Carl Tyler's Blog

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and my connection through Miami lived up to my usual expectations... The gate our plane was to use was occupied with another plane so we sat on the tarmac for a while. This in turn was long enough that catching the flight to Paris became a close call. I managed to get the flight but my bags didn't. Hopefully they will arrive tomorrow.

Lots of good comments from people on their satisfaction with Lotusphere, I have mixed feelings, I am glad that eveyone seems jazzed again, but really dissapointed in the coverage of the Domino extended products at Lotusphere, especially Sametime. I had a few chats with the Sametime developers and nothing they said lead me to believe we can expect anything groundbreaking in the next update, and they estimate that anything close to the features of the current Sametime toolkits for the IM components of Workplace is going to be at least 1 1/2 years. I felt there was less attention being paid to the product showcase from Nth degree than previous years, there was a satisfaction survey form left for us to fill in with thoughts about the show, but then no information on where to leave it or anyone to give it to. Also in previous years Nth degree would be continually scanning booths for signage in the wrong place, or too much stuff on or around the booth, I didn't see that this year.

As I've been told previously by a few customers that have standardized on other portal offerings or J2EE application servers, the new Workplace product is going to make it very hard for some of them to deploy (not from a technical point of view but from a political one) so they're already considering the alternaives.

I heard great things about the Activity Center and I intend to try and read more about that. A few people came up to me saying how impressed they were that Ray Ozzie behaved himself on stage, I never really understood this comment, the guys company got funding from Microsoft, but he's still a regular person with great manners and you'd have to be really stupid to stand up in front of a Lotus crowd and somehow attack them, and lets face it Mr Ozzie isn't stupid.

We had good booth traffic and closed enough deals on the show floor to cover the costs for the event so that is always a good thing. Met some new folks, and got to meet in person people that either read the blog or have been using our products, that's always fun. More later time for bed.