Lotusphere
Looks To The Future Of Collaboration
Lotusphere
started off with loud applause for a special and very appropriate
guest – Patrick Stewart, alias Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the
Starship Enterprise. He
charmed the audience with remarks that both reminded his admiring
audience of his long affiliation with StarTrek and the British
classical theater, but also seemed meaningful to a roomful of
techies,
looking for a little inspiration on a Monday morning.
And all without seeming artificial or condescending.
I don’t know if the Lotus researchers have done a survey,
but I suspect a very high percentage of Lotus developers and users
are also Star Trek fans.
That
could be a hard act to follow, but Lotus isn’t a conference hall
full of strangers pulled together to discuss something new. It’s a club, a family of people who have selected the
technology that enables their companies to communicate and
collaborate, to share information, and to take on new challenges.
They want to be there and they want to hear about what’s
coming next. They
listen hard.
It’s
not like the old days where Lotusphere audiences wildly applauded
every comma and apostrophe, but they were very pleased with what
they heard.
•
While Lotus is moving on to offer new ways to support collaboration and
information sharing, based on web-based technologies, and
combinations of IBM and Lotus R&D, the faithful will not be left
behind. Lotus is
committed to shipping new versions of existing products, suitably
enhanced, for years to come.
•
Even as Lotus executives announced new ways to develop for the Lotus
platform, they assured customers that the existing ways would
continue to work and offering easy-to-cross bridges between the old
and new worlds. That
got loud applause.
There
is, of course, a steady emphasis on moving forward. Much focus was placed on WebSphere Portal technology and on
the Lotus Workplace as the new desktop focus.
Customers could see both currently shipping versions,
enriched by portlets (customer and developer-written connector
add-ins to the Portal environment) and glimpses of the next release
of Lotus Workplace, available in the May timeframe.
IBM
also used Lotusphere to announce the IBM Software Solution for On
Demand Workplace, which combines the integration capabilities of a
full enterprise portal, the IBM WebSphere Portal, with the breadth
of collaborative services in Lotus Workplace, including Web content
management, all for a single per user price of under $400 per user,
including collaboration, messaging, collaborative learning, web
content management, and the enhanced integration of the WebSphere
Portal.
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