Woowar

I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow account of every session I’ve been to. But…

Let’s start with the Opening General Session. This is the once-a-year-only opportunity for IBM to excite its most loyal customers and partners, who have invested a LOT of time and money to come to this event, to get them excited about the future, and to inspire them to achieve great things over the next 12 months.

This year IBM also had the opportunity to reach out to 500 college students and show them what it means to be involved with IBM software.

So why for ****’s sake did they decide to do what they did? What was shown to us was not an inspiring, exciting, invigorating, thrilling festival of the greatness of IBM-Lotus software. Instead, we had interminable panel discussions with people with the stage presence of a dead gnat (they didn’t get to where they are by having stage presence, to be fair). The poor students probably went away with any prejudices they may have had about IBM being all about white middle-aged men in suits comprehensively reinforced. What a missed opportunity there!

Dear IBM: there are, say, 6000 people in that room, plus another 1200 or so watching the online stream, and 90% of them (actually probably more) want to SEE STUFF, to be ENERGISED, to get SPECIFIC information they can USE over the next 12 months. So why did you aim the entire session at the other 10%? And, by the way, whoever decided that there should be not one but TWO customer panel discussions before anything interesting was shown should lose their job. Seriously. They are Not Competent. You read the Twitter stream. You know how bad it was. Please do it better – incomparably better – next year.

Moving on … by and large for the rest of the time session-wise I’ve been concentrating on xpages learning. I went to Matt White and Tim Clark’s jumpstart session “xpages 101″. Mostly it was the similar content to last year – which was great – and what was clear is how much the xpages platform and tools have progressed in the last 12 months: not just feature-wise, but more importantly in terms of all-round quality. Fantastic session. Sessions by David Leedy, Paul Withers, Steve Castledine, Niklas Heidloff et al were all excellent and informative. Another session which was not xpages, but then again was, was the “apps, apps, apps” OpenNTF session hosted by Bruce Elgort. OpenNTF has definitely moved on a lot since its re-visioning a couple of years back, and if you’re a Lotus developer you owe it to yourself to go there, download things, and seriously think about how you can contribute your knowledge and experience back to the community. And if you think I’m preaching to myself there… well, yes, I am.

Talking of “Lotus”. Precious little of that word being spoken by IBM speakers this year, and even less in print. It will be a sad loss if that brand goes, but perhaps IBM has realised how much (largely undeserved) negative energy there is around that word outside our cosy ‘yellow bubble’, and is thinking the unthinkable. Watch this space, I suppose.

The other session I want to shout out is Stephan Wissel’s “JavaScript for LotusScript Developers” session. This would make a great Sunday jumpstart next year, I think.

Of course, there has also been the social (small s) side of Lotusphere. UK Night on Monday was extremely popular, and the raffle for artwork raised about $3500 for children’s cancer charity – a great response, and thank you to everybody who bought tickets for that. Our London Developer Coop t-shirts have been very popular, so watch out for them next year (we don’t do many so you have to ask nicely or come to an LDC speaker session to get one). Mai Tai cocktails courtesy of Joe Litton, with Bill Malchisky’s bar-tending, were splendid. Kimono’s was, well, Kimono’s. And that was just Monday Tuesday saw the Penumbra Group “Ice Cream Tuesdae Social” which was bigger and better than last year. The strawberry marguerita milkshake is a wonderful invention. And then the Great Geek Challenge was great fun and full of laughs. And another drink discovery: Sake Sangria – oh boy. And the evening rounded off with Devine Olsen’s fabulous beers, and an early (well, 1am or so) night.

So now Wednesday beckons, and I turn my attention to the “Future of Social Business” keynote…

It seems busier and buzzier than last year. And I’m less hungover too

What a beautiful day here today. After the morning mist burnt off, it has been warm, sunny, and rather delightful.

Of course, I’ve had to spend most of it indoors, at a number of #ls11 sessions:

- BD Day Opening general session
It was, um, okay. In days of yore Lotus used to pre-announce some of the main OGS announcements to this audience. For the main part, this seems to have stopped, understandably in this age of twitchy twitter fingers. There are a few things coming up tomorrow, clearly, but the big announcements (assuming there are some) will be as much a surprise to the Business Partners as to the other attendees.

- JMP302: HTML and CSS: Scott Good and Henry Newberry
Somehow I’ve never seen them present before. This was a from-basics session about, obviously, HTML and CSS. Sometimes it’s good to revisit the basics, and there were some useful titbits of information, as well as some explanations for things I do but don’t know why they work, so definitely worth attending.

- BDD403: Connections APIs
I’ve not done much with Connections, but it seems clear that Connections is going to be the first product to be Vulcanised, and that the best place to start practising the skills one will need to use when ‘Project Vulcan’ becomes a reality (whatever it’s called by then) is Connections. This was a useful session, although I left early because I also wanted to catch part of …

- BDD303: Making money with LotusLive
Okay, it wasn’t called that, but that was what it was really about.
Sean Poulley did a good job of outlining IBM’s view of the market and the positioning of LotusLive. And then Beverly DeWitt outlined more of the nitty-gritty details of what IBM is putting in place to help business partners get on board the LotusLive project and see profits from it. This still feels like a work in progress, but it’s good to see them try to address some of the concerns that partners have had around LL.

Later I tried to go to the later part of Scott & Henry’s JSON jumpstart. That’s a lesson: don’t expect to arrive after an hour of jumpstart has already happened and just pick it up from there. Silly boy.

Now there’s some hanging around in the Dolphin rotunda to be done, before the beach party. At least this year we won’t be able to see our breath in the air while we party outdoors

Is Sunday now the first day of Lotusphere, or is it Monday because that’s when the OGS is?

Anyway, that aside, yesterday was pretty good.

Started with breakfast in ‘Fresh’, in the Dolphin hotel. Not a bad breakfast at all – if I can possibly drag myself out of bed in time to squeeze in some breakfast each day, I’ll be going there. That doesn’t include today, of course – am running late for the Business Partner OGS now

Then the Penumbra Group meeting, from 8 until midday-ish. It’s always a joy and privilege to sit around the table with the Penumbrites and hear what they’ve been doing, how they’re finding business going, what their take is on the latest and greatest (and gratest) in all things IBM/Lotus/whatever. Interesting, informative, and fun.

Then, after a brief pause in my room, and a chance to phone (=Skype, of course) home, I popped over to the Big River Brewery for the B.A.L.D. get-together. Some old faces missing this year, but some new ones taking their place, and a very enjoyable 2.5 hours or so flew past.

The evening was the annual Penumbra dinner. As always, nice to get off site for a few hours, and good to get the chance to socialise with some of the IBMers before their schedule really kicks in tomorrow. This year’s Prism Award went to André Guirard, and well-deserved it is too.

Finally, back to ESPN for a night-cap or three before turning in to grab some sleep before things *really* get going.

It’s been a hellish year so far, so I’m looking forward to turning my focus onto all things IBM/Lotus for a week. The fact that the days are warm and sunny here helps of course….

Better room this year, with a better view. #ls11