mattwhite.me

Today I have been mostly attending AJAX sessions. And they have been pretty interesting all round. To make my head swell I got a shout from both Lance Spellman and Scott Good for past work on the Name Picker sample code.

By coincidence both myself and Kevin Pettitt ended up going to the same sessions this afternoon, always good to catch up with people who I only see once a year in Florida.

For the single most useful tip from the afternoon sessions, during a performance tuning session we were pointed to an Alpha Works tool called Page Detailer, obviously not had a chance to look at it yet but if it is as good as it sounds it could prove invaluable. Basically it profiles the performance of a web page as it downloads, you can see where the time is spent and then deal with improving performance in code, network, graphics or whatever is the source of your bottleneck.

I have just popped up to my room to drop off the (overloaded) backpack and then head out again to see what exhibitor parties I can crash.

Onwards.

Well I thought I’d get it out of the way early on in the week so I popped in to the Certification Labs and did my ND7 Upgrade exam. 75% pass mark, 75% scored, nothing like cutting it fine is there! Anyway that is all done until Hannover I guess.

Talking of which the latest screenshots have been posted by Ed, they are definitely worth a look. Once I get some more detail about how it all hangs together I’ll post more.

Off to afternoon sessions now.

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.

The parties yesterday were good fun, great to catch up with people and meet some new faces. By 9-ish I was just wiped out, three hours sleep the night before and a few hours of sitting outside drinking (even if it was just American light beer) pushed me over the edge. So I went and got some food from Tubby’s and then just slept right through untl 7 this morning.

Luckily I was in time to get over to the Business Development Day general session which was pretty interesting. Lots of teasers about the opening session  proper tomorrow morning so it will definitely be worth the early start if even half of the rumours I’ve heard turn out to be true.

I’ve never really bothered with the Sunday sessions in past years but a couple look pretty interesting, the repeat of the Workplace Designer Jumpstart is about to kick off (live blogging is a wonderful thing, I am sat in Dolphin III at the moment). But after this it’s over to ESPN again to watch the football (not the proper kind but American style) and then the Sunday Night party kicks off the official Lotusphere week.

Judging by the weather today it should be a good one.

Picked up my badge and bag from the registration desk and just about to head out to the next two parties.

Last night I did go to see La Nouba at Cirque du Soleil, by chance ended up sitting with a couple of ‘spherites. Afterwards we headed over to the Irish pub at Pleasure Island and had a few beers, didn’t get to bed until 3am. Hopefully get some sleep tonight as the Business Development Day starts at 7:15 in the morning.

Until then, see you at ESPN.

So I have spent the day basically on a shopping trip for people (got your t-shirts Simon and your iPod Andy!) and enjoying the weather. It’s about 80 degrees here today and the forecast looks like we won’t be freezing like last year for the Sunday night party.

There is a new Apple store at the Florida Mall so there are two to choose from now which is a good thing (due to lack of black iPods att Millenia I took the short hop over to Orange Blossom Drive as well).

Haven’t decided yet whether to head over to Downtown Disney and the Cirque du Soleil or just the Boardwalk tonight. I guess I’ll see who’s around and then whether I fancy a beer or not. Stupid question really, I know I will!

Anyway tomorrow is the first semi-official set of parties with Bruce’s pre Turtle gathering at the Big River Brewery and then on to the Turtle gathering at ESPN. It’s really the start of Lotusphere and a week of little sleep but good fun.

So I’ve arrived at the Dolphin this evening (rather early I know but it gives me a couple of days relaxation). It was a bit of a stressful journey as the roads down to Gatwick this morning were not good, luckily they cleared in time but I am not a fan of rushing for the plane.

Anyway the rest of the journey was fine, blasted through MCO in record time, off the plane and into the hotel room within an hour (Room 12089 for future reference)!

So I suppose I should share the new Dolphin information…

• The rumours about parking charges are true. To self park (not valet) now costs 8$ per night (14$ for valet). I’ve already complained and tried to get it off the room charge but no luck.
• When you log on to the internet from your room you will be prompted that it will cost $10 per day. Again I have checked with reception and those booked in through the Lotusphere process (i.e. not privately) have been added to a package where it does not apply)

You have to feel a little sorry for the non-convention visitors, their room is going to end up costs nearly $250 per night through the hidden extras.

Anyway, some dinner now, so see you tomorrow.

I don’t know about you but over the last couple of days I have had quite a pile of Lotusphere related spam from exhibitors. I suppose our email addresses have been given to each of the exhibitors recently and they are trying to get as much out the week as possible. Whatever the reason it’s not a welcome new addition to my inbox.

Note to vendors… unsolicited mail is only likely to make me belligerent and not buy your product so please stop it.

Update: According to Neil the spam is coming from having my card scanned at previous ‘spheres. That absolves IBM of passing on details but it’s still annoying though, normally we don’t see the spam until after we get home.

Update 2: Both Ben and Volker have written their own experiences of this now. Hopefully if enough people complain this will be a shortlived marketing effort.