Looking for the Golden Ticket to Lotusphere2010?
Exemplifying how Docova gives organizations More, we're giving away a full conference pass to Lotusphere 2010 and other prizes. The bonus? The pass is transferrable - great if you need to send a member of your team instead.

Enter to win here, and take the money normally spent on the conference and use it elsewhere.

Rewind the clock about 4 years.  Youtube was created by some ex Pay Pal folks.  If a picture is worth 1000 words, how much is a video worth. Well, Google figured about 1.6 billion, buying Youtube when it was a little over one year old.  Want to learn how to use a band saw, takeoff in an airplane without starting the engine, play the guitar....it is all a mouse click away.

I have always been a big proponent of multimedia.  I used Macromedia Authorware years ago when I worked for the Microage franchise.  The concept was good, but the labor was much too intensive to make any kind of sense.  At DLI, I grabbed onto Camasia when it was version 1.0, and began using it screen capture and flash rendering to quickly create video overviews to demonstrate our web development tools.   We did the same for Docova, building a library of over 100 clips to show how to use our powerful web development/doc mgt framework.  



I have often wondered why Lotus did not do the same.  Turns out they have, and they unveiled it at Lotusphere 2009.  The Lotus Multimedia training library.

Technically anything after 12 midnight goes into the Thursday file.  Kumonos was the hang out for most of the LS Geeks after the trip to Universal. I was surprised to see the new leader of the Lotus brand, Bob Picciano, drinking, singing and dancing with the rest of the Lotus community.  Not something I remember seeing Mike Rodin do.   His drink of choice that night seemed to be the Lotus Koolaid, not the blueish batch produced over the last last couple of years but the vintage yellow stuff with a higher percentage of NSF.   He talked to just about every partner in the room, and was pretty open and easy to engage.

Lotusphere has its own vibe.  I met two people who took vacation and paid their own way down because their employers could not justify the cost. It can be a hellish week, but there is something about the Lotus Notes Community that brings you back.

I visited the developer lab, and talked to the IBM'ers about Quickr.  There was talk that Quickr Next was going to have workflow and version control similar to DomDoc and be out by the end of the year.  Not the feedback I got from the developers.  They gave the impression that Quickr was going to remain lightweight in terms of document mgt functionality, and it was up to Filenet and IBM Content Manager via the Quickr connector to do the heavy lifting. I asked about the Quickr connector for Domino for these two products and I got a mish mash of responses in terms of when that would happen. It is looking more like Doc Mgt with Quickr is going to require  Websphere plumbing if you want to do it this year.

Traveller looked cool. Gives you functionality similar to what you can get with the Blackberry and BES combination, but on non-Blackberry devices such as cell phones.  

At lunch I sat with yet another DomDoc customer.  Huge implementation with thousands of users and several terabytes of data.  Although he agreed the UI was terrible, you could see in his eyes the loyalty in the brand.   I told him about Docova and how we saw it as a good fit for organizations that had DomDoc, needed more functionality than Quickr but did not have the massive storage requirements or the desire to move to Filenet or Content Manger due to cost and complexity.  He offered to have a look at the UI we have come up with and offer some feedback once he digs out after the show.

I flew to Detroit then took a Northwest flight into Kitchener rather than going through Toronto.  It was 10 minutes from the time I deplaned to when I was digging my car out for the drive home.  

Everytime I would leave the show floor for the washrooms, going out the back doors, I would pass an IBM pedestal with a young lady who never seemed to have any traffic at her booth. She would always flash me this killer smile as I sauntered by.  I made the mistake of mentioning that to Arif, who said "follow me" and proceeded to head in that direction before I could think it through.  With the diplomacy of a seven year old he told her I thought she was cute and I felt sorry she had nobody to talk to so we came over to see what she was selling.  She looked me right in the eye and said "oh goody, a pity demo".  I found a different route to the loo after that.

Found an interesting tool by a Canadian company called Indellient.  It is called Asset Conversion Inspector  (not to be confused with DLI Inspector), and it will crawl a customer's environment to detect and report on the MS Office products that are in use. The data is not returned, but it does show who is using what, and identifies where a customer could use free office suites such as Symphony or Open Office and save on license fees.  IBM is pretty hot on this, as you can well imagine.

Went to the Lotus Foundations lab today and had a demo of the tool for packaging Notes apps. The idea is to put the self healing, low/no maintenance LF appliance into SMB companies that have few if any IT resources. ISV's can package their apps and have them distributed off the SmartMarket web site, where they are automatically downloaded and configured...again with no IT skills required. Presentation was not the best, and the lab was like trying to hold a meeting in the middle of a auction hall, but I ended up with what I needed. I wanted to compare the tool to the one we had writtent for Docova when we worked with Nitix prior to the aquisition by IBM.  

Another interesting tool is Ephox, which is a rich text editor that you embed in web pages.  The one we use in Docova has some fidelity issues with MS Word, so we will be having a look at this one.

The show floor closed down at 5 pm today, and tomorrow is a day for some last minute meetings and sessions before catching the plane back to the great white north. Hopefully the small battery that keeps my Prius Hybrid alive survived a week in the cold, as I will be landing around midnight at the KW airport, which is likely to be deserted at that time.  

9-5 on the show floor today.  Traffic lighter than last year but still had some quality conversations with potential customers.  Lotusphere is as much about connecting with the community of partners as it is  with customers. Still lots of chatter about R 8.5 Designer and X Pages. Stephen of DominoYesNoMaybe fame has some good comments if you want to tune in.

Had a couple of Domino.Doc (Lotus Document Manager) customers come by check us out.  The migration path for them by IBM is Quickr and the Connector to Filenet or IBM Content manager.  Although DomDoc has some UI challenges, it did have some pretty impressive functionality and some customers were using to as an EDMS system.  Going to Quickr and the connectors at this time means a J2EE infrastructure as the Domino connectors are not available yet.  For the SMB guys, that is a huge investment and they have been looking around for a pure Domino solution.  Quickr on its own lacks functionality that even smaller companies require if they want to do more than collaboration and file sharing. Docova is a pretty good fit in this case.

Tuesday night there were several social events scheduled.  I went to Canada night, and was surprised to see a live band, excellent buffet and open bar  (aka no drink tickets required).  You could see the chamber music the band was putting out was even getting to them, and when I suggested some Canadian content they were quick to pound out a decent version of Taking Care of Business.  

I forgot about the Symphony Kareeokke , which I understand was a blast. They would put a topic up on the screen and you had to present to it with no advanced prep time.  Sort of "Whose Line Is It Anyways" style.  Jelly Rolls was hopping, as usual, with IBM Austrailia forgetting who was who and giving out drink passes to hot Vince Vaughn look-alikes.  For once common sense prevailed and I bailed early. You could tell Wednesday morning on the show floor was going to be a nasty experience for some.

The General Session was pretty much full. They did not have the overflow into the Swan that they did last year, mostly because IBMers were encouraged not to attend.  

The Blue Head Group did a musical number with ABS plumbing pipe that was pretty impressive.  Lots of cell phones captured the action in poor quality and posted it to Youtube. Dan Akroyd was the keynote.  Not so impressive as he was obviously reading from the teleprompters.

The focus really seems to be back on Domino.  Websphere portal was hardly mentioned, and you do not see it listed as much in the session index as in previous years.  Mike Rodin's replacement, Bob Picciano, is married to a Notes developer, and he kidded that has had an impact.

They announced that attendance was up this year by 2%.  Considering last year was a sellout, I cannot see how that could be the case.  The traffic in the showcase seems down a bit from last year, but it is hard to tell.

They announced a lot.  Some I covered in the last post from Business Development days.  Here are some additional points from the general session.

Domino 8.5 is getting a lot of air play.  It has the new Eclypse based Domino Designer, and there is a lot of talk about X Pages.  This is a design element that allows you to quickly deploy Domino web apps.  It gets around many of the issues with Domino Web development, giving you a toolkit filled with ajax lookups, controls, dialog and prompt boxes, RT Editor, cloud tags...etc.  I did NOT see a multi file upload control in the mix.  Everyone seemed pretty impressed, but the Geeks in the crowd were pretty quick to point out that this ability to separate the design and presentation layers is something Microsoft and other development environments have had for years.  

The new designer has support for Blackberry development. That was covered off by Jim Balsillie himself.  He showed how you can easily deploy an application on the Blackberry using the same skills that you use to develop other applications in the new Domino Designer.  

More functionality is coming for Quickr, what they are calling Quickr next.  In my opinion it still fails in the UI department, being built on the old Quickplace. There was some talk about X Pages for Quickr but it was unclear.

We had a draw for a debit card loaded with $ 4K that Scott put together with Ardexus, Metalogics, Integra and FIRM.  Good job Scott.

Monday is the longest day for the Showcase.  As John would said so well last year, "you cannot talk and are walking on stumps by the end of it."

Another Lotusphere Giveaway from DLI.tools and Docova.

We're giving away our DLI.Inspector software, valued at $5000+, for free.

Have a Software Asset Management tool for your organization -
see what lurks on your users' machines in an easy, automated manner.

And have the tool as a gift from us.
This full license of the DLI.Inspector will not expire,
(but does require free activation beyond the initial trial).

Hurry, this special offer is open until March 31, 2009.
Download Today!

Download the Free License here

Lotusphere always starts the year off right -- getting a chance to connect again with all of our customers and business partners.
There's always so much energy at the conference, this year looks like no different.

Just make sure you stop by our booth, it's our biggest event yet - a draw for a $4000 USD pre-paid card!


For more Lotusphere announcements,
see our Lotusphere 2009 previews & announcements page

See you in Orlando!

How many times have you initiated a search looking for something specific, get a long list of results returned, and spend a lot of time scrolling through them to find what you are really looking for?  In some cases even attachments get searched and the search criteria, although technically correct, is out of context.  In some cases way out of context.

An alternative is take advantage of visual search techniques. This web 2.0 technology is being used on many sites and you may be familiar with it.  Check out www.flickr.com as an example.  We have taken this and applied it to a corporate environment in a unique way.  Rather than have the results show everything in terms of meta data, we will be allowing users to define how the search is carried out,. Specifically what meta data is searched and the order it is searched. This is will be all integrated with our powerful "Perspectives" for shaping up data in a way that is meaningful to the end user.

Here is a quick flash overview of a prototype.

http://www.docova.tv/Videos/CloudTags/cloudtags.htm

We always have fun at Lotusphere - 2009 will be no exception. Details to follow on what to expect from us for 2009 - including a new product announcement for Docova and an expanded special draw for the showcase.