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Partnerworld review of the "Lotus Software: Expanding your business across the collaboration continium" session


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This is the only session I walked over to see and was pleasantly surprised.  While there was not a ton of new information in there, it moved very fast and well orchestrated for the 100 or so people that came to see it.  I even went so far as to grab audio of segments of this I will make into a podcast later today so you can match my notes to the actual talks.

Tim Kounadis did the opening, and you got to hear form him yesterday on IdoNotes Episode 31.  His intro was more than brief and he quickly turned it over.  Then I learned why.  They have 5 demonstrations they intended to do in this session plus some talk at the end.

Ken Bisconti and Ron Sebastian were up next.  Ken did the slides and talking while Ron did his usual lightening speed, well defined, working demos.  This is a huge posting so I am putting in the keep reading link.



Ken had some key points to start out:

  • How do we embrace changes in the corporate climate?
  • How do we incorporate technology changes into our business?
Then he shows a slide that has one older gentleman in a suit holding another above his head who is doing some acrobatic move.  Also wearing a suit.  I am not sure how technology played into that slide except to Photoshop some guys together :-)

On a serious note, he talked about the Express offerings with the amazing $1320 for 10 users bundle.  He mentioned that Lotus has performed a year on year growth of 10% with 2500 new companies using the software and 1000 migrations from other systems to Domino.

Ron did a quick Notes 8 demo, but I won't cover that in detail since everyone has seen it.  He continued on with a Sametime demonstration.  The voice chat had hotel firewall issues, but this is every enterprise.  The telephony integration demo with a softphone, his cellphone and Cisco Unity went without a hitch.  I took note of the Lotus Quickr plug-in, but he came back to that later.

Ken then spoke about Portal and the 5 accelerators:
  • dashboards
  • collaboration
  • self service
  • content
  • enterprise suite
Portal Express and all the work with Workplace Forms (the surviving Workplace product) surprises some people in what it could do.

Now we move to Quickr.  The estimated delivery date, doing quick math, is June 2007.  The connectors and way you can access the data in so many ways it what makes it so strong.  You will have the Lotus NSF data store, a Java content (JSR170) storage and soon, FileNet storage options.

Ron did his next demo on Quickr showing:
  • drag and drop to web pages with AJAX technology
  • check in and out
  • notifications
  • RSS outputs
  • integrated Windows desktop access
  • plug-ins for Sametime and Lotus Notes 8
  • the prompting to send at link or full attachment when mailing.  If you send the link and it sees the recipient does not have access it even prompts to add them to have access

As expected, next up was Lotus Connections - social software for business.  IBM internally has 27000 blogs and 700 communities.  The Business Partner Connections site is growing quick as we talked about in the podcast.  The template ability from Ron's demo while in Activities was a neat touch that I had not played with yet as a feature.  The way data can be stored in multiple places in Activities still worries me but I will cover that separately.

Ken taught me a few new terms before he left the stage.  SOA is pronounced, not S-O-A but "so-ah".  Then he said "the net net of it" two times.  I think he saw me look at him like he broke rank. :-)  Kidding.

Marjorie Tenzer was last up.  She mentioned a few key things coming up that you should get involved in:
  • BP Sales Academies
  • Think Thursday calls (next one is May 17th on Quickr).  Send an email to lcp@us.ibm.com is you want info mailed to you
  • (striking this one for a bigger posting on it)
  • If you want in on the Quickr beta (sorry for this Brandon) then you should email brandon@us.ibm.com to try and get in

The Lotus Connections for Business Partners site has a dozen new communities, 28 blogs and 180 new partners already submitting for access.

Lastly, there is a special site for those wanting in to the Sametime 7.5.1 game to play around:
https://stdemo3.dfw.ibm.com/streg.nsf/pw2007

ok, I can't type anymore...