From Individual Actions Larger Patterns Emerge

" Emergence" is this theme of this years Lotusphere. To underline this statement the Orlando symphony orchestra was conducting at the beginning of the General Opening Session. Their individual actions resulting in an well conducted pattern of an excellent musical performance (at least judging with my limited understanding of musical performances). I was attending the second run of the General Opening Session starting at 11am Orlando time. The guest speaker was Bob Costas. I have to admit I had no clue who he was. For being non-American following the sports focused talk was quite a challenge.

But the real attractions of course are the announcements. Here you go. There are two different types: collaboration with partner companies and new products.Collaboration

• RIM: New agreements to work much closer to integrate IBM and RIM solutions (A bit fluffy, not very concrete what that means).
• SAP: Dr. Vishal Sikka came on stage. They announced "Atlantic" that integrates SAP and Lotus Notes. In guess SAP was sufficient impressed by Rocky's SAP integration featured a year ago. It will be available in Q4 of this year. The integration will happen on the form and composite level. Since Notes always had custom forms that could be emailed the integration points are obvious. More about that later this week.
• Sungard: Provide portal to government agencies
• GoPro: Provide portal and Domino for government case management

Products (new and improved)

• Notes & Domino 8.0.1
  The all new DWA web access is not only faster, it  will run on the iPhone. eMails (not only attachments) can be compressed and save up to 35% storage. There is a new feature in town: MyWidgets. Google gadgets and other Widgets can be surfaced into the Notes Client MyWidgets feature LiveText which seems to be the answer to Microsoft's SmartTags in MS Office applications. I'm looking forward to see Notes applications taking advantage of LiveText. It should be fairly easy compared to SmartTags. It even comes with a widget wizard and the distribution of widgets using eMail and just use drag & drop to install the widgets. Widgets are fully integrated into Domino policies. Notes 8.0.1 meetings: supports Sametime, Conference calls and Sametime Unyte meetings. Lotus Notes will be officially supported on Ubuntu Linux.
  
• Notes & Domino 8.5
  Domino Designer 8.5 will be delivered as an Eclipse plug-in. Domino server 8.5 will be able to use other (LDAP) directories and the ID files can be stored in a cental ID fault. It will have a new storage system to use shared storage for attachments. Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta for the Mac is available now. The new xPages feature will allow to write wen2.0 applications within Domino. Domino 8.5 is gaining all the capabilities that were available in Lotus Component Designer as new native capabilities.
  
• Lotus Symphony
  will contain the full Expeditor API and emerge from a simple office application collection to an alternative to the dotNet framework. So you can add sidebar applications to Symphony, that also will run in the Notes client. This is great news for Plug-In development since you now have a platform for your applications.
  
• Lotus Protector
  protection for your eMail: Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus solution.
  
• Sametime 8.0
  The Sametime family will be expanded with Sametime Advanced and Sametime Telephony. Sametime advances will sport community announcements (Skill Tap), persistent chats and instant screen sharing. All these additional plug-ins are already deployed and in active use inside the IBM Sametime network.
  
• Websphere Portal 6.1
  There are a lot of improvement with full Ajax enabled applications. 7 new accelerators for Websphere will be available. Accelerators are business solutions and are full fledged applications (but in name). Pretty cool stuff to get your brand new portal to do actual work. Portal factory can deploy applications to Notes Clients, Sametime clients and run Portal applications even when disconnected. There is a new initiative called TotalForms that allows to rapidly develop new forms. The online form designer looks very promising. The forms are stored a xForms and the dashboard framework can be used to analyze data filled into these forms. Portal now is fully integrated with Lotus Connections, so you can see profile information whenever names are involved. Portlets now can be teared off and float on the portal (well finally. Lotus Raven had that in 2000 ). Dragging & dropping information (e.g. search results into a form to fill) is pretty slick.
  
• Quickr 8.1
  will be available in March, including the personal edition. Quickr will have a open connector framework to connect to Enterprise Content Management. Out of the box it will connect to FileNet and IBM Content Management.. Teamspaces have been improved and run faster much faster now. Quickr similar to Portal is fully integrated into Lotus Connections. I like the integration into the activities a lot. Some of the upcoming (post 8.1) features are: watch list, document and media tagging, document rating, recent changes and subscriptions.
  
• Connections 2.0
  Connections will be available in multiple languages including Arabic and Russian. A dynamic translation engine will be available. New Integration options with Wikis from SocialText and Confluence and Yahoo answers. Greatly improved in 2.0 are the options to customize the user experience and introduces "Attention Management" with a custom homepage. The biggest news for semi-connected users: activities can be taken off-line, so you can still use them while disconnected. The new integrated search allows to search across all parts of connections. With Lotus Atlas you can visualize your social networks and search experts and highlight how to connect to people. The full integration into Quickr even surfaces the shared files of people. Connections is also available on Blackberry. The communities have been improved and added discussion boards and wiki. Activities have a lot of little improvements. I'll blog on that in more detail.
  
• Lotus Mashups
  Brand new product. It is a tool for the "long tail of programming" to mix and match snippets from different applications. Running in a browser it features a mashup catalog with available widgets. Google gadgets are supported. Mashups can surface in portal, Sametime or Notes clients. RSS/Atom feeds provide data for the mashups (I guess other sources work too). Lotus Mashups seems to be the corporate version of Yahoo pipes.
  
• Lotus Foundations
  a tool emerging from IBM's acquisition of Nitix. They are ready configured "software servers". Rhodin pulled a Domino server out of an envelope. The "software servers" are appliances with ready to run software. Lotus foundations is a hybrid of software, hardware and software as a service.
  
• House Party
  Project Greenhouse allows you to get a hang of social software. Now  Project Bluehouse, a sister project, enables you to jumpstart/evaluate the idea of Software As A Service (SaaS). Bluehouse contains quite some results from Alphaworks. The instant chart capability is quite impressive.