Lotusphere Monday: Keynote speech
Monday 21st January, 2008This year's keynote for Lotusphere included lots of summary and lots of information.
This year marks two milestones: the 15th year for Lotusphere and the 10 year anniversary for Sametime.
Mike Rhodin came out to summarize all the products released in 2007. One of the most interesting factoids that was being shared is that 93% of the user base for the Lotus Notes client is using the last two releases (that is R7 or R8). Mike did not try to hide much from the audience as Bob Costas was the guest keynote speaker. Bob basically shared how using the Lotus products can help in delivering information to end users. Bob did talked about the Patriots winning this weekend's game, baseball steroids use, and China hosting this year's summer Olympics. Bob was very critical in how China did not like a lot of his commentary back during the Atlanta summer Olympic games which speaks to the irony of the situation now; China is under a world-wide eyes.
Mike did announce a partnership with SAP to introduce a new project called "Atlantic" which will be a client that can work with Lotus Notes and SAP. For example you could not directly connect to SAP to turn in an expense report or request time off native in Lotus Notes. While SAP integration is great, the overall theme Mike was sharing is how you can just use one client instead of many applications which would amount to a lot of window switching. Mike shared how financial institutions are using many Lotus products. If memory serves me well 8 out of 10 (or 12) top US banks use Lotus software and in the world stage about 90% of the top world banks. For the Lotus Notes product there is going to be two upcoming releases: 8.0.1 in February and 8.5 towards the end of the year. A big portion
The stage was shared to cover Lotus Symphony, Lotus Connections, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Forms, Lotus Expeditor, and on the portal side Lotus Quickr along with Websphere announcements. Here are some other info points:
Speaking of the Mac clients, these clients were released in beta today for the public to download. I have both the standard (eclipse) and C++ classic (or basic) client. Expect another blog entry on my Mac experience with these Lotus clients.
This year marks two milestones: the 15th year for Lotusphere and the 10 year anniversary for Sametime.
Mike Rhodin came out to summarize all the products released in 2007. One of the most interesting factoids that was being shared is that 93% of the user base for the Lotus Notes client is using the last two releases (that is R7 or R8). Mike did not try to hide much from the audience as Bob Costas was the guest keynote speaker. Bob basically shared how using the Lotus products can help in delivering information to end users. Bob did talked about the Patriots winning this weekend's game, baseball steroids use, and China hosting this year's summer Olympics. Bob was very critical in how China did not like a lot of his commentary back during the Atlanta summer Olympic games which speaks to the irony of the situation now; China is under a world-wide eyes.
Mike did announce a partnership with SAP to introduce a new project called "Atlantic" which will be a client that can work with Lotus Notes and SAP. For example you could not directly connect to SAP to turn in an expense report or request time off native in Lotus Notes. While SAP integration is great, the overall theme Mike was sharing is how you can just use one client instead of many applications which would amount to a lot of window switching. Mike shared how financial institutions are using many Lotus products. If memory serves me well 8 out of 10 (or 12) top US banks use Lotus software and in the world stage about 90% of the top world banks. For the Lotus Notes product there is going to be two upcoming releases: 8.0.1 in February and 8.5 towards the end of the year. A big portion
The stage was shared to cover Lotus Symphony, Lotus Connections, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Forms, Lotus Expeditor, and on the portal side Lotus Quickr along with Websphere announcements. Here are some other info points:
- To play up Symphony there was a real symphony to help up with a lot of the music.
- Symphony beta 4 will be out in February
- Downloads are for Windows and Linux. NOTE to LN users install the R8 Lotus Notes first to gain the tight integration.
- Expeditor is used for Sametime, Symphony, and Lotus Notes which means that code for each client can be shared as it is using Expeditor.
- Upcoming 8.5 Lotus/Domino features were released. Domino Web Access will have iPhone compatiblity, a lighter form of the client to load faster, and ajax within it; Domino Designer will have the eclipse-base IDE, Domino server will have some features to try to gain space for file attachments and more compression of the NSF data - if multiple emails have a similar file attachment, then domino will have one copy of the file for both emails which reminds me of an older mail object store feature that was not as popular.
- Lotus Foundation and "Bluehouse" was announced to address the medium to small customers needs. A pre-installed environment for companies without many IT resources.
- Connections, Sametime, and Quickr are getting upgrades but I am not really covering these products on this site. I will skip these details.
- Mac Lotus clients are expected to be out by Q3 numbered as 8.5 though it will have the 8.0.1 Lotus Notes code base.
Speaking of the Mac clients, these clients were released in beta today for the public to download. I have both the standard (eclipse) and C++ classic (or basic) client. Expect another blog entry on my Mac experience with these Lotus clients.
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