My best bits from Lotusphere 2007 general session, which usually has the big news for Lotus Notes and Lotus Notes Domino.
General Session
Started up with a band called Ultrasonic Rock Orchestra, very good, "It's not 8 o'clock (am) it's ROCK o'clock" the singer said.
Then after Mike Rhodin did his bit, Neil Armstrong came in for a chat. Weird.
Figures:
Sales up 30% in last quarter for lotus.
About 7000 people are here at Lotusphere2007 this year, which is up 11%, there definitely seems to be more here than last year, a few extra tents have been used etc
New Products
Lotus Quickr is a file storage system that is integrated with Windows explorer and Sametime and Lotus Notes. When dragging and dropping files to Notes memos, the user has option to send the file or a link to the file. Excellent. Less cluttered email boxes and less network traffic from emai forwarding etc.
Lotus Connections This brings together blogs bookmarks and tag clouds together to allow enterprises to group similar people with similar skills or interests together much like myspace dogear or facebook. This sort of information sharing will be cool to use and will promote knowledge sharing in an intranet and reduce duplication of effort. All good ROI reasons.
Lotus Composite Applications or Components in Notes 8
Lotus Notes 8 runs in Eclipse client and is due to launch mid 2007. I was worried about this new release, but I think Lotus and IBM have nailed it from the functional side and the "keep hard core notes ninjas happy" side as well as the marketing side. The composite applications are a basically an evolution of notes outline/navigator - view - form model, to allow more outlines/navigators and forms and web pages and portlets to hang off a form or a view. Very nice. Lotus Notes is getting cool again - in fact this will make it sub-zero.
See more at: Lotusphere 2007 Tuesday 23rd January