With the firehose of announcements that Lotus spewed yesterday, here is a bit of data about Lotusphere it’self. There are about 7500 people attending, with attendance up by about 500 people over last year. All the sessions were packed and there was standing room only, so I needed to get to every session early just to get a seat.

SAP Announcement

One of the big announcements was for a project code named “Atlantic” that is a joint venture between IBM and SAP that gives Notes users direct access to SAP data and processes right from the Notes client. SAP is currently testing the product around speed and security and it should be available to customers by Q4 as a plug-in for the Notes client. All I can say is “it’s about time.”

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Notes 8

Alistair Rennie, the VP of Development and Technical Support mediated a cage match between the Notes client and the Domino server for Notes 8.
Announcements for the client include the ability to bring together IM, activities, Symphony editors, composite application, as well as a new AJAX front end for Notes Databases and integration with the Apple iPhone. The crowd gave a cheer when they heard version 8.0.1 of Notes will now support a Macintosh client and went into beta yesterday.

From the Domino server side they claim a 30% reduction in I/O and increased performance along with a 30% reduction in cost. The client side now also supports mash-ups and allows users to use something called the “Widget Pallette” along with a wizard to insert Google Gadgets and other widget types into Notes, just by dragging and dropping the widget into the Notes side bar, and double clicking to start it. These widgets can include live feeds for stock reports, weather and also support RSS feeds.

On the sever side they announced Domino Web Access Lite, which is smaller and faster for travelling users. It features a Web 2.0 interface, does not require much bandwidth and is stil provides a rich messaging client for Notes. It also integrates with Google maps and provides rich text editing through AJAX and no client code needs to be downloaded in real time from the server. In addition they are working on an even lighter version for phones such as the iPhone with a Safari browser, which will allow you to get to e-mail, contacts and calendar appointments on a variety of mobile devices.

Domino 8.5 will also allow the ID file to be stored in the server vault and supports a new directory layer (which will allow Domino to interact with more types of directory structures) and a new data store which will cut down on attachments and e-mail storage by 35%. They are also offering Lotus Protector which is an appliance for e-mail security.

Composite Application Framework

They also discussed their Composite Application Framework and some major upgrades for application developers by introducing Domino Designer 8.5 and also AJAX templates with modern page design features, AJAX type ahead and a class browser to help you navigate (which got a big cheer). This version of Domino Designer is built on top of Eclipse and Open Expediter.

Symphony

Kevin Cavanaugh, the VP Messaging and Collaboration discussed Lotus Symphony, and noted that they had over 400,000 downloads already. It is a free, open source, open standards program that is open to both end users and distributors and is based on Open Office and ODF document formats. It has a new UI and added in SmartSuite format support, as well as performance improvements. It has a rich set of APIs which work with Notes.

Unified Communications

Bruce Morse noted that this was the 10th anniversary of Sametime, communications and real time collaboration, which Lotus calls UC2, and claims to have over 100M Sametime users (20M stand alone, and another 80M which had Sametime bundled with Notes 6.5.1 and later). They also announced a new SaaS based service based on the acquisition of Web Dialogs (last year) called Unyte for web conferencing.

Morse was quick to note that Microsoft Outlook has no presence or IM capability. He also announced Sametime Advanced 8.0 (they released Sametime Entry 8.0 and Sametime Standard 8.0 last year) which would allow you to tap into communities to discover information from people you did not know or to get comments from people you never expected. This Advanced version of Sametime is due out by Q2 of 2008. It will also allow you to broadcast to communities, skill tap (find skills and expertise), and will also support persistent chat rooms. These rooms will allow you to share files as well as do IM. You can also set alerts on the number of people, or even key words in a chat. Sametime Advanced will also support instant screen sharing within a chat. More on this in tomorrow’s blog as Bruce gave the Keynote on Wednesday.

Telephony Integration

This new product from Lotus (called Sametime Unified Telephony) tries not to do everything other telephone and IP-PBX vendors are already doing, but rather provides a layer that allows the easy integration of multiple phone systems (from multiple vendors), and to also see awareness information across vendors and even see this on systems external to the enterprise (such as caller ID, on/off hook, or join a meeting).

There is also a rules based call routing system tied to the Unified Telephony offering which allows you to route calls based on your status (in a meeting, on the phone, etc.) as well as where you are (location, i.e. I am working at home, I am on my mobile phone, etc. and the system figures out your location automatically and uses that for the rules for call routing) and the role and relationship of the caller (i.e. always answer calls from by wife or boss, but route calls from vendors to voice mail). This is also where cell phone integration happens for Lotus.

Portals

Larry Bowden, the VP for Portals and Web Integration also had a few announcements including 7 new accelerators, snap-on applications and more offerings for SMBs. He announced agreements with SunGuard and Gopra along with new dashboards to support them. They will be offering more accelerators to allow the user to view and assemble ad-hoc work-flows which should be delivered by Q2.

He also promised graphical navigators which will integrate with Lotus Connections. Also portlets that integrate with Lotus Forms (the PureEdge acquisition) and allow drag-and-drop for both the creation of web-based custom forms, and to add functions for customization. Each form, portlet or web page will have its own URL so it is addressable from other programs.

Connections and Community

Jeff Schick, the VP for Social Software introduced Lotus connections. Version 1 of Connections was initially announced last year at Lotusphere. He describes Connections as a Web 2.0 application that integrates with the company directory but allows greater richness in the profiles to help find expertise, do advanced content sharing, as well as supporting wikis, blogs, expert feeds and even working with users and groups outside the firewall.

IBM claims it is the first integrated social software for business (yes, and Al Gore invented the Internet). He also positioned it against Lotus Quickr which is for teams rather than communities. Quickr is ateam room and is the upgrade for QuickPlace. Quickr is more Web 2.0 (hence the name like Flickr) it is supposed to be easy to use, quick to provision and allows people to share content in an asynchronous way. It is also now integrated with Symphony and Outlook and there is a plug-in for workflow and content routing that will be available in Quickr 8.1. Some of the new features that were demonstrated included: the ability to see recent updates, file history, watch lists and feed readers. In addition, there is a document ratings capability, the ability to share multimedia from a media library, tag or comment on a file, do podcasts, put files into “favorites” and subscribe to RSS feeds.

But the big news was about Lotus Connections 2.0 which will feature new capabilities such as support for multiple new languages, translation, integration with Yahoo Answers, as well as other communities like Facebook. They also announced new links to enterprise wiki software such as SocialText and Atlassian’s Confluence.

One of the ideas I have talked about for the last few years is Attention Management (which is probably an oxymoron) but Connections 2 will help you focus on what is important by customizing your homepage with widgets, and a standard set of widgets now let you replicate, synchronize and do a federated search. You can see who in the community(s) is most active, it supports extended profiles and integrates with Lotus Quicker personal files. From these profiles you can view your professional network or link to a mobile phone like the Blackberry.

Connections greatest value seems to be that it connects with all 5 of the connection services Lotus offers. You can do polling, group chats, create a wiki space or work with a Quickr Wiki. Activities can bring together and help you to analyze your social network (much like social network analysis tools do), and can help you find not only experts, but shows people in a relationship map, so you can see who is connected to whom. I expect the next step in this area to be Value Network Analysis (VNA), where the map will not only show who your connected to and how, but if you have traded value of any kind and which way the relationship went (I give value to you, you give value to me, or we both received value from the interaction). This would make it not only easier to find experts, but to see how much value others received from interacting with them.

Lotus Mash-ups

Is a new lightweight environment for graphical, power-based tools that allows you to see widgets (and see their ratings) and bring them together for unique ways to manipulate data or communicate with others. According to some analyst firms, by the end of the decade over 70% of enterprise applications will be mash-ups.

Not to Forget the SMB

Late last week Lotus announced that it was acquiring a Canadian company called Net Integrations Technologies which is allowing it to play in the SMB marketplace by providing more SaaS applications. This new service is called Lotus Foundations and is a group of servers (collaboration server, Domino mail server, file management server, firewall server, and the Symphony and Communications server). The goal with Foundations is to provide a platform for Lotus partners to serve SMBs. Lotus claims that with these new technologies that they can get an SMB up and running in half an hour. Foundations is available as a small appliance server and is a big opportunity for many of the Lotus partners, because they are a better channel to reach SMBs, which are not always a main target for Lotus.

They also announced Project Bluehouse which is a SaaS for companies less than 500 people. Bluehouse contains features for: contact management, file sharing, chat, web meeting initiations, and is built on a multi-tenant architecture. It is also a platform, and other IBM integrators like IT Factory have already built applications that will work with Bluehouse. Lotus showed an application in Bluehouse that used live charts and allowed you to take spreadsheet data and create charts in real time. You could send someone a link by e-mail or IM so it can be shared and they can access it, and it allows you to extend your social network to other contacts. Bluehouse went into managed Beta yesterday.

Take Aways

Aside from being astounded by the sheer volume of announcements that this 330,000 person company gave out on Monday, it was clear to see that IBM is very aware of its competitors in the market, and some of the new ways of working encouraged by Web 2.0 technologies. As one guest writer for CIO magazine put it (and she was only 21 years old) “don’t give us your old, tired e-mail-based enterprise applications.”

IBM said very little about e-mail, and it was clear that they have seen the handwriting on their Facebook wall and are moving rapidly in the Web 2.0 direction. Although their main focus is on the enterprise, they did not leave out the little guy (SMBs). Last year they accomplished the product road map they laid out in 6 months, it will be very interesting to see if that happens again this year. It will be even more interesting to see if the 140M Lotus clients can absorb this much new technology in calendar 2008.