Greetings! I'm in the Grand Ballroom in the Sheraton conference center in Boston for the first full day of conference. The room is packed, because it's time for the Keynote, with Alistair Rennie (Vice President, Development and Technical Support, Lotus Software IBM), but hasn't quite started yet.

I'm seeing lots of familiar faces - and this is one reason why I love Admin so much. The venue is small and intimate; I know not all their names, but I recognize so many faces of repeat attendees every year.

I checked in yesterday, had a nice dinner in the hotel bar with all the usual suspects, and even 8-month old Zoë held up quite nicely much past her bedtime!

After this, I'm headed off to Francie and Paul Mooney's session on Troubleshooting Server Crashes and Deciphering NSD files.

Debbie Lynd is introduced to the stage.. this is year 9 of the Admin event. Wow! There's certification testing here, over 100 sessions, hands-on labs, roundtable discussions, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, the Solutions Showcase, and a great Ask-The-Experts (fondly known as "beat the geeks") session.

 There is a concurrent Notes and Domino 8 upgrade seminar run by The View also.

And... Alistair is introduced.

The first statement - This is a very important conference, and it's a really exciting time to be with Lotus!

LOL - "Charts drool, code rules".

Alistair tells us how his team has traveled to their customers all over the world to find out how they are collaborating and working. The range of collaboration styles is staggering (fortunately NO ONE prints emails anymore!).

Traditional Notes and Domino Strengths:
Exceptional offline support
Scalability, reliability, and security of the Domino server
Industry leading rapid application development

Sigh.... yet another 8.0.1 high-overview new feature list and demo. I guess this is what happens when you go to a lot of conferences. I must remember that for many people, this is the first time they are getting to see all this stuff.

Notes startup time is a HUGE issue that Alistair's team is actively working on improving (applause). "We got the message", said Alistair. "In fact, I meet with my team for an hour every Friday to see how it's going."

Ron Sebastian, of course the standard "demo" guy on stage now. He asked for a show of hands who is using 8-8.01. Surprisingly not too many. But that's probably why people are here, for the great upgrade sessions (gratuitous plug for my session!)

Ron did a demo making a form change, and going to the web. Change did not appear. "Aha, let me go back and hit the Save button and try it again..." We ALL do that, Ron. I love seeing people be true human beings on stage, that's how we connect with them.

Now Alistair's talking about Sametime Advanced now, which has a more socially-oriented use of IM, including persistant chat which helps entire groups now. Now he's talking about Sametime Unified Telephony, allowing automatic rerouting of locations/phone numbers, Community Broadcasts, skill-taps (ask a question, save your answer to a community FAQ), etc.

I LOVE that automatic re-routing of calls/chats with Unified Telephony. You don't havhe to DO anything, you can specify rules to where Sametime should go to reach you based on hours/and away status.

Alistair back, talking about Social Computing, "Web 2.0 Goes to Work."  Yup, time to talk about Quickr (Personal edition is part of entitlement) and Connections (he calls it "Facebook for the Enterprise"). Aside from the fact that I'm starting to really hate Facebook, I do think that was a great analogy as to what Connections is all about.

Connections is becoming the fastest growing software being sold in the industry, according to Alistair.

Time for Mashups! Alistair likes mashups because of their simplicity (wiring widgets together).  Now he's talking about ROI. I tune of from hearing that phrase on principle. What he means specifically is the fact that now users will be able to create their own "applications" by creating their own mashups to help them work better.

Uh-oh, I have a session starting in a few minutes and they are still going.

Talking about Emerging Technologies now. They are paying attention to gaming attributes and wondering how that can be applied to business.

Showing us a virtual meeting room, almost like Second Life. Participants are virtual avatars, however, this is a REAL meeting - all participants are sitting around the conference room and using Sametime Unified Telephony. Not sure how useful this is, but it sure is neat.

OK, off to my next session!

-Jess

1. Matt White04/30/2008 09:27:41 AM
Homepage: http://www.11tmr.com

This sounds like the sort of OGS we should have had at Lotusphere. Totally Notes/Domino oriented and full of demos. Very jealous not to be there.

Matt

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2. Jess Stratton04/30/2008 02:47:19 PM

I can't make ILUG, so I know *exactly* how you feel right now. Yeah, this opening ceremony was one of the better I've seen. Very to the point, with a very positive message, with "here's where we're looking to the future!"

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