Initial reactions from the Lotusphere OGS…
I don’t think there has been a Lotusphere that I was more interested in seeing what would happen with than LS10. We’ve all been handed a fresh release of Notes/Domino, a stable Traveler product (answering much of the iPhone demand) and a Sametime release that’s so new it still has that “new car” smell to it. I left for Orlando wondering what they could possibly debut at Lotusphere.
The answer: not a whole lot. And I’m OK with that!
Let’s first cover some of the bullet points I found interesting from the opening general session:
- William Shatner was the guest speaker – he did a great job and reminded me of the power of storytelling in getting your message across. The guy is simply a pro. (He even made fun of his Priceline ads RIGHT as I was tweeting about the same thing)
- WiFi sucked. The APs must have been seriously overwhelmed which is unfortunate. A big part of this event is the community and I found reading the community’s thoughts (via Twitter) in real-time last year to be quite interesting. (Sadly the improved AT&T coverage didn’t help and the fact that I forgot my brand new Verizon MiFi was the final blow to the whole “wireless internet” thing).
- Lots of customer & business partner perpsective stuff. This is a tough thing to do. Unless you can “connect” with the person talking, you tune them out. I personally liked the Xerox story, Panasonic and GM (and the entrance in a yellow Corvette didn’t hurt either). I can really appreciate GM’s willingness to attend this event considering how much PR they’ve had on the company in the last 18 months – not all of which has obviously been positive.
- Notes client – despite being called the foundation of most of the product line, I honestly can’t tell you one single improvement/announcement/feature unique to the client itself (throwing out a few things about integration with other things, LotusLive, etc. and some screen shots from Project: Vulcan). Oddly enough, I’m totally OK with that!
- Quickr – is getting some great attention. I am putting a lot of faith in this product at the office and I’m glad to see improvements being made. I’d like to see them being made faster, but I’ll take what I can get. (Most noteworthy from today was better UI for adding content and iCal support for team calendars.)
- Sametime – This is essentially a whole new product (in my opinion) and it looks fantastic! One “new” thing demo’d was multi-person video conf. support. The term “HD” was thrown out there. I’ve looked at A LOT of systems that do this and Sametime (demo’d with a 3rd party tool from RADvision) isn’t “there” by comparison to other stuff out there. (However, its also much cheaper.)
- Traveler – now supports encrypted messages through a new app in the Apple AppStore.
Other big news included some new updates to LotusLive – all of which were talked about but only referenced. I’m expecting the “depth” to be in other sessions on that topic. It looks interesting. I’ve considered LotusLive but felt it was a bit “early” for my tastes. I think its one to watch though!
The biggest news was the announcement of Project Vulcan. Its not a product, its a direction. Simply put – its brilliant! Today’s world is far more transparent than ever before and companies that are making some huge strides in the markeplace are (often) the ones who embrace this and use “being transparent” to their advantage. I expect (hope) this is where Lotus is going as well.
Project Vulcan is a sort of mission for Lotus’ focusing on building on their existing portfolio, converging their products (and how you deploy them either on-premise or in a cloud) and innovations which drive businesses forward (such as social software) – all of which is designed to foster new opportunities.
Its a good move for Lotus because it helps the community understand WHAT they are focusing on. I expect that in the coming months/years we can then translate that into the products and features that evolve as a result of this.
That being said – “Lotus Knows” their audience and knew that they needed to show some screen shots working versions of products to help us wrap our minds around it. And those products look outstanding! (Very “Apple” in a few cases – which I think is good.)
Final thoughts: much like last year, I didn’t walk away excited about new products. It didn’t feel anywhere near an Apple type of event. However I did walk away excited about Alistair Rennie taking over the GM position (he’s hilarious off-script!) and excited about the future Lotus is embarking on!
It will be interesting to see what the rest of the week brings, especially at mini-keynotes and in various technical sessions (which, as they did last year, will no doubt contain many more announcements that simply didn’t “fit” into the OGS).
Tags: lotusphere, ls10, vulcan
Lotus Sametime 8.5 is schedule to be released next week and it promises to be a BIG upgrade. At the top of my list of favorite new features is the zero-footprint install. That’s been the biggest pain in getting people to use Sametime in our organization (they just don’t “get” why they ask for Sametime and get Java errors).
What people here are saying…