Simon Barratt

Summary of Lotusphere 2005

Beginning the trip home after a busy week.  Sat in Orlando airport waiting for my flight.  The down side of using Mears' shuttles, is that they pick you very early for your flight.  So I have 2 hours to kill!

IBM have really made clear their direction with their collaboration products.  There was a lot of emphasis on Notes/Domino 7.0, in anticipation of it's summer release.  IBM are already running the beta 2 code on about 25,000 desktops, and plan on installing on 50,000 well before the product ships.  This size of pilot will really help in ensuring a stable version ships.  During the conference beta 3 was released, which I will download upon my return to the office.

Some of the scalability improvements are staggering in this release.  In effect we will gain at least 1 years extra use of our existing hardware just by upgrading.  Those types of improvements really have a dramatic impact on TCO.  I suggest we quickly take advantage of the Domino server release.  This will be transparent to our users, but will allow us to take advantage of the scalability benefits and administrative improvements (DDM for example)

Web Services were high up on the radar too.  ND7 makes it very easy to expose data in a Domino database as a web service.  Whilst you can do this in v6, it is a lot simpler in v7 (for example the, WSDL is system generated automatically)

As usual, the new version will not require a rip and replace of any of our infrastructure to take advantage of the improvements.  For example, the newer version of QuickPlace allows multiple revisions of Office and Windows to participate, so no Office client upgrade required.  Likewise Windows 2000 and XP are both supported.

In addition to Notes/Domino 7 being released in the summer, you will also see the extended products shipping with v7 (Sametime, QuickPlace, DomDoc, LEI)

The IBM Workplace strategy was a key story.  Any confusion or doubts that people may of had, should be history now.  The Lotus Notes client will be the premier rich client within Workplace.  Customers following the traditional Notes upgrade strategies will be able to take advantage of the newer Workplace technologies as the get rolled into Notes.  Notes/Domino versions 7,8,9 & 10 were mentioned as the currently planned versions.
They demonstrated the Notes client plug in client running Notes applications on Linux (a first!) completely unmodified.  This type of demonstration really proves out the point about ensuring that all investments are protected as the product moves forward.

A new RAD designer called the Workplace Designer was previewed, which makes the creation of Workplace applications very simple and fast.  It is based on the existing Domino Designer product, and allows Domino developers to utilise all their skills in developing Workplace applications - LotusScript and @funtions are available to you!  You can even import forms from Domino Designer.

Saw some interesting prototypes in the innovations lab.  Some very cool anti-spam products.  Look forward to watching (evaluating) how this project evolves into a product.  The technology looks and sounds good enough for us to consider managing our own Spam.  But I still worry about the impact on the network about letting the Spam back in!!!!  Certainly worth keeping an eye on though.

IBM were much more aggressive towards Microsoft and their offerings than usual!  Really keen to emphasis the 1500 new customers (2 million seats). most of these new customers were at the expense of Microsoft - the usually cited reason being, the level of complexity and effort required to upgrade to newer MS versions, was not justifiable in relation to the benefits it brought.  IBM believe they have a far stronger strategy, technology and vision and will welcome disenchanted MS customers with open arms!

Interestingly, quite a number of enhancements that are due in version 7, will also become available in 6.5.4.  Some of the security improvements are an example of this.  So as of 6.5.4 (Q1 2005) we will be able implement force user to change password the first time they connect to the server I'm sure Terry will appreciate this.  We will still have to wait for v7 to take advantage of the new longer keys in Notes certificates!  But the way we can implement this security improvement will be seamless to our users, and really reminds you how effective the tools are to manage our Notes PKI.

Overall a very exciting conference, with lots of innovative technologies on show, which can add real value to FMC.