I’ve been trying a new theme and Simon commented asking how easy it was to change. One of the things I like about WordPress is the ease of changing themes, although I do always reduce the header size as by default wordpress take too much screen estate with the header.
Anyone considering this should use the following as a starting point:
LCTY = Lotusphere comes to you.
John Wylie demonstrated Potal 6.0 Express in a coffee supplier business supplier with a people search and integrated chat example. Also publicised a new offer using web content management (without html experience).
Rob Hedges. Portal express:
Portal express does not include Team Workspaces [a limitation in my opinion].
Then demonstrated the out of the box portal 6 express intranet and internet site.
Showed customisation and personalisation rules to govern portlet viewers.
Another key message was that you pinch builders to develop portlets to reduce dependency on Java skillset (and there are many publicly available builders).
Showed Document Manager. Showed preview of documents rendered in HTML as well as being able to download the doc. Explorer integration. Word integration (Word 2000 was demoed. Wonder if it is supported in more recent office versions?).
My Observations:
My notes from Lotusphere comes to you. Rough and ready in places (my notes that is!).
Not much new to me on the sametime space, blogs are very thorough and have contained this info for a while.
7.5.1 in next few weeks
To come in 7.5.1 Office smartTag support for sametime. Other word integration from menu.
Outlook client integration – didn’t appear to be within the message, just in a plugin menu bar
Sametime Next – calendar presence integration, improved recording and playback of meetings. FIPs-140 support.
LCTY (Lotusphere comes to you) notes from Raddison Hotel Manchester. Don’t bother reading unless you’d really find them useful, its really a record I’ll be able to refer back to easily!
Introduction: Ross Reith. “Its about you”. Best year on record. Reflected on achievements with Sametime 7.5 and Notes 7.0.2 (with SAP “Harmony”). Last year growth over 30%. Notes grew. Sametime 1M seats. Video from Lotusphere (bit pointless). Mentioned second life and Lotusphere event. IBM see this as another route to market and one method to extend the reach of events (like Lotusphere). I would note that during the keynote in January I couldn’t get into SecondLife because the system was too busy. Message on partners developing solutions around the open API’s that are shipped with each product. Sales pitch over 
…or not!?!?
Keynote : Jeff Schick (VP responsible for Connections). Talked on competitive pressures and the dynamic workplace. How change affects workforce and we see a “dizzying pace of change”.
Slides..
“the agile business is connected, responsive and embraces change”. Case study from CISCO. They dynamically published information and allow people to focus on information from specific themes, people etc. using tagging and other metadata. Allowed engineers and development teams to rapidly supply information and more importantly allow many people to learn from the few key thinkers and thought leaders.
“effective organisations allow for great flexibility in the way people work” (note to speakers please use “s” not “z” for an English audience). Deutsche Bank have solution to work with companies requesting funding to then find experts in the bank in the field requiring investment. It got round the issue of emails missing key people. Using the communities of interest model to communicate resolved this issue for them.
“innovation is key to competitive advantage”. “The intersection of invention with insight” from Mike Rhodin. Proctor and Gamble. Using collaboration technologies they have expanded the potential scope of new innovation.
“the responsive enterprise leverages new technologies to get access to new opportunities”. Sprint telecom. Spanning the experience of their connected fabric of customers and built a portal to work with clients and partners and customers and faced their development organisations with those people. Is this any good? Is this the right service for you? Portal allowed more rapid response on their ideas to focus development and reduce time to market.
Mentioned the CEO survey <insert link>. Resulted in the ideas that:
Notes 8 : “integrated high performance work environment”. more than email. Composite application framework. Office productivity tools (will this take off? vs. Office 2007). “Support Microsoft formats” [my thoughts .. does that include Office 2007 formats?]
Sametime 7.5.1 : point to point video, tabbed chat [great in the Notes 8 client I'm using].
UC2 = unified communications & collaboration: moving to a seamless platform for collaboration.
Demo from Darren Adams [nice to see Darren and chat with him again]. Will integrate with Office. 7.5.1 expected Q2. More than just IM. More than conferencing. A platform for delivering collaboration. VoIP. Telephony integration. Simple Video integration out of box (better with partner plugins). Showed plugins including Local Services to allow better roaming between offices for services such as printers. Talked about location awareness. Showed one mashup example to show a buddy map on Google maps. Showed tabbed IM chat windows. Showed point to point VOIP.
Showed web conference. Silent reconnection (a good thing!). Integration with audio conference providers. Welcome page. Slides page (to render documents through Sametime. Screen sharing (better UI from previous versions). In full screen mode moderator sees raised hands or chats etc without other participants seeing them.
Back to Jeff Schick. Focus on Portals.
Presently portal 6.0 which aimed to re-develop the user experience. Increased number of portlets and applications in the application library.
Intelligent forms (via pure edge acquisition). Now key element – Workplace Forms. US Army & Navy & Air Force use this forms technology for 1,000,000 plus forms.
Indian government portal for citizens using Webster Portal.
Quickr. Standard edition – very much like WSS in features.
Connectors >> Content Repositories >> another element i didn’t note down
Connections :
nice slide on social software business benefits in tag cloud style. Multiple LDAP plugins including AD, idea is a single profile to span entire organisation (even in multi-directory environments). Colleague suggested this was a “myspace for business” which is a good summary. Fundamental aim is to give clarity about what an individual does via tagging. Also aggregates communities of interest. Focus people who wish to find skills on searching communities rather than mailing people and often missing. Integrated presence.
IBM as a case:
Back to Darren. Activities demo:
Integrated activities between various form factors. In notes client nice fly out information on hover and click to open full content. Drag and drop items into Activities from notes documents (demo’d attachment drag from email). Buttons in browser to add url’s to activities.
Back to Jeff
Nice slide on integrated collaborative portal capabilities [can we get this slide]. RIM has built a connections client for BlackBerry. Re-enforced message on open standards and “open middleware”. SOA to deliver applications, examples of composite applications for business using a single composite application programming model all built on Lotus Expeditor (a build once run everywhere philosophy). Applicable for eclipse development, notes development, j2ee development.
One interesting observation in my experience of the Notes 8 Beta client and mail template is that there are many occasions I need to use an R7 client. My employers have wisely placed us beta testers in a test domain and our production servers have maximum client versions set to prevent beta clients accessing them. However, for the first time in recent major upgrades (i.e 4.x to 5 and 5 to 6) the new client template is error message free and functional when opened from the previous generation client (i.e. R7 client against R8 mail template design). I’m sure there will be some incompatibilities published but its great news that you can collect your mail and experience your calendar from the old client. This is great news for enterprises as it will mean that in most cases (unless there is an incompatibility issue I haven’t spotted) you should be able to upgrade the mail template experience for all users while you are still struggling to upgrade the client on that last 5% of the population who are difficult to get to. It also means you can still get to your doclinks and other important applications from any pilot environments you are planning. Getting both clients working on the same build is documented in the readme files but I’d recommend you backup all your Notes 7 exes and data folder somewhere as I somehow on 2 different pre-public Beta installs managed to delete the exes – no doubt user error
Now I can say a few words! I’ve been on a private beta for a while now using the new client for all my day to day email and IM. Here are some basic observations:
My Twitters
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