Sunday is business development days with sessions for partners.  Some interesting announcements.

Opening session was in some ways good, in others not so good. They had an artist hurl paint at a scrreen and in short order create a very large and impressive rendering of the Mona Lisa.  This was to support IBM's theme for this years BP day.."the Next Renaissance".  The not so good was that the live demo showing the integration of Notes to other products bombed. Network issues were to blame.

IBM's SaaS offering, Bluehouse, is going to be called LotusLive and will be live early this week.  This is a shared teamspace hosted directly by IBM.  Has a Quickr look to it, with IM, File sharing, Symphony...etc.

As we expected, Lotus Document Mgr  (aka DomDoc) was officially killed off.  May 9 it will come out of the price list. By Sept 2012 customers will no longer have support from IBM.  That gives a pretty long lead time.  The recommended migration path is Quickr with Connections to IBM Content Manager or Filenet.  They are giving customers full credit for existing DomDoc cals, and if they want to buy new licenses they are $ 130 each vs the $ 735 each the full Filenet cals.  That is a limited license. You can only use the API for migrating data. The connector for Quickr is only available for the J2EE version at this time.  They are promising one for the Domino version too but there was no mention of a release date.  

From the Geek file Notes 8.5's xpages feature looks interesting.  At first brush it looks to me like a web form design tool. You can take fields defined on a form, and visually lay them out for publishing to the web.  This saves all the html that we typically wrap around fields and add to the forms and pages so they look good on the web.  More on this later.

The session on Lotus Foundations was packed, and I had to admit Caleb, the lead for LF, did a great job.   He had Geek blood in him, doing a Steve Jobs like demo and fielding all techy questions himself for the most part.  Bareware was there as a partner who is on the Foundations platform with their Notes solution and talked about the process to package an application. There is a tool available. They showed it and it allows you to set ACL's and do some other setup tasks quickly.  Smartmarket is the site where they will be posting partner apps. There are some partners already there, even though the legal docs we have been trying to get for weeks are not readily available.  Have some meetings coming up to investigate how we can get onboard. Docova currently runs on Foundations. We were working with Nitix before the acquisition.