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Lotusphere: Kicking off 23 Jan 2006

The first braindump from LS06! Forgive me if this is a ramble…

The opening session was fun (Jason Alexander, he of Pretty Woman and Seinfeld fame) was an entertaining speaker. With regards the technology, well I’d had a few hints of what was to come, but even so. Notes 7 on the Mac! Sametime 7.5! “Hannover”!

It was great to see Sametime 7.5 — some tremendous strides, very timely! In addition to the myriad new features: overhauled UI, spell check, rich text support, emoticons, doclinks, expanded user details, screencaps, splendid new web conferencing, an Eclipse-based application framework, how about IBM linking up with AOL, Y! Messenger and Google Talk? Very cool.

The Mac: Notes 7 is finally here, and included instant messaging / presence awareness for the first time on the Mac. Domino Web Access on the Mac, using Firefox, has been sorted out. Oh, and Intel Mac support is coming later in the year. The Notes client UI looked a lot more “Mac-like”, so that was good to see. No mention of Java in Notes on the Mac though… ;-)

Moving on: Workplace 2.6 is now shipping, and “Composite applications” is definitely going to be one of the buzz-phrases for this conference. It was very interesting to see a Notes app (in Hannover) combined with a Workplace portlet and a third-party portal application. Clicking on a row in the Notes view updated the associated portlets. “Click to action” in a Notes client??

I can&8217;t not mention Activity Explorer: its reach is extending beyond the Workplace Managed Client to a new web interface (complete with Ajax etc.: as Bob Balaban says: “fully buzzword-compliant”), Lotus Notes, and other applications. It’s a great tool, and good to see that IBM are pushing it beyond the Workplace family.

The network is as over-stretched as ever. You’re lucky if you can get an IP address. Ah well.

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Comments

  1. If you can call a year to late 'timely', then you are more generous than me! Have fun!

    "It was great to see Sametime 7.5 — some tremendous strides, very timely!
    Simon Barratt#
  2. I also was pleased to see the Mac support, but they did not demonstrate presence awareness in the Mac client, although the ST 7.5 client looks very cool. I also am not sure when 7.0.2 is scheduled to ship, hopefully we will hear more in the Mac BOF tomorrow morning.Jonathan Walkup#
  3. Mac BOF this morning was the first time I have been to one (and I have been to many), where the mood was upbeat. In fact, the questions came hot and heavy rapid-fire style and almost all of them were answered with "that's fixed in 7". Apparently the reason they did not demo awareness in the 7.0.2 Mac client is that the code is not working yet, but will be in 7.0.2 (Q3 this year).
    Also new for Mac Notes: Java agents in the Notes client (although not applets, apparently), Preferences file replaced by notes.ini, a working installer(!), much improved performance (switching from Notes 6 cooperative threading to Notes 7 preemptive threading will accomplish most of this), removal of 2 GB limit for local databases, much more that I can't recall now.

    Hannover will not ship simultaneous on Mac, but they say "6 months later" and then concurrent with other platform releases. They are apparently waiting on some Eclipse enhancements that will delay the Mac release.

    All in all, a great Lotusphere (finally!) for Mac users.Jonathan Walkup#
  4. Thanks Jonathan -- I really wanted to attend the Mac BoF but couldn't, so your comments are great. Good news indeed. They showed a very early alpha of Hannover on the Mac in one of the sessions, and mentioned the same issues as you: some work on Eclipse for the Mac required first (e.g. they can't currently render the "business card" PNAB view yet).Ben Poole#

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I’m a developer / general IT wrangler, specialising in web apps, the mobile web, enterprise Java and the odd Domino system.

Best described as a simpleton, but kindly. Read more…