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Lotusphere 2009 Recap

We will have a few people presenting an overview of the major items discussed at Lotusphere 2009. We will also discuss in more detail some of the major cost savings features of having your Lotus Domino servers at R8.5.

Thank you Jeff Anderson from Meridian IT for hosting this meeting.

You can park and enter the building from either the north or south side.

Once at the building, Jeff's directions to the room are: "Enter the building, take elevators to 8th floor. Locate Room 820." Easy enough! :-)

After the meeting, everyone is invited to walk across the parking lot to TGI Fridays to have a refreshment and network with other Lotus professionals. Attendance is always free but it's good to have an idea of who and how many will be attending, so please let know if you're coming!

Please Email me with any topic suggestions for this meeting and future meetings. I would also like to hear from people that are willing to present about how their company uses IBM/Lotus technology.

Meeting Notes

We had over 30 people attend the meeting representing over 20 companies

Lotus is 20 years old this year.

At Lotusphere IBM announced 12,036 new customers since the launch of Notes 8, and 16 consecutive quarters of growth.

RIM was also there and announced their devices’ support for Lotus Notes. Blackberry Support for Sametime features like file transfer and Notes 8.5 mail.

XPages:

• Develop once and run on many devices
• Use XPages to bring Web2.0 features in your existing Domino apps. Give them new life.
• Develop and reuse Custom Controls on XPages.
• Use Themes throughout your sites.

Lotus Symphony

• IBM really encourages Lotus Symphony. It doesn’t do everything MS-Office does, but it does what 80-90% of your users need.
• You can open, work with and save Office formatted documents. They suggest configuring Lotus Symphony this way if your company will have a mixed environment.
• I really like the Save to PDF feature of Lotus Symphony.
• Save money on your MS-Office licenses. Get rid of them, or only have them for the people that need them.

Lotus Quickr

• Quickr place integration for documents.
• Quickr functions will become controls within XPages in a future version.
• Lotus Quickr Connectors – allow people to easily contribute and consume information in Quickr places.

Alloy (Was called project Atlantic) - allows for integration of SAP and Notes.

New features in R8.5:

• Drag a Sametime person or group to the "To:" of a mail message.
• Right click on a "Contact" and send a vCard
• iCal integration with your calendar. Display as an overlay any calendar that uses iCal. The Google calendar is an example of an iCal calendar.
• iNotes, new features: iCal overlay, Sametime Contacts, status integrators, widgets, save attachments to Lotus Quickr.

When upgrading Notes to 8.5 or moving from Exchange, expect

• 30% fewer server resources
• 40% CPU improvement
• 40-60% disk savings
• 50% reduced I/O

Lotus Protector - An appliance you can purchase from IBM for managing mail and firewall.

Lotus Foundations – A Domino Server pre-configured for you can purchase from IBM. Domino running on Linux, tape backup, DNS server, and file and print server.

UC2 (unified communications and collaboration)

• Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) in ST 8.5 due out in Q3-09.
• Softphone in Sametime
• Rules that you configure for how you want to get in touch with you. You have something called your "unified number". People only have one number for you and your rules define how they get you on which device.
• ST knows when you're in a meeting because it reads your Notes calendar.
• Send an IM to a "community" of people that subscribe to it.
• When in a chat, convert the community chat to a conference call. The system dials everyone, they pick up and they're in a conference call.
• Easy to add more people to a conference call.
• While you're in a call...transfer the call to your mobile phone.
• Sametime alerts. There is video integration too.

New Sametime meetings

• Better video conferencing
• iPhone support
• New meeting architectures...doesn't use java applets. Uses HTTP. Nothing for the user to download to attend a meeting.
• Application and document sharing.
• Record meetings in standard formats that can be edited later with commonly available tools
• Start a meeting with Notes
• Persistent meeting rooms focused around an activity or community. It stays around. Keep docs in the meeting and chats and anything you're meeting about. Quickr content too. Record the meeting on the fly and save it in your persistent meeting. Because it is now an industry standard format you can edit the recording and use them for other purposes.

Lotus Connections

• Social Software for business
• Lotus Connections and Quickr are integrated
• Connections 2.5 shipping in Q3-09
• You can now Brand it for your own company
• new Wiki template
• new social content sharing service (IBM says MS offerings will look impotent when this is released)
• Microblogging support
• Integrated with LinkedIn
• Connections will work on the Blackberry
• New features in Connections
• news from people in your network
• change the themes on communities
• Customize your theme and add widgets (a files widget integrated with Quickr)
• Wiki is a core part of a community
• Members can co-author wiki pages, rate them, tag them, comment on them
• Mobile version on blackberry as a rich client.
• Connection 2.5 should support iPhone and Nokia via microbrowser.

ECM (Enterprise Content Management)

• ECM integrates backend Filenet and CM8 with Quickr and Connections.
• You use Lotus Connectors for this.
• Quickr can take advantage of the big ECM solution in the background.
• You can get content out of Quickr or you ECM.
• You can publish to Quickr or to your robust ECM solution where vigorous rules take affect.

Mashups:

• help with the IT backlog. The theory is that you take existing applications and tie them together as a mashup (composite application) and the 'combination' of applications into a mashup is often what people are asking for when you're look for an enhancement to an app or to a new application.
• Task standard feeds, tie them together in new way to help solve business problems.
• Using the Mashup center in WebSphere Portal, you can create feeds and then define the properties of each feed that you expose.

Lotus Live (was bluehouse)

• Allows you to have a hosted environment for collaborating with people when you need to communicate outside of the company. It makes sense if you're doing a project or merger or something with a company that is not part of your network and tools.
• file sharing, web conferencing, mail and c&s, IM, social networking, activities, forms
• upload a new version of a document.
• Available Q1-2009
• Do an organization search to find a business profile when looking for another company. You could then give them access to your file too.
• You can integrate LotusLive into your current environment (seems like that will be accomplished with widgets).
• Integrated with Symphony.
• Integrated with Blackberry, what a meeting with your blackberry. The newer blackberries are 3G devices which mean you can use voice and data at the same time (which you couldn't do before, you had to choose data or voice).

R8 and R8.5 differences in coding applications:

• The Designer Client is very different. It is now Eclipse based.
• Look out for the “Recent Contacts” feature in your personal names.nsf. It is highly useful, but it confuses people. It can be turned off in your preferences.
• Composite applications

New Admin Features in R8.5

• DAOS
• ID Vault

A member mentioned the OpenNTF.org site. It’s a great place to collaborate, download or contribute Notes applications. It’s Open-Source. It’s free. A good example it the “Open Error Log”. It extends the AgentLog class you help you develop, log and trouble-shoot applications.

Members suggested:

• For a future meeting, let’s have Ed Brill back to explain the IBM roadmap.
• For a future meeting, let’s explore Cloud Computing. What hosted services could we get from The Cloud. Sametime Unyte? Sametime IM?
• For a future meeting, can we hear more from RIM in regards to applications on Blackberries.
• Intricacies of Notes/Domino 8.5
• More real-life examples of companies working with the technology. Upgrades, Implementing Sametime, anyone integrating with SharePoint.

Great Resources

• All about XPages, an example: Dec's Dom Blog
• Consolidation or Lotus related Blog Postings: Planet Lotus
• The always excellent blog to keep up on: Ed Brill
• Training for 8.5 (here's an option): TLCC
• OpenSource Notes applications: OpenNTF.Org
• A little something I found about bulding Composite Apps: Balfes.net

Someone asked, "if I use Lotus Symphony and save a document in PDF format, can someone edit the PDF later?" The answer is "No", you can't edit a PDF.