PlanetNTF

Last Thursday and Friday we hosted our annual Lotusphere Comes To You event. The time between Lotusphere and the event was rather short and thus very intense this year. But as much work as it is, we always enjoy giving the presentations and workshops. While preparing for the event we are diving into a lot more sessions than we could ever have attended at Lotusphere - even though we go there with three people and try to have minimal overlap in our sessions. During preparation we always get a much better understanding of what actually happened at Lotusphere than just by having been there.

The event was very successful, attendance was good and the feedback very positive. This year, the event was spread over two days. Thursday afternoon we had two parallel technical jumpstart sessions. One was focusing on XPages and Web 2.0 development, the other one had a focus on infrastructure stuff like DAOS, ID vault, Lotus Notes silent client install, IBM Lotus Traveler and TDI.

Another first was having Ed Brill as the keynote speaker. His Messaging and Collaboration Strategy session was well received and the Q&A afterwards had some very interesting questions. It certainly helped to explain and emphasize the importance of social software in today's and tomorrow's business world.

As Alistair Rennie said in the OGS, this might have been the most important Lotusphere so far. IBM switched from defense to offense mode. The "which e-mail system is better" fight is becoming less and less important. In the collaboration model of the future, e-mail is just one of many ways to collaborate. The real value for business users is having one platform which allows working in one consistent UI. The UI provides access to all important back-end systems and applications, fully integrated into the user experience.

We have seen some great paradigms which will be part of the future products. An Activity Stream syndicates social activity, enriched by social analytics which helps to find relevant content. Embedded Experiences allow to interact with data from external applications without leaving the current UI and the Share Box provides a simple and effective was to create content in various applications like Blog entries, status updates or requests in a workflow application. The Social Business Toolkit will provide the means to bring it all together. In my view, IBM is perfectly positioned to lead this social business market.

Another very important statement was that IBM is now again seeing Domino as an application development platform. XPages was everywhere on the agenda. If you are a Notes/Domino developer, you should seriously consider learning XPages. IBM is investing heavily in expanding the XPages capabilities. The XPages extension library is available on OpenNTF since last fall and much of it will be incorporated into the product. Distributing it as Open Source via OpenNTF allows us developers to use it now instead of waiting for the next (or even a later) product version. Of course, deployment is an issue - especially in larger infrastructures - but with the new Plugins Deployment project this will become much easier.

Of course there's much more I could add but let me stop here and again say a big THANK YOU to Ed Brill for joining us.