Rob's Blog

21/1: Not made Lotusphere (again)

I spent the afternoon trying to combine an honest day's work with catching up on the Opening General Session at Lotusphere.  There was plenty of live blogging going on and I was able to get a flavour although being there would have been better!  It seemed to me that this year is one of consolidating on last year's announcements and strategies.

I guess my highlight was the Designer client in Eclipse with a new class browser etc.  However, doing this was a no brainer once the strategy for using Eclipse was decided on way back before the Hannover announcement.  Making the Notes client available on Apple's Leopard and also Ubuntu has got to be a good thing and is only possible because of the Eclipse strategy.

There was quite a lot for small businesses.  This is a huge market and one that IBM Lotus Notes/Domino is under-represented in.  Hopefully that's going to change.

I am booked on a Notes/Domino three day course on Composite Applications in March.  I think that being able to tie Notes in with other desktop applications and systems will differentiate developers more and more in the future.  It can also be a huge differentiator between Notes/Domino and the competition.

The improvements coming in Quickr and Connections are going to strengthen the overall Lotus Software branding and they will start to make inroads into companies also considering Sharepoint.  I only wish that there had been some sort of announcement that Lotus Document Management (Domino.Doc) functionality could have been incorporated into Quickr.

One project I have on the drawing board is a Lotus Notes Composite Application front-end to Oracle eBusiness Suite ERP.  It was interesting that IBM are going to develop a customisable product with SAP code named "Atlantic" that will be sold by both IBM and SAP.  This seems to be much bigger than the SAP templates giveaway that didn't seem to get the same support from SAP.

So in conclusion, I am happy with the consolidation of a successful strategy and glad that IBM haven't tried to bring out a whole bunch of brand new products.  Looking forward to the Eclipse Designer release!!