Lotusphere 2010 : my story so far
Lotusphere began for me properly on Saturday, with the Penumbra dinner in the evening. As always, that was an enjoyable event, and it's nice to get off the Swan/Dolphin lot for an evening, even if we don't escape the Disney estate. Maureen Leland was this year's Penumbra Prism Award winner, for outstanding dedication to the IBM Lotus Business Partner community.
Sunday started with the Business Development Day Opening General Session. Which was underwhelming. In the last couple of years they've given sneak previews of some of the main announcments that will be coming up the following day, but this year's seemed more low-key. Although there were some interesting-looking BDD sessions later in the day, I chose to spend the day at Paul Calhoun's "XML and Web Services" Jumpstart session - a good overview, and highly-recommended if you're an XML and/or web services newbie, and then in the afternoon the "How to Build and XPages Applications from Start to Finish" show-and-tell session from Matt White and Tim Clark. This session was packed, with people in an overflow room, AND was repeated later in the week. Great content, and well-delivered.
Overall, Lotusphere has a slightly different feel for me this year, as the London Developer Cooperative attendees (myself, Ben Poole and the mighty Mark Myers) are spending a fair chunk of our time helping out on the Elguji stand. Another LDC member, Matt White, is of course there too, in his capacity as Elguji's codemonger-in-chief. If you're at Lotusphere, and you've not heard of Elguji, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?! Seriously though, pop down to booth 622 in the Product Showcase, introduce yourself, and take a look. If you're REALLY lucky, we might like you enough to give you one of the few remaining LDC t-shirts we have.
While not on the stand, I have managed to make it into a few sessions. I won't list them here, but thanks to Stephan Wissel, Steve Castledine, Philipe Riand, David Kajmo, Rob Novak, Viktor Krantz, Declan Lynch, David Leedy and others for helping me fill my brain up with exciting new tidbits of information and knowledge.
Much has been said about the main Opening General Session, including the William Shatner experience, so I won't comment at length here. What struck me, though, is that for the vast majority of the session we were shown and told about things that are either already here, or will be coming in 2010. Then at the end we saw a vision of a possible future, which will take IBM several years to execute on. Short term, and long term. What there wasn't was any mid-term view. So we didn't see, for instance, announcements about features and timelines for Notes and Domino 9 (or "Notes Awesome" as Ed Brill said he wants it to be known 
). I think, therefore, that IBM has some work to do in connecting the dots between largely incremental change in 2010, and the grand vision for "Project Vulcan" going foward. Watch this space in 2010, and particularly at Lotusphere 2011, for more, has to be the message.
There's a big focus on "the cloud" this year, with many of the products shifting in that direction, and the new announcements heavily skewed to cloud-based services. The cloud-based collaborative tools, known as "Project Concord", look very interesting, and are going to be available in beta form within months, for instance.
Socially, this Lotusphere has been as hectic as ever, with compulsery visits to the Big River Brewery, ESPN, the Dolphin bar (of course), Schula's Lounge (for the record-breaking UKLUG "UK Night" - and thanks to all the sponsors who made that possible), and far too much time spent in Kimino's. I did come under some pressure last night to indulge in karaoke performance. Maybe one day 
That's it .... and it's only 8am on Wednesday..........
