LotusSphere Opening General Session …Taking Notes
I’m blogging from LotusSphere today in the Opening Session. Here are some of the key highlights.
- Lotus Notes celebrates 20 years this week.
- IBM announced that Bluehouse is now LotusLive, a SaaS solution for Lotus Notes and Domino.
- RIM announced new Blackberry Application. The new app for Lotus Connections features access to all of Connections’ features. Domino Designer functionality in xPages for Blackberry. The Curve 8900 is soon to be released (only on TMobile however). Lotus Symphony will be supported on the Crackberry (uber cool!)
- Notes 8.5 client now fully available for the Mac and for Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse) – not news, but still important. Anyone care to guess what platform Outlook runs on??
- The IBM/SAP alliance project Atlantic is now a full featured product now known as “Alloy”, with plans to ship in March.
- IBM is working with LinkedIn to provide a custom plugin to interact with that external community from within the Notes client.
- iCal support in the Notes client – bring in your Gmail calendar or create a iCal feed from custom applications.
- iNotes has a WICKED new look.
- In the Domino Designer, xPages are a pure Eclipse based development. Developing Ajax based applications can be deployed to the Blackberry using xPages.
- IBM SmartMarket is a new IBM offering for business partners – http://www.ibm.com/smartmarket
- IBM is sponsoring a new effort to OpenNTF.org, making templates, applications and code widely available under common Open Source licenses (GPL, lGPL, Apache, CDDL etc).
- IBM showed absolute positive reasons to update to Notes 8: >50% reduction in I/O, 30% reduction in servers, and 40% reduction in disk utilization. Bottom line: There is NO reason not to upgrade!
- Lotus Foundations. – an appliance based application for Notes/Domino where the OS is so small its burned onto a chip. This device looks like a small p505 desktop type app. It has autonomic functions to help restore/repair it in the event of crash or failure, and can be remotely managed by a business partner. This is designed for small and medium businesses. More on this in future blogs.
- Telephony integration for Unified Messaging
- Sametime can read your calendar and automatically change your online status accordingly.
- Start a conference call from within Lotus Sametime – while on the call, you click and drag new conferees into the call window from your Sametime list to automatically add them to the call. Then you can transfer your portion of the call from the VoIP/Sametime conference to your office phone, or your cell phone. Freaking cool. This is all available in Sametime 8.5.
- …and the guys from the Blue Men Group just came out (not a feature, but entertaining nonetheless)
- A TON of new Sametime features…. too many to even type here. Holy crap that was cool.
- WOW, IBM has a VP of Social Software. Tells you where they put it as far as importance to the market place.
Lotus Connections 2.5
- Twitterlike micro-blog features
- New services – shared across connections/Quickr – new Wiki , now Social content sharing services. Securely share any content with your employees quickly.
- Widgets for easily connecting other social software services such as Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, BrightKite, and more.
- Mobile version of Connections for Blackberry, iPhone, and Nokia devices
