The Lotusphere 2009 General Opeing Session

It wasn't Carl Tyler, however a band of blue men warmed up the crowd before Bob Picciano, the Lotus Software General Manager, took the stage. His first message was that Lotus added more than 12000 new customers since R8 shipped. He then cleared the stage for the guest speaker Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd. It was a quite an entertaining talk. This year's theme for Lotusphere is " Resonance". Picciano mused about resonance and how it can bring down the most rigid structures including shattering windows. As a twist to previous Lotuspheres Picciano featured 3 key customers and invited the senior executives to address the crowd: Coca Cola, NetJets and HSBC.
The more interesting parts of course are the announcements:

• The first announcement came from Blackberry. 10 days after Domino 8.5 ships the Blackberry enterprise server is compatible with Domino 8.5. Blackberry has a new Sametime client supporting file transfer, a new Lotus Connections Client and supports the new Domino 8.5 Designer to develop XPages for Blackberry devices.
• Bluehouse, our SaaS solution is now LotusLive. LotusLive has multiple components to suit every need. There is LotusLive Meetings, LotusLive Events, LotusLive Engage, LotusLive Notes, LotusLive iNotes.
  LotusLive allows you collaborate across corporate boundaries. Customers now have the possibility to blend a mix of on-premise and cloud services to suit any business or IT scenario. LotusLive also provides sidebar application for Lotus Notes and Sametime.
• The SAP integration project "Atlantic" announced last year and will ship in Q1 2009 as the product named Alloy.
• Notes 8.5: New side-bare galore: LinkedIn Plug-in, Lotus Activities offline capabilities. Better address integration: forward addresses as vcards, Drag & Drop sametime names into the to field of messages. Overlay calendars from various sources. LotusLive includes mobile support. On stage demo of a Blackberry online meeting session. LotusLive partners with LinkedIn, Saleforce and Skype. This puts LotusLive in the reach of 400M people.
• iNotes 8.5: The user interface is much closer to the Notes client. Calendar overlay works. Notes widgets are available, Full Sametime status updates, full Lotus Quickr integration (kewl)
• Domino Designer 8.5: XPsges is the new way to develop Domino applications (and will be in 8.5.1 available for the Notes Client too!). Support for mobile devices is right build in.
• IBM SmartMarket: IBM's own market place for Business Partner applications.
• OpenNTF: IBM will donate resources and templates to OpenNTF under an OpenSource license.
• Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT): manages all your phone connectivity integrating multiple PABX vendors. It will include a softphone and phone awareness. Sametime chat is fully integrated will SUT including dragging Sametime contacts into conference calls or transferring a conference call to your mobile phone.
• Sametime 8.5: available later this year. No more Java applets, iPhone support, new Rich Client as Sametime plug-in. Permanent meeting rooms including libraries with all stuff you need in a meeting. Sessions are recorded in Quicktime.
• Lotus Connections 2.5: UI will be fully brandable using Themes, Micro blogging (like Twitter), Profiles includes a wall (like Facebook), a new WIKI as native Connections application, "Social Files" to share files (a.k.a Quickr Share), 2way integration with LinkedIn (Facebook seems to be missing yet). iWidgets can be used everywhere to add whatever needs to be added. All these will be also available to devices with micro browser: Nokia, gPhone and iPhone.
• Lotus Quickr 8.1.1 (J2EE): shipped in December with a full integration into Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM). Quickr users now can take advantage of ECM with the full comfort of Quickr's capability like the Quickr connectors
• Quickr 8.2 (Domino): Quickr will use XPages for customization, will include the same ECM capabilities as Quickr J2EE and support Mac and Linux clients (can't wait for that).
• Websphere Portal & Mashups: The Websphere Portal logo is now yellow <g>. No more odd purple dot in the Lotus product family.
  Web Content Management now contains Ephox web editor to better author content. Portal and Mashups work hand in hand. Using the portal Mashups accelerator Lotus Mashups can serve as staging area for portal application. Portal uses a lot of web2.0 technologies and fully integrates the whole Lotus portfolio. Very neat. Mashups can be used to integrate corporate and personal information. You can combine your spreadsheet with data from virtually any enterprise system.
• Lotus Marketing: No product or service, but the new ideas how Lotus marketing will raise awareness for the Lotus brand. Based on IBM's Smart Planet campaign the new Lotus tag line is Working smarter together.