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I’ve just left the 2008 Lotusphere Opening General Session (2nd session). I have to say that this was the most exciting start to a Lotusphere I’ve ever seen. The Orlando Symphony Orchestra played some great songs while the screens all around featured a theme of “from individual actions, larger patterns emerge.”

As everyone sat down, there was a playbill on our seats that described the “symphony” we were all about to see. It talked about a symphony in three movements:

1. From individual actions, larger patterns emerge
2. A myriad of possibility
3. It all works together

A this point, I was pretty dang impressed. This appeared to be the cohesive direction I’ve wanted Lotus to have for years. It looked like the start of a synchronized marketing campaign that would end the day showing me how all these applications worked seamlessly together.

And for the most part, that’s exactly what they did. The OGS whipped through the entire line of Lotus products and did a good job of showing how they all integrate together. I think the concept could have been a bit tighter – the playbill suggested they would be a bit more explicit about walking through those concepts as they talked about each application. It was left to each attendee to figure out the tie to those concepts themselves … which is fine.

Other interesting topics (random):

• Notes and SAP have an application that allows you to access SAP via Notes (which would be cool, if we used SAP)
• Notes 8.5 is coming out … sometime … this year.
• Notes 8.0.1 is coming out … sometime … this year … before 8.5.
• A Mac version of 8.5 will come out after its released for every other O/S under the planet … but the beta is available now (guess what I’m doing tonight!)
• Sametime is focusing on becoming the core of your telephony infrastructure. It promises to work with a mix of PBX and VoIP vendors without extensive rip-n-replace. The demos looks promising. Of course, no costs or ETAs were discussed.
• Domino Web Access is getting redone to look like Notes 8 (which is brilliant – I never understood why it looked different). DWA also gets a light and super-light mode, the latter will work on the iPhone (but that means you have to connect to the web and log in to get stuff on your iPhone, not quite the integrated solution I had hoped for).
• Lots of performance improvements on the road for 8.X
• Symphony will integrate with lots of Notes stuff – I’m anxious to go to some sessions and find out exactly what that means; but its nice to hear they are talking about doing that!
• Quickr 8.1 will come out in March. A demo was then done of a future version of Quickr (so, apparently 8.1, which isn’t out yet, isn’t the “future”)
• Lots of people started to leave the room when they began talking about Websphere Portal. Even more left when they started to talk about Lotus Connections. — I always find that to be an interesting indicator of what people are curious/interested in.

Lots of other updates, but those are my main thoughts thus far…