Opening General Session : LiveBlog

Sitting at the front of the OGS. There is an orchestra on stage right now while the main screen is shows a fantastic video of patterns and the usual keywords. If your playing buzzword bingo you have probably won by now

Live pictures being uploaded to my flickr account…

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Welcome to the OGS

And the opening Speaker is…. Bob Costas.

Mike rodhan is back on stage and by now everybody in the seats around me has won the Buzzword Bingo. Now if only we could get somebody to stand up and shout out bingo just like the IBM commecial. Nice joke about other companies who are ‘looking in the rearview mirror’ The image on stage behind Mike shows a partial MS logo…

Mike is talking about business partnerships with RIM and on the screen behind him is an image of a blackberry with lotus Connections running on it. Now the CEO of SAP is on stage. Project ‘Atlantic’. Allows access to the SAP business suite from the lotus notes desktop. Very quick demo of how it works.

Alistair Rennie is now on stage to talk about the new Notes clients. Jeff Eisen and Russ Holden join him onstage. Lotus Traveller mentioned and DWA on the iPhone ( so not a FULL iPhone application then ) Jeff also mentioned the mac client beta. On the Domino server side there is 20% cpu reductions, 35% design compression, DWA starts up to 45% faster and is optimized for low bandwidth environmenst.

Some new features in the new client is the abilityt to do online meetings with an external provider and also store the teleconf detals in the meeting. The sidebar has been extened witha ‘My Widgets’ section where you can add the likes of Google Gadgets to the sidebar. Also just demo’d making a view in a notes DB into a sidebar widget. Can be controlled by policies.

Showing the iPhone interface. While it looks nice and is easy to use it is not a ‘PUSH’ email client. All this is in 8.0.1 to be released next month.

Domino 8.5 is announced. New ID Management features, new attachment reduction system and Lotus Protector to reduce spam and viruses.

Domino Designer 8.5 to create new web 2.0 apps and reskin existing apps. Maureen is on stage to show off domino designer. The new domino designer is Eclipse based. It will be available in Domino 8.5. There is now a class browser ( at long last ).

Lotus Symphony. It’s FREE. More then an OpenOffice with an old Lotus name. It has features from ‘Smartsuite’. Beta 4 in a few weeks will have new APIs for extending Symphony and the API’s will be available in the notes client also.anniversary for Sametime. There will be a schedule of locations and ates for a Symphony bootcamp roadtrip.

Happy 10th anniversary to Sametime. Sametime Advanced and Unified Telephony is coming this year. Advanced brings you access to onlines communities and persistant chat rooms. Unified Telephony will integrate your phone system with sametime. You can create rules based on your status and location. So something like ‘If I’m away and location is anywhere’ then all my calls will go to my cell phone.

Time for some Portal announcements. Be back in a bit…

Talking now about Quickr and Connections. Quickr 8.1 is coming in March. Easier ways to share files and adding full function integration to Outlook. Quickr 8.1 adds a new ‘Public Files’ area where you can add files for others to find. There is now a Team Spaces template. a ‘rating’ feature ( that looks very like the rating feature in blogsphere so you can get an idea as to how it works )

Sorry, the battery on my laptop ran out of juice so i didn;t get a chance to blog about the last few announcements like Lotus Mashups, Lotus Foundations and Lotus BlueHouse. Pop on over to Ed Brill’s blog for more details as he will have them all there.

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Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta for Mac OSX

Well IBM fixed the download so I grabbed
it down overnight. If your here at Lotusphere and want a copy of the file
I have it on my external drive now so feel free to find me and make a copy
of it. Save the bandwidth….

Oh and as Terri just found out you do
need OS X 10.5 ( Leopard ) for it to run.  Looks like she will have
to upgrade.

The upgrade from the Mac 7 client was
very smooth and everything looks good so far.

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I already have Notes Mail on my iPhone

A lot of blogs are buzzing about the news that IBM will be releasing a special Lotus Notes mail client for the iPhone next week at Lotusphere but until I see it I’m just going to continue using my Lotus Notes mail on my iPhone.

That’s right, you can already use your Lotus Notes mail on the iPhone. You don’t need to purchase any extra software and everything you need to get it up and running is right there in your current Lotus Notes environment. I’ll give you a clue… LOAD IMAP.

I will wait till I see the new offering from IBM next week before I give a final opinion, however my initial thoughts are that this app MUST integrate into the iPhones mail client software, the last thing a business user needs is a separate icon on the iPhone home screen just for Lotus Notes email. If they do go down the separate icon route then it has to be a real application and not a pointer to a Domino Web Access iPhone client otherwise it would not have the ability to notify you of new emails.

So till the application is unveiled next week, I’ll just keep on using my Lotus Notes mail with my iPhone.

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Lotusphere 2008 Session DVDs

You can now preorder some of the sessions from Lousphere on DVD from VSI Media.

The entire set, including the must see Worst Practices session can be yours for $826 excluding shipping and handling.

Update : I must have added the entire set to the cart twice. I’ve corrected the price above.

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