OK so I guess a few people are going to be doing this, but I thought I’d try and live blog through the session. We’ll see what different people have to say about the various announcements….
Of course you’ll have to forgive typos, opinions are my own etc etc
While we’re waiting (13 minutes to go according to the big countdown clocks) the Sunday Night Party was good fun, with a gambling theme there were loads of Blackjack, Roullette and Craps tables set up around the place. Spent some time trying to learn Craps, the conclusion I am crappy at craps even with fake money!
While we were queuing to get into the session (yes I am that sad) I bumped into Gary Dev, he’s on good form so if you see him during the week say Hi. Just because he’s from Redmond now he won’t bite!
The Start Mike Rhodin is standing in front of a very flashy stage wide screen. Giving the usual retrospective of the past year – seat counts etc. There are 6,000 attendees this year which is up again.
And the guest is… Jason Alexander. Who the hell is that? Well that was my reaction but he is a comedian who starred in Seinfeld and is pretty good so far.
Mike’s back on stage now and the announcements are about to start so welcome the bullet points…
- We are being promised demo’s rather than presentations… a good thing
- There are 61,000 customers of Notes and Domino and 125,000,000 seats (I thought they weren’t doing these any more?)
- Notes 7 is coming to the Mac and DWA will work on Mac as well (woo hoo)
- And it will work on the Intel based Macs as well!
- Anti FUD – taking the piss out of Ballmer and bashing Microsoft… this is what we want.
- New Notes 7 mobile announcements from Blackberry, Nokia, Intellisync and Good
- Expansion of SAP integration with Notes (with a demo)
- IM demo between Notes client and a Blackberry
- Some cracking demos here… Google Desktop search can find Notes content
- Some Sametime connectivity announcements:
- AIM
- Yahoo Messenger (nice one!)
- And Google Talk (even nicer!)
- All out of the box
- Sametime 7.5 in the summer
- The big one which was kept very quiet… VOIP integration with Skype
- Any protocol to any protocol
- We got some demos of eForms (PureEdge) and Portals (BowStreet) which IBM have acquired recently
- Onto Workplace…
- Workplace 2.6 is shipping today
- Maureen is giving a demo of Workplace Designer 2.6 (nice that she got a round of applause at the start)
- Unfortunately the demo gremlins have appeared and screwed things up.
- Workplace 3.0 is going to be an Eclipse plugin
- AJAX is built right into the Designer as design elements giving type ahead functionality out of the box
- Ability to call Web Services is available
- Activity Explorer
- It’s beginning to look like a useful tool, but it’s still a Workplace tool, we haven’t reached the tipping point yet
- But an open standard is being created so we’ll have a web based interfaced
- Now we’re getting somewhere!
- There’s a Notes plugin to integrate with activities
- There’s a Firefox plugin to integrate with activities
- There’s RSS integration
- And now the cool stuff… Hannover and Domino "Next"
- There is no architectural shift in the next version
- Opening up to Eclipse, Java and Web 2.0
- Websphere Portal integration into Domino
- "The most significant release of Notes ever"
- Preview pane on the right as well on the bottom
- Control Click selects multiple documents
- Hannover is built on the Workplace Client Platform
- And that’s about it, a bit of a runover but a great session all round.
As I find out more about Hannover I’ll post, also a few photos which I have taken of screenshots will go up later on tonight.
