A Quick Wednesday Review (so far…)

Well today has been really good session wise so far. I went to STR104 Understanding Lotus Workplace and WebSphere Portal to start the day. It was pretty good at laying out exactly what both products are designed to do and their integration points. I’ve used neither product, so it was good to get a little more in-depth grasp.

Next was one of my favorite sessions. STR113 The Boss Loves Microsoft: Where does that leave Lotus Software? This is something that Ed Brill revels in. He loves to stick it to Microsoft. He also pointed out his competitors in the crowd. There were actually several people that claimed to be MS employees. Anyway, The quotes, statistics and analyst reports that he posted were really good to keep in mind for ammunition. And the one chart where he put up life cycles of different MS products was great. I had forgotten about half of those pseudo-vaporware pieces of software that existed for a very short time in history. It was good, but I’m sure MS can fire back a little *cough* K-station *cough*

Then I hit almost the anti-thesis of the Ed Brill session with John Head’s BP116 Integrating Notes and Domino 6.5 with MS Office Advanced Topics. First of all, I almost didn’t get in as it was getting ready to overflow. John was inside the door and said “No, don’t go anywhere, we have a seat for you.” And he escorted me in and up to the front. It was very nice. Also a very good session. Some very advanced code, and he even showed some that will export views to Excel really easily that he said he will be donating to OpenNTF.org. I thought that was pretty awesome. I seen tons of different ways to get views into Excel, but this looked very clean and very fast. It should help the open source community a ton. It was also pretty amazing to find out that MS was trying to patent some of it’s XML for the Office system in order to prevent third parties from writing XML filters and such for their products. Talk about limiting choice… Ugh.

Pretty soon I’m off to BP117 Java for Lotus Notes Developers with Duffbert and Joe Litton. Should be a killer session…