Lotusphere Evaluations
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I know some people have been struggling with the Lotusphere online Evaluation system this year, and I appreciate people taking the time to fill in their forms. This year I on;y had one session that had Evals, BP204 on VMware. The nice thing about hte system is that I can keep checking the link to see if anymore evals have been submitted. Very nice.
If you're interested here are the eval results for the VMware session.
And yes, I really did show Notes V1, Improv and Ami Pro in my session, as I said at the time, backwards compatibility testing can sometimes be very important
So how was Lotusphere 2008?
For me one thing I could not get out of my head was how much IBM has turned themselves around on Sametime. Just a few short years ago, there were a handful of us still trying to convince IBM of the merits of Sametime and how them making an investment in the product would be a wise thing to do, this was often met with comments such as "It's time to move on, Workplace IM is the future, you really need to stop clinging to the past" fortunately I didn't listen to those people (many of them who have been promoted away form Lotus, or have no changed their spots) and IBM realized that revenue and customers are more important than having boxes line up prettily on an MBA slide deck.
So this year, being the 10th Birthday of Sametime, it was great that the product had so much focus, it's own Keynote event, customers stories, exciting previews of things that may or may not come in the future, and every partner in the product showcase now claiming to be in one form or another a Sametime partner. So exciting times, especially for those of us that have believe in it for such a long time.
I'm not sure how many people attended Lotusphere as I didn't hear it announced anyway, it seemed like a pretty good crowd, but not as large as I was expecting.
As usual the best thing about Lotusphere is the networking opportunities, not the wireless networking, that was really struggling and I saw it put an end to many a demo in sessions, no I mean the people networking, catching up with old friends, partners you haven't seen in a while, chatting about the future or bitching about the past, that's what Lotusphere is all about. Seeing the things other people are working on and discussing new ideas over a beer, how bad can that be?
For partners Lotusphere is always a great opportunity to meet with existing customers, potential new ones and to catch up with people you often feel you know intimately through their blogs.
Concerning announcements this year, I think the best one is still the pre lotusphere announcement around the Net Integration application. The other announcements were much more I'll wait and see for me, where as I can see immediate benefits from the Net Integration acquisition.
Loads I have not written about, and I could never write down the name of everyone I bumped into so I won't even try. Often I just wish there was a day of nothing at Lotusphere apart from meeting up with old friends, no sessions, no rushing off to catch BOF, just time to wander around and meet people.
I'll see you in 2009!
I know some people have been struggling with the Lotusphere online Evaluation system this year, and I appreciate people taking the time to fill in their forms. This year I on;y had one session that had Evals, BP204 on VMware. The nice thing about hte system is that I can keep checking the link to see if anymore evals have been submitted. Very nice.
If you're interested here are the eval results for the VMware session.
And yes, I really did show Notes V1, Improv and Ami Pro in my session, as I said at the time, backwards compatibility testing can sometimes be very important
So how was Lotusphere 2008?
For me one thing I could not get out of my head was how much IBM has turned themselves around on Sametime. Just a few short years ago, there were a handful of us still trying to convince IBM of the merits of Sametime and how them making an investment in the product would be a wise thing to do, this was often met with comments such as "It's time to move on, Workplace IM is the future, you really need to stop clinging to the past" fortunately I didn't listen to those people (many of them who have been promoted away form Lotus, or have no changed their spots) and IBM realized that revenue and customers are more important than having boxes line up prettily on an MBA slide deck.
So this year, being the 10th Birthday of Sametime, it was great that the product had so much focus, it's own Keynote event, customers stories, exciting previews of things that may or may not come in the future, and every partner in the product showcase now claiming to be in one form or another a Sametime partner. So exciting times, especially for those of us that have believe in it for such a long time.
I'm not sure how many people attended Lotusphere as I didn't hear it announced anyway, it seemed like a pretty good crowd, but not as large as I was expecting.
As usual the best thing about Lotusphere is the networking opportunities, not the wireless networking, that was really struggling and I saw it put an end to many a demo in sessions, no I mean the people networking, catching up with old friends, partners you haven't seen in a while, chatting about the future or bitching about the past, that's what Lotusphere is all about. Seeing the things other people are working on and discussing new ideas over a beer, how bad can that be?
For partners Lotusphere is always a great opportunity to meet with existing customers, potential new ones and to catch up with people you often feel you know intimately through their blogs.
Concerning announcements this year, I think the best one is still the pre lotusphere announcement around the Net Integration application. The other announcements were much more I'll wait and see for me, where as I can see immediate benefits from the Net Integration acquisition.
Loads I have not written about, and I could never write down the name of everyone I bumped into so I won't even try. Often I just wish there was a day of nothing at Lotusphere apart from meeting up with old friends, no sessions, no rushing off to catch BOF, just time to wander around and meet people.
I'll see you in 2009!
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Posted by Tim At 08:48:38 PM On 01/26/2008 | - Website - |