mattwhite.me

OK this is attempt two, I did live blog the session but managed to delete it all at the end! D’oh!

This was nothing to do with me installing the 8.5 Mac Beta Lotus Notes client which worked flawlessly, and seemingly faster than 7.0.3!

The session itself was all a little underwhelming. Let’s deal with the negatives first. The keynote speaker was Don Costas, a sports presenter from the US so all of us Europeans were immediately at a loss. But the content of his speech had little or nothing to do with Lotus and IBM, followed by a rant about the upcoming Beijing Olympics. All a little odd to be honest.

The actual content of the main session was al fine, there was just nothing that leapt out at me as big news. I guess the closest thing was the Lotus Foundations product which is aimed at the SMB market. Other than that it was just update announcements for 8.0.1 and 8.5. All of it is looking good so putting a positive spin on the session, the strategy which was announced last year was headed in the right direction so this year it is more of the same.

Designer on Eclipse is looking good, can’t wait to try it out, but there were no announcements of even the beta program so I would be surprised if we see it before Q3 this year.

So overall a little underwhelming. There was nothing wrong with the announcements, there was just nothing in particular to get excited about.

Because of the two OGS’s this year there was a second session running for those not in the main theatre. This was actually really god, totally non-Lotus but amusing and interesting. I hope that they repeat this next year.

Right this was just a quick brain dump, I’ll do my full round up later in the week once I’ve seen the meat of the announcements.

The journey yesterday was incredibly easy, they have redesigned the whole fiasco of two bag pickups at Orlando Airport so now you can be out the airport from touchdown in less than 20 minutes all being well. So as soon as I got to the hotel a whole gang of us met up and headed to Pleasure Island where we basically took over a whole outside section of the Irish pub and ad the usual catch up session. A really great night that didn’t finish until well into this morning at which point the Brits had been awake for more than 24 hours, it was beginning to show. Unfortunately I just didn’t sleep well last niight which meant I’ve been knackered all day. And after 6 hours at the BALD and ESPN Zone I have just hit the wall this evening. So in a vain attempt to get some rest before the conference begins I have headed back to the hotel room.

It’s BDD day tomorrow with several sessions that I want to get to during the day before the opening party in the evening. By all reports it’s going to be a cold beach party so got to remember the jacket before that.

Bruce is taking photos of everything that moves at the moment so he has a good photostream to watch here

Luckily the crash landing at Heathrow doesn’t seem to have had any knock on effect on Gatwick this morning so the plane claims to be on schedule. I arrived in plenty of time but actually managed to get from home through security in less than 90 minutes so I’ll be kicking my heels for a couple of hours. Oh well the Wifi is strong and there is always plenty to do at the moment.

Tha plan for today is to get to the Dolphin for about 6-ish this evening, sort out the room and then head on over to the Oirish Pub to meet up with Declan and Terri and whoever else is among the early arrivals. Then tomorrow we’ll do a shopping run to a Mac store and a beer shop for room provisions before heading over to the Boardwalk for the BALD gathering. Hope to see you there if you’re in Orlando.

If you want to get hold of me my mobile (cell) number +47767384970.

Like Warren doesn’t do enough already, he and Kitty are organising the Barmy Bloggers Boatrace for the third time at Lotusphere. You’d better be quick to register your seat for the fun and games.

Great news everyone! Ed has announced the venue for the Wednesday night party at Lotusphere will be Islands of Adventure. This is head and shoulders above the other parks in terms of fun, Spiderman is still my favourite ride ever. Looking forward to it already 🙂

John Head is organising a party on the last day of Lotusphere (the Thursday evening) and needs your help, add your name to the comments on his site and publicise the party if you’re a blogger.

That is all.

Update: I should also note that Declan has posted about the PLFNEBGT party on the Friday before Lotusphere. There will be slightly fewer people but it’s always a good way to start the whole week off.

Well it’s getting to that time of year where Lotusphere becomes the primary thought. So I was checking out the Lotusphere site just now and noticed this little tidbit of information…

“New for 2008! We’ve listened to your feedback about how you’d like to have access to sessions, to either listen to the replay of sessions you attended, or listen to sessions you didn’t make it to while at Lotusphere. This year we’ll be delivering both MP3 files as well as the PDFs of most sessions from the Futures and Innovations (INV), Application Development (AD) and Managing Your Collaboration Infrastructure (ID) tracks.”

Now to my mind that is great news, it means that if you miss a session (and given the content this year it’s very likely due to conflicts) you’ll at least be able to get a better record of it than trying to interpret plain old PDF files on their own.