Simon Barratt

Opening Session

John Cleese was the celebrity speaker to open the conference this year - Very funny!! "Why do the French fight Civil Wars?" ---- "So they can win a war!!!!"  bum bum!

A good opening session, did the usual number of users (120 Million, if you are interested, 1500 new customers in 2004)

Lotus head re-affirmed the direction of the product, clarified that there is no longer a two lane highway for Notes/Domino and Workplace - They are both integrated into a single lane now!  This simplifies the story greatly, and guarantees protection of customers current investment in Notes/Domino as more Web Standards based computing becomes more widely adopted.

As Notes is now 15 years old, there was a bit of a trip down memory lane, and Ray Ozzie one of the original developers of the product (starting in 1984 and released in 1989) was a guest speaker, and was warmly welcomed by the attendees.

As usual there was a bit of Microsoft bashing, but it felt more justified this year, as Microsoft's strategy for collaboration has been zig zagging all over the map recently, whereas the message from IBM is very clear!


Notes/Domino 7 was announced, and will be release in the middle of this year.  Some major scalability improvements were mentioned - 80% more concurrent users on the same hardware, was one of the major stats of the upgrade, and Lotus' commitment to reducing TCO.  Web Services and the Domino 7's native support for them were also shown as a key method to extending the scope of data stored in Domino applications.

A new feature for Administrators in the Domino Domain Manager, which is a set of pro-active monitoring probes to help alert of any issues, before they become a problem.

Some new client features include:

• Client lock down features to prevent clients from changing certain client settings
• Message Marking - to v cc etc..  This helps you prioritise emails based on how it was addressed to you
• Mail thread view in memo - This is a very cool new feature,  While reading an email that has had several replies to it, with a single click, a frame will open to display the email thread within the context of the email, allowing you to quickly review the context of the thread.
• More Sametime awareness has been added, including the calendar and private address book
• An Autosave feature has been added to help in the event on an untimely crash!
• The ability to save the open windows state in Notes, so when Notes is restarted all the windows that were active previously are automatically opened for you.
• And lastly a prompt to confirm that your really do want to close Notes down.

Workplace designer was previewed.  This is a Workplace applications designer for J2EE applications, based on the popular Domino Designer currently in use.  It is very similar in looks and function, and should help Domino developers to broaden the application base easily.

A preview of the Workplace client, showed how Notes applications will continue to run in the newer Workplace client.  This feature was originally slated for version 8, but Lotus have confirmed that this feature will be now available in version 7!  You really do not know what type of application you are running, as the level of transparency between Notes and Workplace is amazing.also add new feature

• activity explorer - brings together all the necessary tools to get the job done, rather than making the user flip from one application to another, persistent chat
• IM, E-mail, slide presentations, word processing documents – these are among the desktop productivity tools people use these days to get work done. The variety of tools used by teams for collaboration and workflow, in fact, can be daunting
• server managed, secure environment

Workplace Designer - very inspired by the domino designer - very nice tool for developing workplace/j2ee applications
 
John Cleese wrapped up the opening session with the astute observation, "That it is very appropriate that Lotusphere is held on Disney property, as an acronym for Lotusphere is "Here's Pluto!"