The Lotusphere 2010 Opening General Session (OGS)

If you were following the tweets about Lotusphere or LotusKnows you know everything what is contained in this post. The guest speaker was William Shatner of Star Trek fame. Instead of repeating the chronological sequence of the OGS I'm listing our product and partner announcements sorted by product name. Enjoy.

• General
  This year's Lotusphere theme is "Lotus knows why. Lotus knows how" revolving around three business themes: The collaboration agenda, the Cloud and LotusNext. The collaboration agenda is IBM's industry specific approach to collaboration. It provides a framework approach to identify gaps in collaboration patterns and improve effectiveness and efficiency. It is the official transition from product selling to solution selling, something the more successful sellers have embraced for many years already. Now the power of IBM's internal collaboration will help all to do that. IBM's view on cloud is a natural extension of existing on premise equipment. IBM's cloud vision encompasses a seamless integration and transition between any IT assets whether local or in the cloud.
• General Manager
  Bob Picciano handed over the role of Lotus General Manager to Alistair Rennie.
  
• Lotus Connections
  In H2 2010 Lotus Connections 3.0 will be available it adds, based on customer demand, new capabilities around metrics and audit capabilities and extended mobile access. Social Analytics will allow to automagically find connections hidden in plain view through a recommendation engine to connect to people and communities.
  
• Lotus Foundations
  Xerox is delivering OfficeNow! solutions as Lotus Foundation applications linking to Xerox multifunctional devices.
  
• LotusLive
  Lotus Live has after just one year in the market more than 18 million users. in Q2 IBM will add LotusLive Communities which today are available in Lotus Connections on premise.
  LotusLive Engage
  Engage now is integrated into the Notes client using new sidebar applications. Engage is the perfect tool to extend collaboration safely across corporate boundaries. Why eMail a file around with a version nightmare if you can share them online including tracking who looked at what version.
  LotusLive iNotes
  Light eMail solution starting at $3/User month.
  LotusLive Labs A new feature in LotusLive will allow users to test new capabilities before they become mainstream functions (Google labs anyone ). It will have Slide Library (Slide River), Collaborative Recorded Meetings (Agora) and other. Labs will be available in Q2 to IBM partners.
  LotusLive Notes (hosted Notes) allows for a hybrid model with on- and off-premise mix of Domino servers. Minimum number of users lowered from 500 to 50. Mailbox size is 5GB/user. Sametime chat is included and services for migration and backup are available.
  Domino servers hosted in the cloud for development will be available on developerworks that will take less then 30 minutes to set up.
  
• Lotus Notes and Domino
  Businesses adopting Notes and Domino 8.5.x at a record adoption rate, twice as fast as the previous fastest deployment. To continuously improve product quality there will be the 8.5.2 maintenance release in 2010.
  
• Lotus Quickr
  Lotus Quickr 8.5 Beta for both Domino and J2EE can be expected soon. The J2EE version now runs on top of the current Websphere Portal 6.1.5 making deployment much easier. The release of Quickr 8.5 is expected in Q2. The Domino version will catch up with the J2EE version and directly connect to ECM systems. The available APIs are greatly extended and XPages developers can directly access Quickr services.
  The Quickr plug-in for Lotus Notes now allows to not only store attachments but entire eMails in the open standard EML format. Quickr calendars now can surface as iCal streams to be integrated into your personal calendar. Quickr will support CMIS to connect to all sorts of backends including our competitors.
  
• Lotus Sametime
  Lotus Sametime 8.5 has shipped. Community (chat) and meeting functions are now fully separated with the later running on a Websphere infrastructure (like the Sametime gateway and Sametime advanced before). The new clients (Eclipse, Web, Mobile) allow a very rich user experience. Audio/Video is lacking in the current web clients, but planned as future enhancements. Now users have their fixed meeting room to be used any time. Meetings can be recorded in industry standard formats. (Note on this: there are 2 IBM research project to take the recording further: Agora and Falcon - see them in the innovation lab. I'm a proud member of the Falcon research team).
  
• Lotus Symphony
  Lotus Symphony 3.0 Beta will be available in February and go gold in Q2. It is based on the OpenOffice 3.x code stream and will improve the user experience, functionality and stability of Symphony. One important new feature is the support for Visual Basic Macros in xls files.
• Lotus Traveler and Mobile
  The Lotus Traveler server is coming to Linux. A native iPhone application allows for message encryption and is available in the iTunes appstore today.. Lotus Traveler is bundled with the Nokia E72. A native Android application will support mail and calendar to be delivered in H1. The plan is to initially support the Google phone (a.k.a Nexus One) and Motorola's Droid. RIM produces new clients for the Blackberry for Sametime, Quicker and Lotus Connections, delivering on an old promise. The application will be sold both by IBM and RIM. A lot of detail improvements around directory lookups and scheduling.
  
• Websphere Portal and Mashups
  IBM offers Industry accelerators for key industries to dramatically cut down the time to deploy a workable Portal. Accelerators are initially available for health care, government, banking, insurance, education, manufacturing and transport. Portal and Mashups are fully integrated into Unified Telephony.
  
• Partners
  IBM featured partners on stage: Xerox, iEnterprises, Group Technologies, GoPro and Ascendant.
• Project Vulcan
  IBM's new vision for the future of Lotus Software: continuity (no rip & replace, deeper integration), convergence (unified collaboration, join on-premise and cloud), innovation and new opportunities. Vulcan is based on open standards like HTML5, CSS3, REST, Web Services, Widgets and Mashups. All of this will be available in the Notes client (the premier experience), online and on mobile devices. XPages taking center stage to deliver all that. A new homepage will collate information using social analytics. The homepage looks very much like the universal inbox I advocated before. Searches in the homepage can turn into permanent self updating lists and collections. It will provide full integration of concurrent online co-editing with task and attention management (more on that will be revealed in the mini keynotes during the show). Project Vulcan will be available this year on developerworks.
  

You will find additional and deeper coverage on Planet Lotus. Stay tuned for more entries on this week full of new information.