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 http://www.indellient.com/aci/aci_tech.pdf" title="http://www.indellient.com/aci/aci_tech.pdf">Asset Conversion Inspector  (not to be confused with http://www.docova.com/www/Docova.nsf/eng/Inspector_Offer" title="http://www.docova.com/www/Docova.nsf/eng/Inspector_Offer">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 maintenancehttp://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/foundations/start/hardware.html" title="http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/foundations/start/hardware.html"> 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 http://docova.com" title="http://docova.com">Docova when we worked with Nitix prior to the aquisition by IBM.  

Another interesting tool is http://ephox.com" title="http://ephox.com">Ephox, which is a rich text editor that you embed in web pages.  The one we use in http://docova.com" title="http://docova.com">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.