One of the things  currently wrong in how we handle discussions in the Lotus community is the tiny islands we seem to create on a regular basis.  Before we go further, I am not saying any implementation is bad, wrong or whatever.  It is how it all fits together.  I have learned a lot the past year from some of the top social media people out there, and fragmentation is a key issue we face.

Lotusphere has brought that out even more with the beginning of support from IBM on the Twitter account I created last year (that was brushed aside as a communication channel) a new LinkedIn group and another blog for Lotusphere itself.  Yet none of the blogs (myself temporarily included) uses some of the commenting systems like IntenseDebate or Disqus (that then integrates with things like FriendFeed and Plaxo and Seesmic for video comments).  Your RSS feeds can even utilize flares inside of Feedburner to show numbers of comments dynamically and aggregated.  
Just today there were new conversations started on LinkedIn that are good Lotusphere information.  But if you have not joined that group or go back and watch it, you would never know. Even the LotusUserGroup site has weekly forums that fragment the discussions on Notes.Net.  Not to mention the ones that take place inside isolated business partner and company forums.  So where do you go to keep up?

Then we get into the multiple Lotus Connections sites popping up.  From Greenhouse to Paxos (for partners) to BleedYellow, yet more links, blogs and other information is fragmented once again.  Of course, none of these interact with each other and RSS is not a fully acceptable answer since we would have to still log in and out everywhere to actually participate and not just read.

We won't even get into how all of us bookmark.  With LinkJam, Dogear, Diigo (my favorite), Delicious, Magnolia and the 250 other ones.  How to we all get aligned?  We start be trimming down the sites we utilize.  From bookmarks, to shared RSS feeds, to communication channels to comments and conversations.  We begin to include and mix technologies instead of isolating.  We ask what people think of sites and items and if no one has an idea, we go test.  From there we might begin to bring a lot of this together.  I run into Lotus people all over the world that have no clue about the blogs, PlanetLotus or anything else but Notes.Net (LDD).  How do we start including these people in the conversations?

Winners in bold and link to last years winners at the bottom.

Category	Business Partner	GEO
Best Industry Solution	e-On Integration S.A
	iEnterprises
	Ascendant Technology
Best Lotus Energy and Environment	KLG Systel, Ltd
	Alphalogix
	Enterprise Information Management
Best Mid-Market Solution	iEnterprises
	Pavone AG
	Nortel
Best Philanthropy	PSC Group, LLC
	Teamcentric Technologies
	ITM Associates
Best Portal or IBM Mashup Award	Ascendant Technology
	Alacrinet
	Edifixio
Best Tool and Utility Solution Award	Permessa Software
	Sherpa Software
	iEnterprises
Best Total Lotus Solution Award	Trilog Group
	Ascendant Technology
	Brookstone Technologies Pty Limited
Best Unified Communications and Collaboration Solution Award	Avistar Communications Group
	Polymorph
	Permessa Corporation

Here is the link to the 2008 winners.

On a call troubleshooting an upgrade of a client from Nitix Blue to Lotus Foundations Start, it was mentioned that we had hacked the system already on the Nitix server.  This is quite true as I migrated in an existing Domino server, which breaks all the rules.  I manahged to get most of it working and use the Domino interface for user management instead of the web one.  All the rest worked fine.  Virus, spam, etc etc etc.

Well on the call they mentioned a new Foundations Wild that would allow you to run a Domino server on the Nitix backend wihtout all the integration issues currently faced.  Just thought that was interesting.

Carl called himself out by shaving his head and going as a member of Blueman Group to his niece's birthday.  He then stated in his comments he could do it for Gurupalooza at Lotusphere 2009 if we raised enough.  So I went ahead and started a fundraiser project for a great cause I work with here in town.  So I know it goes to a great cause, autism treatment and services.    The organization is called MO FEAT and provides the following:

An organization of parents and professionals throughout Missouri with headquarters in St. Louis. Our mission is to provide advocacy, education, and support for families and the autism community and to support early diagnosis and effective autism treatment.

So jump in and spread the word!

Just in for the start of the 3rd annual Lotusphere interview series with the track managers. Come see my session Are Your Users Chatting with the public? on the (Sametime Gateway) and From Domino Admin to WAS Admin - In An Hour with Gabriella Davis.

I almost forgot to mention that if needed, you can download the 23 min podcast in it's 23 or so MB glory also.

IdoNotes is now part of the Techpodcasts network

Back on November 26th I announced that the Connections PoT was coming to St Louis.  I went ahead and attended the event and made a bland comment on Twitter yesterday that elicited some response and prompted this blog posting.  While there was tons of content presented at the session, the book itself is like 2 inches think of labs and slide printouts, the topics had to be covered too fast.

A proof of technology to me is not just two laptops running the Lotus Connections servers in the room with everyone doing the labs from another laptop.  They rolled so fast through deployment architecture everyone was left reeling.  While some diagram pictures should a bunch of servers, they never really let you know to do a large scale implementation would not only take tons of man hours, but tons of hardware.

I know the time was consolidated, it just seemed this was more of a listing of technology and proof of end user.  The presenters did a fine job of giving their own insight into easing the install, and answered many questions, there was far too much more than needed explanation for those that were new to the product and social networking in the enterprise as a whole.