Jan 22

Lotusphere 2007 – General Session

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I’ve got a very short break between sessions so I thought I’d recap a few of the highlights I took notes on from the Lotusphere 2007 Opening General Session. More details (and pictures) to come.

Business Stats:

  • 30& revenue growth (in 2006)
  • 500 companies converted to Notes from a competitor (last year)

Attendees:

  • 85 Reporters
  • 43 Analysts
  • 1869 Certified Professionals
  • 7000 Attendees
  • … Lotusphere has become such a large event that they will soon open up a new way to attend (the general session) on SecondLife.

Sametime

  • Sametime 7.5 had 3500 downloads in its first 4 months – Some new features coming soon:
  • New Cisco IP phone integration with the ability to start a phone call from Sametime and launch the call using the IP communicator softphone.
  • Ability to see Voicemail messages in the Sametime window.
  • Mobile IM – with click-to-call ability (from your cell phone – currently working on Blackberry platforms, no details about additional ones in the future)
  • Press Release: Unified Communications

Notes 8

  • Will run on Mac, Linux and Windows
  • Will include spreadsheet, word processing and presentation programs in it (compatible w/ MS Office and the ODF format)
  • Ability to save documents to a PDF (kinda like Macs already have – sorry, had to mention it)
  • Ability to see thumbnails of open documents (within the Notes UI)
  • Supports message recall (the ability to undo sending an email message to someone — assuming they haven’t already opened it)
  • RSS reader integrated (if you input a URL, it’ll look at the site and retrieve a list of available feeds)
  • Ability to have applications shown in the sidebar or float them
  • Public beta available next month

Calendars ( Notes 8 ):

  • Ghosted entries appear in the calendar (invites show in the slot where they would occur on the calendar and allow you to respond to them from within the calendar – in addition to the inbox)
  • Ability to import internet based calendars

Mail ( Notes 8 )

  • 3 pane view
  • See threads of emails easily

New Software: Lotus Quickr

  • (Read the press release link above for a better detailed description)
  • Personal Edition – Free w/ any Notes (or DWA) license that is active and on maintenance
  • Standard Edition – Upgrade version that has libraries, workflow, calendar, meeting places, and more templates to be available on the web.

Newish Software: WebSphere Portal Express

  • 41% of portal implementations are done using WebSphere.
  • 49% of those are for Executive Dashboards
  • There are currently 2600 Google Gadgets available that integrate with WebSphere.
  • IBM will ship their new Express version of WebSphere Portal at the end of this month. It is targeted at small and medium sized businesses
  • Works with current IBM dashboard apps (presumably, this means the former Bowstreet developer tool)

New Software: Lotus Connections

  • Sidenote: announced with music and lasers – very cool!
  • Again, the Press Release does a good job of describing what this is, but in short the idea is to take social networking & web 2.0 tools and make them consumable for businesses. It looks very cool, especially for larger organizations.

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