Tuesday afternoon highlight reel -- the Silver Lining
I'll amend my earlier description of this
year's 'sphere as "Lotusflat." I'm sure it's just me. Our
team had been on a grueling month-long death march of preparations this
year, ranging from writing and performing a TV ad, completing 2 major
Xpages apps, 3 and a half infrastructural apps, a Foundations-based IP/PBX
system, and a new hosted offering called "Beyond the Cloud."
All of this while juggling customer obligations, visiting families,
and a very pregnant wife had left me thoroughly exhausted, but absolutely
adrenaline-pumped to get to Lotusphere.
I even made last-minute travel plans and flew down to Orlando early to set up a special event for Sunday.
In the ensuing days, Murphy has not merely struck. He has mercilessly rained fury down on my head in a series of hardware and software problems that stretch way beyond anything I've ever experienced. From the wireless network meltdown in the BD OGS, to having to troubleshoot connectivity for the blogger pool during the main OGS, to DDE freaking out and eating my Xpages demo hours before today's session with my buddy Chris Blatnick -- truly anything that can go wrong, has.
Well, short of my wife going into labor. But the week is young, right?
So I'll see if I can turn around this morale struggle and make a point of talking about the positive messages I've heard at Lotusphere this year. Because honestly, there are some spectacular things afoot, many of which I haven't bothered to point out.
1) Xpages is a killer story. It's absolutely fantastic. Tim Tripcony and I have been mired in them for months now, so I tend to forget just how game-changing it is for Domino developers. I was reminded of the strength of the architecture on Sunday when we were polling 900 Squawk users every second for the live behind-the-stage feedback channel at BDDay. When was the last time you knew a Domino app to run a traffic analysis on 900 people in less than 900ms?
2) While the service in the BD room was a tragedy, Lotus 911 did move Bleedyellow.com to 2.0 this week. In just under a year's time, we have grown the site from an experiment in Lotus's curious new "Connections" software to a full-blown hive, incorporating a hugely successful IM server, moving to Connections 2, rolling out new homepage portlets, integrating Squawk for micro-blogging and Crowded Wisdom for site suggestions, and introducing the preliminary version of the Bleedyellow Marketplace where any yellowbleeder can publish and sell products.
3) SAP integration stuff is coming; LotusLive is... well.... live; Blackberry integration for Sametime and for Xpages is completely badass. While I might sound down on the announcements, it's only because the key story of the keynote was really about internet and partnership presence more than traditional technology solutions.
4) Matt, Bruce and Gayle won some well-deserved awards. And here's a log snippet for posterity...
Session Start (Nathan Freeman:Bruce Elgort): Fri Sep 28 12:29:28 2007
[12:29] Bruce Elgort: idea jam
[12:29] Bruce Elgort: with jam sessions
[12:29] Bruce Elgort: that will be it..and you will get public credit biatch
[12:34] Nathan Freeman: lol
[12:34] Nathan Freeman: well, thanks :)
[12:34] Nathan Freeman: dig the name
5) IBM's new commitment to OpenNTF.org was in the keynote! And the Board of Advisors finally had a serious meeting this morning to lay out plans for the coming months. IBM is putting a surprising amount of resources into this effort, with full time legal counsel and full time development resources. It really is going to change the way we think of the Lotus development community.
6) The blogger executive briefing continued to be a major highlight of the conference for me. The level of openness and clarity in that room is breathtaking. The only problem remains that with so many brilliant yellowbleeders in the room, even I have trouble squeezing a word in.
7) The next version of Foundations will be designed to plug-in to an existing Domino infrastructure as a "branch server." So SMB scaling and simplicity, but enterprise integration. And it'll run 8.5. I'd felt a bit let down by the technology in the last year, but I think they're finding their legs, and I'm definitely looking forward to working further with them.
8) Bob Picciano delivers techno-jargon like Data. It's a sight to behold. I can't wait to talk to him again. But at the same time, he wisely only spent 15 minutes in the blogger briefing, which allowed the various product & marketing VPs to address the audience directly. I enjoyed hearing Mike Rhodin respond to questions in the last two briefings like this, but he definitely dominated the conversation. This year was much more personable.
9) Forgive the shallowness of this remark, but I swear to god it's true: Lotusphere attendees are better looking this year. One particularly fetching redhead even blessed me with a little piece of Anguilla in a bag.
and finally...
10) Guess who is in the room directly across from mine? Whatever our differences of opinion, he's a helluva photographer to get this out of my mug. I think that might have to be my new BleedYellow portrait.
Okay... on to some session planning for tomorrow with the mighty Thomas Gumz. Thanks again for reading this far!
I even made last-minute travel plans and flew down to Orlando early to set up a special event for Sunday.
In the ensuing days, Murphy has not merely struck. He has mercilessly rained fury down on my head in a series of hardware and software problems that stretch way beyond anything I've ever experienced. From the wireless network meltdown in the BD OGS, to having to troubleshoot connectivity for the blogger pool during the main OGS, to DDE freaking out and eating my Xpages demo hours before today's session with my buddy Chris Blatnick -- truly anything that can go wrong, has.
Well, short of my wife going into labor. But the week is young, right?
So I'll see if I can turn around this morale struggle and make a point of talking about the positive messages I've heard at Lotusphere this year. Because honestly, there are some spectacular things afoot, many of which I haven't bothered to point out.
1) Xpages is a killer story. It's absolutely fantastic. Tim Tripcony and I have been mired in them for months now, so I tend to forget just how game-changing it is for Domino developers. I was reminded of the strength of the architecture on Sunday when we were polling 900 Squawk users every second for the live behind-the-stage feedback channel at BDDay. When was the last time you knew a Domino app to run a traffic analysis on 900 people in less than 900ms?
2) While the service in the BD room was a tragedy, Lotus 911 did move Bleedyellow.com to 2.0 this week. In just under a year's time, we have grown the site from an experiment in Lotus's curious new "Connections" software to a full-blown hive, incorporating a hugely successful IM server, moving to Connections 2, rolling out new homepage portlets, integrating Squawk for micro-blogging and Crowded Wisdom for site suggestions, and introducing the preliminary version of the Bleedyellow Marketplace where any yellowbleeder can publish and sell products.
3) SAP integration stuff is coming; LotusLive is... well.... live; Blackberry integration for Sametime and for Xpages is completely badass. While I might sound down on the announcements, it's only because the key story of the keynote was really about internet and partnership presence more than traditional technology solutions.
4) Matt, Bruce and Gayle won some well-deserved awards. And here's a log snippet for posterity...
Session Start (Nathan Freeman:Bruce Elgort): Fri Sep 28 12:29:28 2007
[12:29] Bruce Elgort: idea jam
[12:29] Bruce Elgort: with jam sessions
[12:29] Bruce Elgort: that will be it..and you will get public credit biatch
[12:34] Nathan Freeman: lol
[12:34] Nathan Freeman: well, thanks :)
[12:34] Nathan Freeman: dig the name
5) IBM's new commitment to OpenNTF.org was in the keynote! And the Board of Advisors finally had a serious meeting this morning to lay out plans for the coming months. IBM is putting a surprising amount of resources into this effort, with full time legal counsel and full time development resources. It really is going to change the way we think of the Lotus development community.
6) The blogger executive briefing continued to be a major highlight of the conference for me. The level of openness and clarity in that room is breathtaking. The only problem remains that with so many brilliant yellowbleeders in the room, even I have trouble squeezing a word in.
7) The next version of Foundations will be designed to plug-in to an existing Domino infrastructure as a "branch server." So SMB scaling and simplicity, but enterprise integration. And it'll run 8.5. I'd felt a bit let down by the technology in the last year, but I think they're finding their legs, and I'm definitely looking forward to working further with them.
8) Bob Picciano delivers techno-jargon like Data. It's a sight to behold. I can't wait to talk to him again. But at the same time, he wisely only spent 15 minutes in the blogger briefing, which allowed the various product & marketing VPs to address the audience directly. I enjoyed hearing Mike Rhodin respond to questions in the last two briefings like this, but he definitely dominated the conversation. This year was much more personable.
9) Forgive the shallowness of this remark, but I swear to god it's true: Lotusphere attendees are better looking this year. One particularly fetching redhead even blessed me with a little piece of Anguilla in a bag.
and finally...
10) Guess who is in the room directly across from mine? Whatever our differences of opinion, he's a helluva photographer to get this out of my mug. I think that might have to be my new BleedYellow portrait.
Okay... on to some session planning for tomorrow with the mighty Thomas Gumz. Thanks again for reading this far!
Comments
Posted by Miguel Calvo At 05:15:34 PM On 01/20/2009 |
Posted by Charles Robinson At 01:20:09 PM On 01/21/2009 |