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Now that Lotusphere 2009 has ended this is a good time to wrap-up my thoughts on what I saw, learned, and look forward to. The first and undoubtedly most import takeaway for me this year is that IBM appears to be making a strong marketing push for the Lotus Software division. While talking about marketing is usually a joke-filled subject there is value to a strong marketing campaign. While we could argue about it siphoning monies away from further development of the product, the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. If Lotus does not sell product then they cannot continue to make product and therefor anything that drives sales is for good and not ill. And, speaking of selling product, it was encouraging to hear of the 12,000+ new customers that Lotus acquired in 2008.

As for continuing to make product some very interesting things are on the horizon for Lotus. LotusLive.com, formerly Bluehouse, will soon see a development environment which is not only intriguing for me as an ISV, but looks to be a very smart move to infuse  the offering with extra value for customers.

Demos of Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony were quite impressive. The system has the “find me� capability to ring different devices to look for you. We have seen this before in other systems, but what was impressive here was the total integration into Sametime by utilizing your Sametime location and a pre-defined set of rules to ring devices in a specific order. Imagine workers who have a desk and another working location such as a shop floor or roving desktop technician. When their location is set to “At Desk� the office phone will ring. When they set their location to “On Shop Floor� or “On Service Call� a call to their desk phone is forwarded to their cell phone. Taking all of this one step further was the ability to instantly and seamlessly hand calls off from one device to the next without dropping out of a meeting. Imagine being on conference call and the chairperson is sharing their screen. The meeting is running late and you really have to go pick up your kids at school but this meeting is extremely valuable. You can tell Sametime Unified Telephony to move the call to your Blackberry which not only allows you stay on the call without the annoyance of dropping and redialing in, but can also stream the slides being presented down to the device in realtime! That is what I call “taking it to the next level.�

My final big takeaway from Lotusphere this year was the IBM Smart Market and Lotus Foundations. Think of this as the iPhone App Store meets Foundations. Here is how to works. You have a Foundations server and let’s say that it is running Domino which is being used for your small business’ messaging solution. As the months go on you begin to see that you have a need for a third-party messaging management solution. A virus was sent to several employees and while it did not harm anything because your Notes clients do not allow the attachments to auto-launch, you still fear that a user may detach and run the virus. Furthermore, as the months have gone by and e-mail usage has climbed dramatically, you are beginning to feel the pinch on your available hard disk storage. What are you to do? You begin browsing through the IBM Smart Market catalog and find that Conxsys makes a messaging management solution named Logistic that will not only allow you to quickly and easily set mail retention rules and thus alleviate your disk space issues, but will also painlessly find and eradicate that virus attachment from every mail account. In what promises to be a simple process, you decide to try Logistic. The application automatically downloads, installs, and configures itself on your Foundations Domino server. Quick, simple, and with little to no configuration you have found a solution, purchased it and have it running. That is the promise of Smart Market.

Of course I took more away from Lotusphere this year than just those few things, but those are the ones that I feel may end up having a positive impact on Lotus in 2009. What I saw that will impact myself or Conxsys were some of the changes that have come to Notes and Domino 8.5. For me personally, the most anticipated is the class browser in Designer, but this will not see the light of day until 8.5.1. However, there are plenty of new features to keep me busy with Designer 8.5 until then given that it is now based on Eclipse, something I expected to happen in an 8.0.x release.

XPages are intriguing, but for now not a priority because I do not currently write many web-based applications. I see the writing on the wall however and know that this will change, but I am unlikely to seriously look into XPages until 8.5.1.

If you ever get the chance to see Ben Zander speak in person don’t hesitate!

You cannot have a discussion about Lotusphere with there being a personal side. If you can have that discussion then you are doing Lotusphere the wrong way! It was very nice to see some old friends and to see people again or meet for the first time that are primarily Facebook and Twitter friends. I apologize for those whose real name I could not remember or that I could not recognize, but when you have a cartoon (or rabbit) as your Twitter profile picture that makes it a little challenging!   This brings me to an important tip for any newbie to attend Lotusphere 2010: if Joe Litton invites you over for a Mai Tai, you had better accept because it is damn good!

Finally, I want to thank everyone who came out for the Conxsys 2009 Blogger Open at the Fantasia Miniature Golf Course. I had a great time even though my team, which consisted of Kevin Pettit, Stuart McIntyre, Karl Martinsson and myself, did not win. Or come close that I know of! And very special thanks have to go out to Mitch Cohen and Warren Elsmore for organizing the event. If it becomes a yearly Lotusphere tradition, and it should, I was glad to at least play some small role in it’s inauguration.

Links:
Flickr.com: My Lotusphere 2009 Photos