I. Can’t. Wait.
I’m not exactly certain, but I’m more excited about Lotusphere (2009) this year than any other year I’ve attended. I think its largely due to the amount of stuff from ‘08 that we’ve NOT yet implemented.
Yeah, you read that right.
My team and I came back from LS08 eager to deploy Notes 8.x; excited about the concept of an “all-in-one” box; anxiously awaiting the promised iPhone compatibility; excited about what looked like a strong update to Quickr; and super excited about the 8.5 beta for the Mac (yes, two of us helped cause the big slow down of that download the evening that was announced).
Nine months later: we’ve just begun testing 8.0.2 in hopes that the performance is finally good enough to launch across the company; DWA ultralite for the iPhone is nice, but not something that we can roll out; Quickr is a good update, but still has some odd quirks (personal folders – please!); and I stopped using the 8.5 beta for the Mac within a month.
Kinda sounds like a swing and a miss to me – and yet, I’m REALLY excited about LS09.
Lotus often does a good job of addressing the comments of their community; and everything I listed above has been talked about, blogged about, twitted (that’s a verb, right?) about, etc. quite a bit in the last year. I really would be shocked if Lotus hasn’t heard (loudly) the comments from all of us and I’m hopeful that LS09 will bring some new announcements on a number of these fronts.
Here’s the other reason I’m excited: the Lotus community. By far, the most valuable thing to come out of Lotusphere last year was hearing from others in the community about what they are doing with Lotus products. In some cases (being totally honest here) you attend a session, hear a solution that someone put in place and realize: wow, we’re really doing well – that isn’t a problem we have at all! Phew!
In many more cases, you hear (or better yet see and get code examples) about really cool ways that people have used (or stretched) Lotus technology for their applications. This past year, the guys from Snapps put on a solid show (as always) and the amount of information we got (and were instantly able to use) about ext.nd was amazing.
So… while the product announcements may not have brought the value we had hoped (yet), connecting with the Lotus community has given us more tools than we dreamed of. That information has allowed us to deploy three new websites (one for customers, one for supply chain management and one for internal use), two new dashboard/graphing tools and build a toolbox of code that allows us to make application development advancements in 1/3 the time it did before!
And that’s why I’m excited!
Tags: ext.nd, iphone, lotus, lotusphere, quickr
September 18th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
We’re going to post a few sessions that deal with Ext.nd again for LS09. Last year only one was accepted and that was basically an “intro/beginners” session. Hopefully we can get an advanced session approved and if so, is there anything in particular you would like for us to cover?