Things not mentioned at Lotusphere

by Volker Weber

While everybody pays attention to the things being talked about in the Opening General Session, it is also interesting what has not been talked about.

Still waiting for IBM to install their own Sametime Gateway to AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo.

What is on your missing in action list?

Comments

A proper commitment to the standard Notes 8.x client suite (i.e. Designer and Administrator) on non-Windoze platforms.

Ben Poole, 2008-01-27

I, too, was wondering about the lack of an attendance number.

Gregg Eldred, 2008-01-27


Purely from a subjective viewpoint, I thought attendance seemed a good deal higher than the last few years, but of course not at par with the peak years.

The lack of seat numbers is an interesting note - but I always found that information boring and suspect anyway.

What I did notice, was that since everything promised at LS07 was shipped by mid year, where is my quick'r express for Notes? I must have misplaced it.

Andrew Pollack, 2008-01-27

That should be in 8.0.1.

Volker Weber, 2008-01-27

There was a session on Domino Document Manager on Wednesday afternoon. It was not talked about in the OGS, but it wasn't last year or the year before (I think .. not 100% positive there). There is a short term story with Quickr Content Integrator being able to bring DDM Libraries into Quickr, but there is a long term story ... just wish someone would make it public so we could all talk about it.

I think numbers were higher, but that is just my feeling of being at the conference and seeing people.

John Head, 2008-01-27

It sure didn't take long for things to return to normal, sigh.

The gateway to ST / AOL / Yahoo isn't in mainstream production yet. Chris Crummey demonstrated his use of it during Sunday's business development day general session. I do not know where else it was demonstrated.

Attendance: As I told you standing at the rotunda on Wednesday, I believe it was flat year to year. I did not see a final number. As has been noted in the similar conversation on my blog and elsewhere, the attendance seemed to be as in the recent past, and sessions overflowed, labs were crowded, and good leads were obtained on the show floor. I do not know why Marjorie didn't include the final number in the closing session. Obviously, we were confident enough with how things went at this Lotusphere to disclose the commitment to the event through 2015.

Revenues: In Q4, Lotus gained 7% year to year, and finished the year up 9% vs. 2006. That's for the whole brand...different products had different results and are not broken out on a per-product basis. Rhodin opened with the 9% number and noted that we now have 13 consecutive quarters of growth for the brand.

Adoption rate: We had multiple sessions where customers announced deployments of ND8. This included the mention in the general session but also in a few of the breakouts (such as INV106). There are over 400 customers in active deployment phase now. Many are waiting for 8.0.1, per industry superstition and other factors such as waiting for the (now-available) update to RIM's BES to support Domino 8.

Ed Brill, 2008-01-27

The gateway is there, the just havent rolled it out to many yet internally and still have the SIP gateway in place.

Chris Miller, 2008-01-27

As I told you standing at the rotunda on Wednesday

Ed, I am taking every piece of information I gather casually as un-quotable. As I said, it was not stated in the OGS, nor published in any way.

Volker Weber, 2008-01-27

@Andrew - The 'Quickr Personal Edition' was the one exception I noticed to the general on-time shipping last year. In fact, considering the way that the pace of product delivery has picked up recently, I think Lotus did an outstanding job last year, even to the point of making a whole new set of announcements back in mid-year (8.0.1, Symphony) of code that is shipped or just about to ship now.

On the original point: attendance to me felt pretty much the same as last year. Even if it was down by 5 people, that would be enough to justify not showing numbers.

With all the product that will have shipped by next January, I would be very surprised if we didn't see a significant increase in attendance for L'sphere 2009.

Julian Woodward, 2008-01-27

On as positive side....

Bitching about wireless access did not happen this year. It was much improved. I had a problem only once. To my knowledge, IBM had a 40MB direct pipe for the 5 days, before some of their internal techies tweaked it even higher.

(Not on the Kool aid... just we were very quick to complain every year, and sometimes not so quick to compliment improvement)

Paul Mooney, 2008-01-28

I heard somebody actually downloaded the Mac beta. ;-)

Volker Weber, 2008-01-28

@Ben Poole - they talked about Designer on the Mac a couple times (I heard Maureen talk about it at her session, and Mike and Alistar talked about it at the blogger Q&A) ... Domino Designer on Eclipse is the beginning of that. It will not be supported on Linux or Mac in 8.5, but it is on their radar.

Administrator is a different beast. No discussion at all. But from what I gathered from developers, we have a better chance for WebAdmin being supported on the Mac and Linux via firefox than the full client. No one is talking about Administrator on Eclipse, even for Windows.

John Head, 2008-01-28

WebAdmin is supported on the Mac today. But it would make a nice composite app, wouldn't it?

Volker Weber, 2008-01-28

@Volker

Yup.. that was me, Declan, and a few others.......

I did hear some people having issues gaining an IP address, but the Mac picked one up in a second or so...

Paul Mooney, 2008-01-28

As for Dom.Doc - I went to the "Future of LDDM" session and this is the wrapup:
1) There will be a 8.0 version in H1 2008 and another one is on the Roadmap
2) There is an official commitment for 5 years to support a dom.doc, it has not been announced which versions exactly
3) There is a strong recommendation for existing dom.doc customers to migrate either to Quickr or to Filenet or DB2 Content Manager - IBM is planning to release migration "wizards" tools to help customers doing that. (As far i understood, those migration products will be offered as an additional product and will be able to migrate sharepoint and other data sources as well. It will not be free)

eventually Lotus Quickr will catch up with most of the feature set of dom.doc, so that there will be no need for dom.doc anymore...

Gregory Engels, 2008-01-28

@John: hey, Maureen and the guys are doing an incredible job, and I love their enthusiasm. Everyone is talking about DDE being the route to all-things Linux / Mac, but we all know there’s a big difference between engineering hopes and hard product priorities eh :o)

Ben Poole, 2008-01-28

Volker, I think the 9% revenue growth number was mentioned in the OGS. I remember making a mental note of the fact that it was just short of double-digits. I don't, on the other hand, remember an explicit mention of the 13 consecutive quarters of growth.

Richard Schwartz, 2008-01-28

@Ben - let me be clear ... they talked about DDE being the route to get there, but they made no promises or annoucements. I heard Mike and Allistar say they would like to get to that point, but I believe it is not a 2008 play. Hopefully Lotusphere2009 will bring us some annoucements there. All in good time as they say ;)

John Head, 2008-01-28

In one of the Lotusphere 2008 press announcements, IBM mentions that 7000 attendees were in Florida:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23366.wss

Andy Brunner, 2008-01-28

@Richard - my recollection is the same as yours.

Julian Woodward, 2008-01-28

Mike Rhodin has mentioned the revenue growth of 9% in the OGS

Otto Foerg, 2008-01-28

@Ed: "Many are waiting for 8.0.1, per industry superstition"

I don't think this comment is completely fair. Taking a look at the fix list for 8.0.1, there are over 700 fixes in 8.0.1; it is a bit more than superstition that is making us wait for 8.0.1. It takes time to do these upgrades, and x.0 releases have problems. Its not a reflection on the product, its a reflection on x.0 releases.

Most people familiar with the auto industry will tell you not to buy the first year's build of a brand new model. Same thing.

Ken Porter, 2008-01-28

Ken, I did not mean that comment in a negative way. It was a reflection of reality. On the other hand, 25,000 IBMers are running Notes 8 in production.

Ed Brill, 2008-01-28

Is that about 7 percent of IBM? ;-)

Volker Weber, 2008-01-28

Yep - not bad considering that our own plans are for rolling out 8.0.1, not 8.0. The 25K users have made their own self-provisioning decision to use Notes 8 through the technology adoption program.

See more via Chris Pepin's session at Lotusphere on the IBM internal deployment.

Ed Brill, 2008-01-28

FWIW, my company is currently using a mix of Notes 7.0.2 and Notes 8.5.

We will embark upon an extensive roll-out of 8.0.1 with our Windows user once that is available. And we might get a server too.

* cough *

:-)

Ben Poole, 2008-01-28

ROFLMAO

Yes, we have 8.5 in pilot deployment now. ;-)

Volker Weber, 2008-01-28

[irony] I am missing any announcements about speeding up the versioning... I would be really exited about new versions every 2 months. That would change my job from project management of development completely to versioning management of LN X.X... [/irony]

Steffen Pelz, 2008-01-29

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