Lotusphere wrapup

Ahh… Lotusphere. You go to learn, to be immersed in new technology, to see glimpses of the future, and to be bathed in yellow goodness (yellow is the new black!). The only problem is leaving and coming back to the reality that your company has no plan to upgrade to Notes/Domino 7 at this time, you’re still trying to upgrade your QuickPlace server from 2.0.8 to 6.5.x, getting a Sametime environment seems like a pipe dream, and you may never have the time to implement all the cool stuff you just learned.

Regardless, here’s my take on geek week:

Non-techy stuff:

1. Jason Alexander was my favorite opening session speaker of the three I’ve seen (Patrick Stewart and Ben Stein being the other two). His views on how technology has influenced Hollywood were interesting and tied into the conference. Plus, he’s funny. 😉
2. Made a new friend (who happens to be a blogger) and kept running into him over and over again throughout the conference, which is pretty amazing when you consider that there are 6000 people there. Chris deserves a lot of credit for organizing the JamFest Wiki, which was then promptly ignored when the amps were fired up.
3. I said this in my other post, but I’ll repeat it here. JamFest was cool, but a little more organization can help it flow better. Standing “backstage” I heard several comments about musicians that wanted to get up and play, but didn’t feel comfortable just butting in. I ran open mic nights for a few years in college and learned there that sign up sheets are a necessity.
4. Welcome reception was great as always. Poker tables were cool!
5. I only got up for one 7am BoF session, but I was extremely appreciative of the fact there was coffee and doughnuts there, since I never would have made breakfast that morning.
6. I never did find the CLP lounge. 🙁

Techy stuff:

1. I was surprised that Notes/Domino “Next” or Hannover or whatever you want to call it was going to get us so close to the convergence of the Notes and Workplace product streams. I was a bit underwhelmed by what I saw available in ND7, but Hannover looks hella cool!
2. The labs were awesome, as always. Having direct access to the developers and gurus of the various products and the ability to ask them questions is one of the main benefits of Lotusphere to me. Sometimes, I’d walk into one of the labs with no question in mind, and as soon as I’d start talking to someone, they’d help pull a question out of the back of my brain.
3. XML, DXL, AJAX, RSS – I was glad to see so much focus on these. These are today’s technologies and as a developer, I got to see a lot about how to implement and make better use of these in our environment.
4. QuickPlace Next is going to rock! Seeing actual working demos of the future technology that’s going to be integrated into it gave me a lot of renewed hope. I was disappointed and a bit worried that there were so few sessions on QuickPlace, but after seeing what’s coming I have no more fears. Hats off to the QuickPlace team for staying on the leading edge of innovation!
5. I sat in on the BoF session on search (BOF204) and was a bit disappointed that there appears to be little to no innovation on the search front. Ground control to IBM – domain search may have worked fine in 1998, but you need to put some renewed emphasis on improving search. Tweaking the indexer and adding new attachment filters doesn’t cut it for companies like mine that has an intranet of over 100 databases. Domain search needs to be more customizeable, needs the ability to control what’s bubbled up to the top of the list based on the search term entered, and needs more control over how relevancy is calculated. Google has raised the bar. At least make an effort to reach for it.
6. WiFi coverage was outstanding. If you could please figure out wireless power, then I could use my laptop for more than two sessions. 🙂
7. The session technical level needs to be added to the pocket guide. I really don’t like walking out of sessions, but sometimes the description of a session is more enticing than the actual content.
8. All star presenters: Jaime Magee/Kevin Marshall and Bill Buchan/Paul Mooney! Too many sessions were just too dry and monotone. These two pairs had outstanding rapport with each other and the audience, and informative sessions as well! As for the snoozers… you’ll know who they are from the session evals.

Overall, another great conference. Looking forward to the next one!