So I'm in Orlando for Lotusphere. Took a crappy delayed red-eye, so I missed the very first part of the session, with Bob Costas talking about how good the Chinese are at controlling their people. Ed Brill is live blogging it. Alan has better notes on Mike Rhodin's opening Keynote.
Lotus and SAP announced project Atlantis, a joint effort around composite applications.
In Demo, Notes and Domino Web Access seems to provide a robust implementation of all Ajaxy web services that Zimbra has. But given that its 2008, there of course is an iPhone version. Demos Google Gadget and other widget type inclusion within Lotus Notes then letting you distribute the widget by email, so someone can drag and drop it from the email view to a My Widget sidebar.
Live TEXT lets you scan a Notes message for a pattern, like a stock symbol, and invoke a widget (similar to Zimbra). Addresses have Google map integration. Domino Designer demoed as a way to take a crappy old discussion web page and make it all Ajaxy and Web 2.0 pretty. Lotus Symphony, an open office distribution, gets a makeover and performance improvements too.
Lotus Sametime, the real-time collaboration offering, is ten years old, and had two new developments. Sametime Advanced lets you tap into "communities" to chat with strangers -- with broadcast chat, persistent chat rooms, chat room file sharing, screensharing with buddies. Sametime Unified Telephony which lets you click to call with multiple telephony systems. Some good instead some good cases of real time collaboration business value. Celina insurance group sells through 500 agents, service phone calls have been cut in half. At Carestream health, a richer and visual set of real time collaboration tools aid communications between doctors and radiologists.
Websphere Portal achieved #1 market share during the decade, but this year they added Accelerators to snap on functionality, some vertical specific. Sunguard, GoPro and NFL (apparently that's where broadcasters get their stats) Accelerator announcements. "Consumer" Google Gadgets and .Net and Federating other portals, plus new BI connectors. "More exploitation of Web 2.0 technologies? You bet."
Lotus Connections was the first integrated social software solution for businesss, and Lotus Quickr made it easier for groups to collaborate. In 2008, we have tens of thousand customers who have team rooms and quick places. With Quickr, it needed to be easy with immeadiate provisioning of everything you need. Quickr made easier, with integration with Filenet P8 ad IBM content manager. New filesharing features, file ratings and watchlisting. Fairly simple way to grab a file and kick off document management workflow and policies into FileNet, but still being able to see it in the context of Quickr's team space. Shows some pretty nice podcast/media management capability.
Lotus Connections changed the market naad how organizations viewed collaboration, they created new categories and metrics. Next release will take this nto new levels, embedding it in eveything we do, mobile to global. Arabic, Russian and many other languages. Embedding language translation into social networking services. Integrated with Yahoo Answers, Facebook, Socialtext and Atlassian. Changing the paradigm. Version 2 will have attention management to let you use widgets and mashup abbility to focus on what is important to you. Atlas for Lotus Connections lets you visualize your social network. Mobile version. Suzzane demos a new homepage based on a set of widgets you can drag and drop. Federated search with integrated results and people that relate to the query. Profiles now have attention info assigned to it. New in Communities, you have a discussion forum, and persistent chat. Also worked with leading industry players like Socialtext, so now Communities can now have their own dedicated wiki.
Launches Lotus Mashups, as a mashup catalog and platform, based upon an open stadard (OpenSocial?). Nice clean UI to let you overlay data and functionality and wire widgets together. The wiring reminds me of Yahoo Pipes.
Mike closes by saying they are putting Web 2.0 to Work, but not done yet. Historically they haven't been able to serve SMBs well. (suddenly the band starts doing the Olympics theme song) Lotus Foundations is a new line of servers -- collaboration server, communications server and other servers based on ISV solutions. Fast to deploy and configure. On Friday they acquired Net Integration Technologies. Last week Jobs took a laptop out of an envelope. In this server (that he pulls out), is an entire collaboration server you can plug in. The bulk of smaller companies need to work with others, launching Bluehouse, a SaaS extranet solution for companies with less than 500 employees.
Later, sitting in the press conference (I'm here on a Blogger Pass):
- More on Lotus Mashups: QEDwiki did in-market experimentation, this is the official IBM productization of it. After people create Mashups with the client tool, they can publish them into the directory The missing piece is where they come from, they have iWidget 1.0 going through standardization. An advanced Rad tool lets you generate widgets based on backend systems.
- Channel partners and business fundamentals of SaaS are still under development. "Not everything can be supported by advertising."
