Lotusphere 2005

Monday 24th January 2005

After an intestesting Business Partner Business Development Day, today started with a good breakfast and the excitment of the main general session. After hearing the strategy of where IBM Lotus is going and hence ourselves, in terms of ND 7 and Workplace, today was going to be interesting.

Firstly however, we enjoyed a very good speech from Mr John Cleese. His comments, whilst humourous, raised interest inline with the theme of envision, and decisions. How best to make decisions, to collaborate, to evolve and forsee.....

However, after the short speech, Today, was mostly about learning more about Notes Domino and how it fits within the WORKPLACE family.

Lotus detailed how Notes Domino is to be part of the next generation of collaborative tools and products which will allow companies to integrate and streamline processes even more, to integrate their business processes and improve information access.

Importantly however, this is contrary to todays frequently seen information overload. The Workplace concept is to aim at providing information and collaborative teamworking within the context of business processes and associated business roles. Roles based working, or WORKPLACES, are aimed at making people more productive on what they do, within the context of the job (role) that they do, or within the business process or processes that they do.

Increasing volumes of email and phone calls etc lead to overload, so that people spend larger and larger amounts of time simply "managing" these tools. Business Process orientated portal style areas focused on the job in hand, are seen as a potential way of avoiding the conflict between your job and your messages.

WORKPLACE orientated technologies aim at providing more activity based WORKPLACES and Role based contexts in which to work, through more portal styled intefaces. These technologies appear that it will become increasingly possible to hook in various data sources, connect mutiple processes and display and arrange information in more efficient ways.

This begins with the forthcoming release of Notes Domino 7. IBM Lotus say this is expected this Summer!

Additionally Ambuj Goyal, IBM Lotus Divsions General Manager and other senior Lotus personnel took the opportunity in the general session to re-inforce to end users that Notes Domino is not dying, but about the plans for Notes Domino 8+. They talked about roadmaps for the product evolution and how we might plan and implement some of these new tecnologies.

My most exciting moment of the day, was to see NSFDB2 - IBM DB2 RDMS as a back end to Lotus Domino. Of particular note was how we might look to hook in multiple data sources within a view using SQL Join commands and how we might be able to radically evolve the level of applications that run within Notes Domino.

There's much more to come

UPDATE!

I'm sorry, but I forgot to mention that this opening session celebrated the 20th anniversary of Notes being invented. To mark the occasion, there was a surprise appearance by Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes. Many of us instinctively gave him a standing ovation. Ray said "I think the technology is only beginning to explore how we can work together" - this after 15 years - having now setup another technology company called Groove Networks,I wonder what he's going to come up with next....