conference that you are talking about, done.  No more Workplace Messaging for mail when we are talking DWA.  Of course, unlocking some USB ports for Nomad would have helped the score. 8.6

The Notes client....Here I sit, days after Lotusphere2007 wondering if I took away what I think I saw.  I am not exactly sure.  Do not get that confused with Lotus not having a clear message.  They did.  Notes is here to stay and grow.  Not just grow, but evolve.  Mary Beth Raven and the team (sorry I don't know all the names) have transformed what we think of as the normal Notes client that people bash for years on end.  Sure the chicklet desktop will still be there in some format, I for one never moved to bookmarks.  But the new UI gives so much flexibility with the underlying Eclipse framework, it will shock me to hear anyone complain about it.  The tasks have been streamlined, actions that are hardly used have been removed or hidden away into advance areas.  The ability to plug-in just about anything astounds me each day I watch someone make a new one on the fly.  I know the increased hardware requirements, site updates, and policy management will change, but get with it, it is backwards compatible to all the stuff you have done already.

Sametime, near and dear to me as most of you know, enters a new arena with the point-to-point video integration.  The public IM integration was promised and delivered in 2006.  I have talked to the AOL Clearinghouse team directly about future plans and if all goes well, you will see some awesome things coming out in the future too.  The reworking of the Sametime server has to be done, it has been far too long.  Such things as true failover and scaling for meetings needs to be put in place.  While the EMS was a valiant attempt, that was years ago and it hasn't gotten any better.  The policy controls need to be optional to integrate with the Domino policies, or standalone for those with Sametime and no other Lotus environment.  Lotus really needs to get on the ball and get a real Sametime plug-in catalog out there and open for everyone if you want this to continue taking off.

Lotus Connections...  candidly I don't see how most enterprises will get any value from it upon deployment for some time.  It takes huge effort to start getting enough data where it becomes a valuable asset.  I can't imagine IBM turned it on and the first day had people gaining insight into the thinking leaders.  it took time to populate bookmarks (Dogears), profiles and communities.  This will be a direction that a company has long term plans for.  I approached Alan Lepofsky, did a podcast and I fully understand where they are going with this.  I just have my concerns on implementation and controls.  I know we will be hosting this product for companies, I can see that without the crystal ball.  I am even trying to get Lotus to offer a real test of this in action with the bloggers having a community.  I registered BloggingConnections.com so we can run Lotus Connections and you can watch how the bloggers Dogear and create communities.

Quickr... A much needed change to Quickplace with the controls of Domino Document Manager.  We heard the rumors of this coming, and it appeared, just short of an E apparently.  I haven't played enough with it yet to make an honest statement on it, just please place it in the spellcheck for me.  The optional backend data stores will be a selling point for everyone, even going head to head with Sharepoint.

Second Life...  I have jumped in and out, met some people I know and don't know but see that in order to have this be a fully functional opportunity, you basically have to have people dedicated to the task of being there.  While a neat way to reach more people in a pseudo world, it takes more time playing around to be productive.  Who wants to look goofy in there so you spend a ton of time making yourself look just right.

SpeedGeeking, Gurupalooza and other things I did...  SpeedGeeking was something that caught my eye the moment it was brought up.  I have presented plenty at numerous places, and everyone knows how fast I can go.  So I decided to push myself and not be outdone by Mr Mooney, Ben and Wild Bill in that room.  From stealing Bill's Toblerone midsession to covering about 36 presentations in the hour (3 presentations in 5 minutes) I had no voice left and couldn't get the slides reset fast enough it seems.  But what a blast it was.  Congrats to Rocky on that and then moving us along to Gurupalooza.  I always enjoy that session in that most people don't get the amount of experience on that stage at one time.  Across so many disciplines too.  While all of you are out there asking questions, we are mumbling to ourselves based on the topic who will be getting the mic.  It is as much fun for us.  The glowing part? To have all that skillset on the stage look to you for specific answers.  I don't know how the others feel about this, but having your peers respect you for certain parts of your knowledgebase is incredible to me when you look to them for the same thing.  Then lastly, there was LotusphereLive.  If you did not have the chance to check that out you should.  Carl Tyler whipped this site of persistent chat rookms and virtual places in about a week.  Connectria then hosted it to thousands of visitors that wanted to see the bloggers talk live about the opening and closing general sessions.  A great way for partners to use the technology together and show rapid development.

Vendor floor..  As always, Connectria had a presence on the exhibitor floor.  This year seemed to be about one or two particular topics like DR and remote management.  It is becoming clear that companies want a good disaster plan and we are happy to talk all about how we become part of that.  Overall the feedback was a nice constant buzz.  Instead of other years where there was large gaps in people down there, this year was almost a constant milling.  That means good news for partners and for products being developed.  It was nice to see such an array of plug-in partners for Sametime too.

Podcasts...  Now this was totally a highlight.  I couldn't get them done fast enough and balanced enough to not overflow your iPods and give you time to stream online.  I had so many topics to do and people to talk to.  Not to mention those that wanted just to get on one.  Thanks to the advertisers who helped assemble the t-shirts Bruce, Julian and I totally ran out of, the new equipment we needed and other random items.  Special thanks to the wife for coming down to help do intros on the podcasts, edit and hand out t-shirts.  Heck, she ended up on the plasma screens as an attendee, lol.  She also had a huge part in the vendor floor and book.

Book...  Wow!!  I can say wow!  The first batch in the Lotus Bookstore sold out.  The second batch did well enough in there too.  Thanks to all that grabbed a copy.  It would have been nice for the sessions on the Sametime Gateway to mention it as a reference, but there was not much time between Lotusphere and the book coming out.  I signed a few, which was surprising and made me grin so big is was silly.

So I willingly placed the fixpack 1 onto the Sametime Gateway server this morning.  In a full 21 seconds flat of install time.  Now as for the install, I am not sure why this couldn't be wrapped into a simpler exe file or even something to use the Websphere Updater.  It required a nice long script to typo in with plenty of room for typographical errors to make you try and try again.

Much to my humor after it was installed, it destroyed the management screen changing the gateway section to portlet entries that would not launch as shown below.


So I went back in and uninstalled following the simple task of switching the word install for remove.  Another 21 seconds later and I am back in business, without Yahoo integration, but back in business.

initCleanupWorkDir:
   [delete] Deleting dir

initRemoveAdminPortlet:

remove-servicepack:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 21 seconds

A live podcast at Lotusphere2007 with attendees of the conference about their impressions, what they are taking away and what they thought was the key thing they learned. We are right at the Dolphin fountain so you can hear it in the background. The piano player even joins in during the second interview. So enjoy the ambiance of having it sound like you are sitting right there with us at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 13:23 minutes for a file size of 9.6 MB.

You can find my entire Lotusphere2007 picture set on Flickr now, or everyone that tags match Lotusphere2007 will be there.  As usual, I still make a directory sideshow on Yahoo photos over here.  I have 3 more podcasts to get out from Lotusphere for you.  First up, a quick 2 person end of week review to get another attendee's take on how it went for them.  Then the interview with the Technotics guys on DST.  Finally, the bloggers press interview with Mike Rhodin that took place during the week.

So here is what I missed blogging about directly.

Lotusphere Day 4
Speed Geek - Let me start there.  It was as you would expect from reading around the blogs.  Ben L had a nice section on what everyone covered and I added my comment in.  Everyone that attended received a nice open bar surprise and I provided some giveaways of my Sametime Gateway book.  I did 3 presentations in 5 minutes for 12 times in just at an hour time.  Whew!  It was brain draining for us too.  Ben L has two postings with a SpeedGeek review on his blog, so go have a look.  I would definitely do this one again.  Plus I managed to get a nice travel bag with tech toys, my favorite being this 4 port USB hub in a square..


All week the exhibitor floor was non-stop and I have to commend the sales team from Connectria for standing there fielding any wild issue all of you brought to them.  I know I couldn't catch everyone that tried to stop by, but they did a great job of telling me who came and trying to tell you when I would be back.

Lotusphere Day 5
The blogger BOF at 7am left us with half the room of people that never slept, and a few not showered :-).  Ed was the commentator and led a good discussion on some topics he brought.  The task of bringing other ideas was actually acted upon by some of the bloggers.  My point was the implementation of the social computing and Lotus Connections software into larger scale environments.  We know how long it takes to groom your own profiles on personal sites, but getting workers to actually do that for something internal is a long fight.  I liked the idea of some forced work and automated information updates being utilized in parallel.

I stopped in the labs for a few minutes to find most of the schedules full for the ones I wanted to participate in.  That was a good sign that people wish to touch the new technology and it gives a wider variety of feedback to Mary Beth and the teams.

Next up was a stop at the Certification Lab to find the massage ladies were done yesterday and there was not much for good giveaways.  A place to sneak in a drink and snacks always though.  It was moved from the 7th floor of the Swan to the side Europe room in the Dolphin.  No balcony, cool view or just a nicer place than a dark conference room.

Instead, I was asked to join a company conversation with Lotus on deployment of the Sametime Gateway.  Thanks to all of you that bought a book while here, the first round sold out and some of the second with him.  I even had some people asking me directly.  Well the conversation turned into a larger scale architecture conversation and many solutions.  I hope to talk to that group again shortly.

Gurupalooza was even better this 3rd year for me.  The questions have settled in some and people are still hesitant to give that first one out.  After the first person got up, we had a nice run of some good issues.  LDAP, mass mailings and backup products were some I handled.

Ask the developers was the same as usual, but no big ranting this year.  Some nice applause and it was good to see a few stumpers from the developer team.  We did the live blogging of the closing session over at LotusphereLive once again and all the commentary on that is there.

Dinner was caught with Gabriella Davis, Andrew Pollack and the Turtle crew before saying a goodbye to everyone over in Kimonos.  A relaxing evening to close out a sleepless week.

I will give a tech overview and more podcasts later on today.

A live podcast at Lotusphere2007 with Ed Brill. Some of the volume is low due to people scattered all over the room and talking at different levels. Heck I am podcasting this within a few minutes of the session and I played with what I quickly could for audio levels. Sorry to Stephan Wissel, who got cut some. he was far back in the room and quiet. So enjoy the ambiance of having it sound like you are sitting right there with us at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 57:49 minutes for a file size of 41.6 MB

One topic came up around "what if there was a Lotus Connectons" for bloggers to trim the gathering of info and implement Dogear.

So I went ahead and registered BloggerConnections.com and will put up the site as soon as we can with the Lotus Connections software and get everyone in there as needed.  Sounds like a better way to track and see what everone reads without trying to get everyone into Del.ico.us

Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Notes -

This new suite exploits a simple, unified interface, allowing customers to plan, prepare and transition their messaging and directory services as well analyze their Notes application infrastructure, determine the best course of action for applications, and move data from template-based applications to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

McAfee updates disables Lotus Notes -

...the recent update McAfee Virus Scan Enterprise to version 8.5i will disable the inboxes of Lotus Notes and lock users out of email.

Once the update for McAfee is installed, users will see a displayed message "ERROR: You are not authorized to perform  that operation and are denied access to their mailbox.  This can lead to serious issues for a large company using the IBM business suite.

This issue is known to McAfee and they are working to provide a fix.

Here is the full news story link:

Trilog Group, Inc., a pioneer in real-time collaborative project management solutions for the multi-enterprise, announced that they have selected Connectria as a partner in providing the infrastructure solution for hosting the new online version of ProjExec. By offering ProjExec as a hosted solution, Trilog will be able to provide project managers with an integrated role-based team space designed specifically to manage and control collaboration throughout the entire project life cycle, while eliminating the need for deploying the solution within the corporate IT environment. Connectria, an award-winning provider of secure managed hosted services, and premier level member of IBM PartnerWorld, will provide ProjExec customers with a world class data center, proven reliability and security, as well as critical 24/7 support and application monitoring functions.

A live interview at Lotusphere2007 with Alan Lepofsky, evangelist for the Lotus Connections program about my concerns and thoughts on getting actual useful data into the system about users. With the reliance on users to update their own information, there is chance for error, 'enhancemnts' of skills and no entry at all. Alan took the chance to sit right down with me near the Dolphin fountain. So enjoy the ambiance of having it sound like you are sitting right there with us at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 18:15 minutes for a file size of 13.2 MB

I started the day in a BOF with Wes Morgan BOF that I walked out on before heading to Wes.  Now, to move from session to session is a normal event for everyone based on what you expected and want to hear in the short times you have, but rarely would I use the words walked out on.  It was not a sponsor event where you expect to hear about a certain solution.  It was an advertisement for the services of the host of the BOF.  I even took some of the placards placed on the seats with me.  One side was promoting the BOF itself, well done and glossy.  The other was a terribly blatant ad to this solution and the host led right into it the first couple minutes.  This is something personally I have not done in my sessions.  While what I do is not a secret, I don't mention it unless they expect some background on us.  Ok, the rant is over on that topic.

Now on to Wes.  A small session but well run, as usual, and full of comments.  The people there were slow to start speaking up but it slowly moved into more questions and answers about deployment, plug-ins versus bots and versioning.

One of the tones of the opening is the Social Computing aspect.  They launched Lotus Connections and placed it in the online system for the attendees.  I played with this for a while and some thoughts came to mind.  So I started thinking of whom I could ask for opinions.  After Ted and I tossed it around during lunch I just happened to run into Alan Lepofsky who willingly wanted to answer the questions I had burning in my brain since he is the marketing guy for this product!  One of those weird by chance instances I asked him about it.  So look for that podcast in a few minutes.  I have more comments after that.

Lastly it was the vendor floor for quite a while.  It is nice to see the enthusiasm of the products as you walked around on a break.  I did see many that were definitely competing in numerous areas which just shows the strong growth of the Lotus products in the marketplace.  You don't have vendors flocking to sell services and software when the Lotus Notes marketshare is declining do you?

A live interview at Lotusphere2007 with Akiba Saeedi, Program Director for Real Time Collaboration at Lotus, right after the Opening General Session about the Sametime announcements. This podcast runs 18:26 minutes for a file size of 13.3 MB

First things first.  There was a signal but no connection to the Internet from 3 attempted places in the room.  While we could see access points, there was no way to get to LotusphereLive or any other site.  I managed to hit one or two pages and then it went away again.  So this was what happened all morning in my eyes.
**********************

After a nice live band opening the show, Mike Rhodin took the stage for the introduction and 2 minute recap of 2006.

• Sametime is over 1M seats since Sametime 7.5 shipped!
• 7k people here in Orlando, up 11% since last year
• 85 reporters and a ton of analysts
• 1869 certified professionals
• Second Life opens tomorrow online for Lotusphere.  Ed gave the link last night

The guest speaker was... Neil Armstrong.  He received a standing ovation from everyone in the crowd.  His immediate tip is why Orlando International is the title MCO.  I never knew why.  It was named for McCoy Air Force Base, which turned into the airport.  It was here they did the X1 rocket work if I heard correctly.  He joking stated that once they got the idea to race the Russians into space, no one was quite willing.  Until they chose pilots.  The Americans fell behind the space race with the 3rd person in space behind the cosmonauts.  Neil made the first spacecraft docking in space and made a good joke about setting a landing record, for the farthest away from the aircraft carrier.

Mike Rhodin took the stage once again after Neil closed with another standing ovation.  He made a good joke about not having to worry about being in the "Office" and the removal of the word "Office"

• Access should be easier to information through better and faster ways
• the mailbox needs to be tamed

Mike turned it over to Akiba Saeedi and Bruce Morse to talk about Sametime 7.5

• 3500 customer downloads of Sametime 7.5.  Huge demand shown for new technology
• Customer case studies were mentioned about DOD, GE and Intellicare (a Connectria customer).  While they provide a quick clip, there is always the murmur to hear more about how they did the implementation
• Sametime 7.5.1 is announced with video chat in point-to-point connectivity.  I heard the giant vacuum of bandwidth sounds.  But what a way to bring
• Tabbed chat
• Linux server
• Mac client platform support
• Microsoft Office and Outlook integration
• UC² is the new theme for Sametime and Unified Communications

Ron Sebastian then jumps in with live demo and Sametime 7.5 and video

• you can invite devices and people for multi point video
• tabbed chats is now integrated (I remember asking for that one in the beta program)
• Smart Tags in Office sees the names and start chats from within the Office docs
• the softphone integration was a nice touch but a lot, I mean a lot of clicks for voice calls
• Blackberry integration showed off click to call

Ken Bisconti then was up next

• 130 million seats of Lotus Notes with competitive wins worldwide.  If this doesn't say growth and market position, then people in other shops don't understand simple math of true collaboration software.
• The name Hannover is now officially dropped as a project name and it is fully Notes and Domino 8
• ODF technology is built into the Notes 8 client.  This brings a whole new solution to the SMB market for large cost savings.
  • He tossed it over to Ron again for a demo
  • Ghosted entries show in the calendar show to let you choose to accept an invitation or not without being in the mailfile.
  • He also showed the ability to import calendars based on standards right into your own with a couple clicks.  I would like to see this easier for the users, but this is still in beta.  Having certain business applicaitons serving RSS feeds would make notifications much easier and you can work with the streams.
  • Threaded mail messages click open with ease from right in the inbox with a simple arrow.
  • The simple click RSS reader will be an excellent enhancement.  Now can you push pre-configured feeds down?  That would be awesome
  • Sametime integration is full and complete.  All the side items can be floated or docked to let the user drive the interface with ease.
  • Convert to PDF built into the client, that will be huge for all enterprises.
  When Ken came back he then changed to Domino
  • Message recall ability is being made available.  I imagine this will be an on/off feature controlled by admins through policies.  This also means some new mail template changes in store.
  • tighter integration with Websphere Portal, Larry Bowden covers that further below.
  • Then it was moved beyond Notes 8
    • alternative directory support for authentication
    • the move to support 64-bit platforms without mandating them.
    • Domino Next will have more content management abilities integrated.
    
    Allister Rennie announced Lotus Quickr software
    • There was a note to a Personal Edition to share and store your own content.  Think about this storage as a place people will back up harddrives and share content everywhere.  Storage concerns will be an issue here.  I did like the RSS and Atom feeds built in.  We aren't talking companies hosting family photos, we are talking content that can be shared and replicated locally.  An interesting twist to security controls and policy management
    • Every licensed Notes or DWA user will be able to use the Personal Edition for free.  Yes, no additional charge.
    • Quickplace license holders will be able to use the Standard Edition of Quickr for free.  This has more built in capabilities and controls that the personal edition,of course.  Information on that will be forthcoming as they did not fully cover that.
    • Microsoft Sharepoint repositories will be included with the purchase that IBM preformed of FileNet
    
    Larry Bowden comes on next to discuss Portals and collaboration
    • Google gadgets will be available as mashups within Portal 6
    • Forms handling capabilites were integrated this past year to increase speed and redice errors
    • There is a new Workflow Builder
    • IBM Websphere Portal 6 Express ships on January 30th
    • A personal Portal mode to work offline and disconnected will be available
    • Using the Google gadgets they showed how AJAX will allow only portional Portal screen updates for better performance for the end user
    
    Allister returns to talk about how Notes 8 based on Eclipse can run Domino apps online and online
    • A common runtime wrapped with Lotus Designer allows Domino 8, Sametime and Portal to allow you to build and depoly components that can be shared without writing Java code
    • Lotus Expeditor 6.1 and Portlet Factory provide some foundations for SOA, J2EE and a slew of other opportunities
    • The Composite Application Editor in Notes 8 allows you to mix all of the above
    • The demo was a portlet built in Component Designer, then have it run offline.  Move it over to to Sametime and pray for more.
    • Now call me silly, but in the lower right of Ron's demo computer it sat there trying to retrieve a wireless connection.  Just call that humorous
    • Quite an impressive demo actually.  One tool, one solution, one product.  Wait, that is a movie line.
    
    Mike Rhodin was back to provide more product news
    • He announced Lotus Connections and passed the stage to Jeff
    
    Jeff Schick, the new vp of Social computing took the stage to talk about Lotus Connections
    • This was a terrific announcement on how Socaial Computing will change the workplace with the integration of blogs, dogears and basic profiles about individuals to get better response and ease of finding knowledge in your enterprise.

Do not forget for everyone not here (and here with Internet) to watch LotusphereLive.com for live blogging of the OGS.

Pictures can be found on Flickr under the Lotusphere2007 tag or on my Yahoo! site as usual as an album.

The day had far too much going on at once, but Lotus has made one thing clear, they are not out to play games anymore.  Well ok, they had a game theme at the Welcome Reception as a weird twist however.  Poker, air hockey, pool tables, twister and even video games.  Sametime sessions are non-stop, as the podcast pointed out yesterday.  They unveiled another company that has deployed Sametime in a larger scale than IBM themselves.  That would be GE.  The diagrams look the same as what you have seen at the conferences I have presented over the years.

Business Development Day was a success as always with partners from all over the globe gathering to talk shop and see what Lotus has in store for them in 2007.

This was also the day for Certified Lotus Instructors.  I was only able to attend a short amount of time there but they are gearing for some major shifts in how curriculum is delivered and assembled by the instructors.  More on that later as I have my own opinions.

The Welcome Reception was well packed as the weather was better than the recent past years and everyone had a blast.  Even Wild Bill as we welcomed in his 40th birthday as you can see in the pics.

With the murmur of Notes 8, tons of hands-on sessions and even the 'un-Conference", the 2007 Opening General Session looks to fling everyone straight into Web 2.0 and the wave of Lotus future.

I interview Akiba Saeedi, Program Director of Real-time Collaboration Products at Lotus. She discusses "Sametime all the Time" at Lotusphere2007 and how to get the most out of your Sametime training while here. This podcast runs 10:24 minutes for a file size of 7.49 MB

I was reading a bunch of the web about these new product names and such, and much of the links seem to be gone or removed (suddenly, hmm) but CRN went ahead and left a nice page talking about all these product/names/announcements

You can read the CRN article right here and a quick clip for you:

Ventura is the umbrella name overlaying a set of Web 2.0 applications that IBM will make available for enterprise use. The project will make BluePages, IBM's end-user directory for people's profiles, available beyond Big Blue's walls. Ventura also will include a version of Roller, the open-source blog server that drives Sun Microsystems' employee blogging site and IBM's DeveloperWorks blogs.

Also on the road map is a project code-named Geneva, which would converge, repackage and clean up IBM's QuickPlace shared workspace software and Domino Document Management.

Dogear, according to this IBM Research Web site, is a "social bookmarking" system that lets users "centrally store, categorize and share a set of personal Web bookmarks with others."

Here are a few more links from IBM'ers and the like it seems:
Elias Torres
Andy Piper
Elesar1
RollerWebLogger
Arseneault

Carl Tyler went and built a whole live blogging site for a few us to give you immediate feedback as the Opening General Session goes on.  He built it in a matter of days and I stepped up and we are hosting the server to run it.

We will be running the latest and greatest of Domino/Sametime with Carl's custom code.

Ed Brill already announced it and will be participating..

So here is the site, it will be live shortly....

LotusphereLive

I interview Bob Balaban of Lotus. He is track manager for the Jumpstart sessions at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 17:19 minutes for a file size of 12.46 MB

My Odeo Channel (odeo/90ccf8a83add393f)

I interview Ed Brill of Lotus. He is track manager for the Infrastructure sessions at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 10:34 minutes for a file size of 7.25 MB

Podshow PDN {podshow-7fd2dc203b3b0fa5cc14fa0664dd90e0}

Note that I am doubling up Ed Brill and Akiba Saeedi in the same podcast in a few minutes

I interview Oliver Heinz of Lotus. He is track manager for the Hands-On sessions at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 13:52 minutes for a file size of 9.52 MB

I interview Jim Deters, president of Ascendant Technology, winner of a Distinguished Achievement Lotus Award for 2007. Jim talks about the Websphere Portal industry and what to look for in 2007 from them. He announces Blue Code and where to find them on the exhibitor floor at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 17:37 minutes for a file size of 12.6 MB

Chris Miller interviews Martha Hoyt, senior software manager at Lotus who in real life is the manager of the Application Development track for Lotusphere 2007. Martha covers how the track is broken down by subject area, what to look for that is new and where your first and last stops should be at Lotusphere2007. This podcast runs 21minutes for a file size of 15.4 MB

I had already gone back and adjusted some past postings to include the Lotusphere2007 tag for Technorati and also Flickr stuff.  But today Ed sent out a reminder that not only can we use this tag for ourselves to search for Lotusphere2007 info across the blogs, but the press will be using the same Lotusphere2007 tag to look for quotes, stories and other info.  So make sure you put the Lotusphere2007 tag everywhere you can :-)

Also, if you have not visited the LDD Lotusphere2007 page, you need to do so.  It highlights the blogs, podcasts and other events.  A great page.

Notice how I snuck that Lotusphere2007 tag in far too many times for one posting?

Chris Miller interviews Rocky Oliver, senior development dude at Lotus who in real life is the manager of the Best Practices track for Lotusphere 2007. Rocky covers the beginnings of the track, JamFest, SppedGeek and Boomerang. Don't know what they are? Listen into the podcast. It runs just under 19 minutes for a file size of 12.8MB

I have arranged all the track managers for Lotusphere to tell us what they like best about their track, any surprises they can talk about and what makes you, the attendee, want to be at those sessions!  Most are scheduled and I am finalizing the exact time for the last couple so get ready.

I am getting them all to you by Thursday so you can have them on your iPod and listen in before Lotusphere.

• Monday listen to Rocky Oliver talking about Best Practices and some of the YellowSpace events (Gurupalooza and the new SpeedGeek and Boomerang)
• Tuesday listen to Martha Hoyt talking about the Application Development track
• Wednesday listen to Oliver Heinz talking about the Hands-on Sessions
• Wednesday double feature listen to Ed Brill talk about Planning and Managing your Infrastructure
• Thursday listen to Kristin Keene and Heidi Votaw on Futures and Innovations and maybe some special topics
• Thursday double feature listen to Bob Balaban on Jumpstart Sessions
• Finally on Wed or Thur we will try to get Kada Sigl to talk about Business Development Day

Chris Miller interviews Jessica Stratton, president, CEO and dishwasher for Solace Learning in Rhode Island about the recent market for Lotus training and the move to becoming an independent consultant.

Also discussed is the Lotusphere 2007 upcoming podcasts and events, the new book and the recent Sys Admin Tips newsletters in just under 21 minutes.

Bruce has the pictures of the shirts right here

If you happened to already get your online username/password and find the profiles section.  You will currently see 315 pages of profiles at 15 people per page.  That makes about 4725 registered attendees in the system.

Sorry, early morning math brain working

Information on the podcasts, interviews and sponsors are listed by clicking the image above.  As well as where you can find me at certain times of the week.

You can follow the link to this static page I will be updating regularly.  I will also put a link on the navigation somewhere.

The demise of Workplace Messaging.  The request we just received was what is IBM telling us to do?  Well it was right on the bottom of the document announcing the withdrawl.  Switch to DWA.

End of marketing: Effective January 11, 2007, IBM will withdraw from market the IBM Lotus Workplace Messaging Passport Advantage^® offering. Customers who hold current licenses for this program will renew to the following:

• One (1) IBM Lotus Domino Web Access license for each licensed Workplace Messaging user
• One hundred (100) Value Units of IBM Lotus Domino Messaging Server for each one thousand (1000) Workplace Messaging users. 100 Value Units of Domino Messaging Server is equal to One CPU.

End of service: Effective September 30, 2008, IBM will withdraw from service the IBM Lotus Workplace Messaging Passport Advantage offering. Customers will no longer be able to receive support for this offering after that date.

Ed talked about the recent announcement of the SpeedGeeking un-conference session this year.  You can see all the details here for the time being.  The full list of topics and speakers has not been announced but you are getting a good idea.  I am scared to see Wild Bill, Paul Mooney and myself (with others) in a room talking at the same time, but we will see how it goes.

My topic you ask?  I am coming up with a catchy title if I can

Industry expert Chris Miller delves deep into the installation and configuration of the Lotus Sametime Gateway. Follow along as he walks you step by step in how to get your Lotus Sametime environment connected directly to the public instant messaging providers with ease. He also covers management and network topology placement in this first book in the series, "Consultant in your Pocket Guides".

Special pricing through Lotusphere 2007!!

Pictures were sent over from Troy here in the office.  I am guessing going on any type of vacation is a mistake.



You can see the 9 picture set right here

I was forwarded an interesting little email from one of the other admins here.  He had found a link inside the admin screens on the Barracuda 400 model for a Lotus Notes mail template.  Downloading it showed version 6.5.7 (which was weird) but looking at it, it was a change to the extended mail template.  The work was done by Thuridion, a California based company from searching and locating a press release on this very topic.

It was an interesting touch if we could move those deign elements into the Domino 7 template and provide a hook into the Barracuda natively from the user's mailfile.  Anyone have experience with this integrated template in production yet?

I downloaded the deployment plug-in (not the source version yet) to test it out and see what help it could provide.  The first thing I noticed is that it unpacked into the wrong directory.  You are supposed to download the zip then unpack straight to the plug-in directory of the Sametime client.  It added an extra folder layer so I moved everything up to the root folder and it started working right away.  No big deal, just packaging.

From there I started manipulating the browser to use (a button to browse the local OS would be nice instead of having to figure out and type it in manually) and what search host.  I couldn't figure out how to use my Sametime custom search engine yet, but it worked well otherwise and you can change the name and play with some of the basic code to make a nice internal Intranet and specifically targeted search.  You could then deploy this to the right people for some good quick reference help.

Take a peek if you haven't.

Apparently Carl talked about this months ago, I just read about it, :-)

A company in the UK has taken presence notification to a new level through Availabot.  Instead of getting a pop-up, sound or notice that your AOL/iChat buddy has come online, you have a puppet that stands up from a connected USB port.  You need as many ports as buddies you want to stand at attention.

Availabot plugs into your computer USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away.  It's a presence-aware, peripheral-vision USB toy

Apparently you can preload them with your data and even have them customized to look like yourself.  Interesting concept for handing out at conferences

Availabot stores the IM details of the friend it represents in the puppet itself.  That means that you can buy a few, load them with your own IM screen name and service, and give them out like business cards to your closest contacts.

It seems to be ready for Mac with Windows on the way.  Could you see the overzealous CIO with a room of 1000 of these to see how many employees are online in Sametime working with a Sametime Gateweay hooked up?  I found they even have a youTube video of it working.  Now that theory I just had really gets some humor.