I guess IBM will announce to do things different. Regarding marketing we see some serious efforts made with the Smart Work campaign.

Still I think most of the non IBM / Lotus customers do not get the story. Maybe we will hear more about this tomorrow in Düsseldorf.

What we definetly will here about tomorrow is a special promotion for Lotus products with a significant 25% discount on new licences and reinstatements. Reduced prices will be available for a few months. IBM hopes to win back lost Lotus customers back into maintenance mode – and to win new customers from the dark site who are facing yet another large renewal bill for evil products like Exchange in Micrsofts fiscal Q4.

From my perspective there are two kinds of customers in the first category: The customers who discontinued maintenance will not reinstate, because they are happy with the pre-Notes 8 releases and they want to avoid upgrade of clients. Marketing will have to do a good job to convince these customers.

The second kind of customers are very happy about Notes 8, but they have maintenance and will not buy new licenses – because they simply don´t need to because business does not grow in these times.

In the second category it will be a hard sell too. License costs are only a small part of the budget for choosing a new messaging and collaboration infrastructure. But in some cases it might help.

In Germany we call this “Abwrackprämie” – a scrappage program for MS licences. Maybe 25% discount is real good argument

Today I stumbled upon Stuart McIntyre´s posting, and I think I should link to it because he put it the right way:

As the head of a 50-person ‘up and coming’ organisation from London that is faced with alternatives from Google, Socialtext, Jive, Huddle, Alfresco etc and little understanding of the Lotus portfolio beyond some buzz on the web about Lotus Connections or Quickr, I’d have walked away utterly confused at what IBM/Lotus was actually offering me or my business.

Nobody outside our little, very closed Lotus community understands what IBM is talking about today. Thats a big problem when a business partner tries to sell the message to it´s customers. I was one of these partners the last 10 years. And I wish IBM would have continued marketing like Lotus did in the past.

Today I work with people in IT organizations who are responsible for running large infrastructurs. They don´t even talk about Lotus. Lotus is something they know back from the old day – but it´s irrelevant today.

In my last position sometimes I felt like the last Jedi. But the force was not with me. Today I see some new efforts being made, including some of the videos of the Working Smarter campaign on Youtube. I would like to see Lotus back on the agenda of my current customers. And still I think: When IBM would like to do good marketing, they could do it. Maybe they simply don´t want to.

Two years ago our “After-Lotusphere-Trip” ended up in Anna Maria island, where we found a beautifull place at the Cedar Cove and watched the Pelicans for a few days.

This year we stranded in Boca Grande. And this is an unbelievable place. A small village with about 2500 citizens, no MacDonalds, no shopping malls. One hotel, one bakery, a few small shops. Nothing more.

Today we rented bicycles and drove down to the south end where the old lighthouse stands since more than 100 years. We were sitting on the dock of the bay watching the pelicans and the dolphins. And tonight we had the first really delicious dinner since we stayed in the US. What a wonderfull and extraordinary experience.

We could stay a few days more before we return to cold and dark Germany.

Lotusphere ended with a remarkable Closing Session. I have seen just one other guest speaker on my 11 Lotuspheres that fascinated the crowd like Benjamin Zander this afternoon. Like Patrick Stewart a few years ago people were really touched when Benjamin Zander spoke and sang with us – and made 3.000 Lotusphere attendees sing “Freude, schöner Götterfunken”, most of them not speaking one word of german. He is a fantastic speaker and motivator. Lots of things he said will be on my mind traveling now to the gulf coast.

Lotusphere was great. Still have to think about what the things coming up will mean to me. But now to something completly different…

Hey, this is a picture I took years ago at Lotusphere 2004! And they used it to build this video. Without asking! Hey guys, I want my royalties…

No customer meetings, no partner meetings. I am out of business. Not that bad at all. Can see all whats happening here from a different and much more relaxed perspective. No need to turn the stuff I learned into money immediatly.

Twitter. The use of Twitter has become essentially for me. Can´t believe it, because I was so sceptical about microblogging. But Twitter is THE source of whats going on at Lotusphere. I am not sure if really someone outside the Lotus community here reads Live Blogging streams from one of the sessions, but to stay up to date its perfect. When I look around on Laptops nearly everybody checks Twitter streams all the time.

Content: No big bang at the Opening Session. But a continuous information flow all over the week. I think much better than the years before. I liked the smaller keynotes. The Unified Communication & Collaboration keynote was the best I have attended. The only disappointment was the Social Software keynote. I don´t like that style. But some people find it funny. For me it was naiv.

Products. Lotus portfolio has grown too much. To many separate products. They should consolidate the product set. Just remember Allan´s great thoughts on that topic. But: I am happy to see many products becoming more and more mature. Most of the things that were promised at Lotusphere 2008 are now there and usable. Huge improvements for the social software product portfolio Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. Hiuge improvements in the UCC product portfolio: All the things coming up in Sametime 8.5 will help IBM gaining new market share and deliver what they promised. Zero footprint web clients, no plugins, streamlined UI, many usefull new functions – Sametime Meeting Center is now a real competitor to WebEx & Co. Foundations: Hmm, still no idea when people in Germany will hop on that train. My thoughts on LotusLive remain unchanged. Necessary step, looks great, lets see how it evolves. Will test it in a real world situation this year.

Finally living in my Mac world without Lotus Notes as an one man company is still possible, even at Lotusphere. But learning from David Allen using Lotus Notes as his GTD tool makes me feel I will use Lotus Notes in the future again. Until then it would be great if Marco will release ebf.caldav server plugin to get what IBM should deliver: a calendar feed from Domino sources to use iCal even with an Domino backend.

See you at Universal Studios tonight.

With the implementation of ActiveSync they did it the right way. Now they could probably support Windows Mobile devices through active sync. And the question comes up why there are now two seperate ways of supporting Windows Mobile devices – SyncML and ActiveSync? Well, this all seems to be early stage, and we will see what we get end of the year. The new Traveler with ActiveSync will be integrated into the Domino 8.5 code stream. If customers want to enable iPhone sync they have to upgrade or at least setup one Domino 8.5 sync server as far as I understood.

For the Lotus Notes end user setting up his iPhone will be a strange experience:

He probably will have to choose Microsoft Exchange to enable sync with his Domino server. Can not imagine Apple adding other vendors to that list.

All in all a late but very good decision by IBM. I know many customers and especially executives who will love that announcment – if they be patient till end of the year.

But I think they should. The business model is changing fast. And extending an existing infrastructure seemless to cloud services does means its easy to move these services to the cloud too. The next step is only a small step if the first step works. So customers will move completly services like Mail, Instant Messaging, etc. to the cloud – and to the IBM datacenter.

What does that mean for Business Partners? Google has build a whole ecosystem around its cloud services. IBM has not. The Lotus partner ecosystem is mainly a Notes developer / admin ecosystem. They have to change and ask themselves how they can add value to LotusLive. With open standards, customers will not need anymore a “classic” Notes app to add an CRM service or a DMS service. Suddenly, the closed Lotus shop is an open shop. For many companies that provide today tools for managing Domino servers to its customers there will be no market if the servers are in IBMs cloud.

Again: From an IBM perspective this is a necessary step. IBM is focusing on solutions for its customers and not discussing the underlying technology. It does not matter for IBM if the Meeting Center technology behind LotusLive is Lotus Sametime or the scalable architecture the acquired to build the Unyte server. It even does not matter if Mail services are Notes based or Outblaze based – as long as it has one look and feel and is robust, open, scaleable.

I am very curious where this community will stand in two or three years and which will be the services business partners will provide.

Today I wanted to try the other stuff that was shown in this mornings keynote. And it failed. Tried to open the file library. It took more than 20 minutes to open it. Then I tried to upload a file. Failed. So I tried to test the Instant Messaging capabilities:

Hmmm. OK, I have no Lotus Sametime client on my Macbook, so the only other way to use LotusLive Instant Messaging is the download option. This is what you get:

Imagine 160 MB download in this conferences WLAN. Looking at the URL, I know I will receive a Win32 only installer in the zip-file.

There seems to be some work to do.

Orlando, Fla. – IBM/Lotus for the first time ever will provide users of the iPhone and other mobile devices that support ActiveSync with real-time access to their email, calendars and contacts.

The company plans to announce on Wednesday that it will add support for Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol, which will enable instant over-the-air email delivery to Apple’s iPhone 2.0 mail client and other handsets that support the protocol.

The ActiveSync technology will be added later this year to Lotus Notes Traveler, which provides real-time replication between mobile devices and Notes.

more

Meanwhile Sybase anounced full iPhone support too. So welcome iPhone to the other half of the corporate messaging world.

This years OGS was different. This year IBM did not split the OGS like last year in two separat sessions. There was only one OGS, even if IBM claims to have 2% more visitors this year. Looking at the economic situation these are very good figures.
Although there was no big announcement this year nobody seemed to be bored. It was a well timed show, Blueman Group was really great – and Dan Aykroyd was, ok, at least a little bit funny. I enjoyed the OGS very much on my beanbag.

So what was in it this year:

So thats it for today. Will now join the Media Party and afterwards the JAMFest. Unfortunatly missed the Executive Q&A, but will read everything on Twitter, read it on blogs or hear the podcast lateron

Did not know that front row seating for Bloggers would be THAT special when I read the invitation letter.

Photo by Volker.

NSFDB2 is dead, or at least, isn’t going to be resuscitated, according to Bob Picciano himself. In the Press briefing, he was asked where it was going, and he confirmed that it’s going nowhere. The difficulties of managing Notes unstructured data in a structured storage backend are too great. Instead, and this is the good news, the effort is being refocussed on making NSF truly great as the best, and only way, to store and manage Notes data using the best that IBM have to maintain and improve NSF. The way that came over was very, very clear and the implications are very clear. NSF is the backbone of Notes and Domino, and Notes and Domino are the backbone, the centre, the flagship of the Lotus collaboration portfolio.

Lotus Notes 8.5:
1. Drag/Drop of Text within rich text editor
2. Offline support for Activities
3. Choose from multiple addresses for a person in typeahead
4. Ability to make your own views look like the PIM views
5. Forward contact as vCard (along with better import/export)
6. iNotes improvements (e.g. calendar support in Lite mode)
7. Roaming user available with new file-based option
8. Support of ID Vault and Single Logon
9. Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Ubuntu Linux support
10. Calendar federation

Lotus Domino 8.5
1. Expanded platform choices
2. Increased reliability
3. Dynamic group policies
4. Improved router scalability
5. I/O use reduction
6. Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT)
7. Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE)
8. XPages
9. ID Vault
10. Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)

Ed provided some interesting additional numbers. Will add them later.

Still not able to connect to other Lotusphere attendees via Lotus Connections. At least it sends an invitation to connect – but with a huge list of Java errors.

I will not try to compete with all the Live Blogger & Twitters this morning. So here is simply my Twitter stream. I will blog about all my impressions this afternoon.

For now just follow #LS09 or @Lotusphere to see all the updates this morning. Got to go now to find my “bloggers´s den” sign for special seating in the front rows .

Figure out the differences.

Since I do not use a Domino server for my mail anymore I was very curious to see how the iPhone optimized iNotes Ultralite looks like. Lotusphere Online Mail comes now in in three flavours: tall (Ultralite), grande (Lite) and venti (Full). And I like the Ultralite client: very fast, iPhone look & feel, easy to use. But: Why do I have the choice? Wouldn´t it be much easier if the application detects my device and fits the UI automatically?
Unfortunatly I will not use iNotes Ultralite. Most of the time I am offline over here only using WLAN where it is available because of the roaming charges. Downloaded my schedule now as iCal file. Sorry, iNotes Ulralite. If you have an offline sync, I will give you another try.

So after 21 hours of travelling I arrived finally 2:00 a.m. Today I am not allowed to visit Business Development Day. I am press this year. So I will go shopping with Volker now and meet everybody tonight at the Welcome reception.