A busy day at Lotusphere. It started with a keynote about how Social affects business. The messge was that leadership matters, a dedicated team must take point. Social is not an IT function/project, it needs to involve departments liek HR, legal and of course IT. If you engage the employees, they will be a huge resource. The example given was when TD Bank decided to be open 7 day a week, the reaction from the workforce would probably been negative. But by using social capabilities and transparency, the employees got engaged and even enthusiastic about the new opportunity.
Then the sessions started.
BP102 – User Blast with Mat Newman. Mat Newman, the Australian with the yellow suit, had a great session showing a multitude of functions that will make life easier for end-users. The idea is that anyone attending the session should be able to bring this info back and energize their users. The room was packed (as was the repeat session later), and the organizers had to use overflow rooms. Even experienced Notes users learned new things here.
BP110 - A Performance Boost for Your IBM Lotus Notes Client, presented by the excellent pair Francie Tanner and Florian Vogler (both from Panagenda). I learned a number of things that I will be able to bring home and hopefully implement in my environment.
I also had some meetings, so I went to the Solutions Showcase and looked around inbetween meetings. GBS was out in force and had occupied a huge section of the floor. I did not have as much time as I wanted on the showcase floor, but it seemed like bigger than last year, with more booths and vendors.
Finally I took some time to visit the Meet the Developers lab, a place where I always spend several hours during the week. This time I had mainly development questions, most of them related to issues with Domino Designer itself. I spent quite some time with Maureen Leland, the head of Domino Designer development, and we identified a number of issues that hopefully can be fixed. One of them, to automatically indicate that a database is a template by using a different background color behind the workspace icon, was so easy that she was convinced she could code that on the flight back to Boston. She said the hardest problem to solve was to decide what indicator to use…
This is the kind of access we get to the IBM staff, nothing beats being able to talk to the guys and girls who actually wrote the code we have questions about. If you haven’t been to the labs, take a few minutes or an hour to go there. Highly recommended!