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I overheard that the closing speaker is going to be comedian Stephen Wright!!! SWEET!

Ed Brill was doing his annual “The Boss Loves Microsoft, Where does that leave Lotus” session, and as is the custom, our blogging contingent took up the first row to encourage, and/or heckle Ed.

Well, at the end of the session, Ed went into his analogy (that I’ve heard before) about bottled water. The question goes, “Why do you drink bottled water, when it can be had free from the tap?” Well, the answer is obviously that it tastes better, it’s pure, it’s portable and can go with you. Basically, bottled water, although not free, is better. Obviously this was the comparision that people make between Microsoft and Lotus. Many times MS tries to get into an account, or even an entire market, by giving away free stuff. But obviously, it’s never free. There’s always a catch.

Well, knowing this, Ed asked the crowd, “Who of you are drinking bottled water?” A bunch of us raised our hands, and he looked down at me, holding my Lotusphere branded water and asked “John, why do you drink bottled water?” and without missing a beat I said (while holding my Lotusphere bottle aloft) “Because it’s Free!” Yes, it was intentional, I just couldn’t help myself. It got a good 20 seconds of sustained laughter at Ed’s expense.

I apologized to him after the session, but it was just too good to pass up 🙂

This session was really great. It was filled with tons of current bloggers, future bloggers, and those that read what we have to write. I really had a good time discussing the ins and outs of blogging with everyone. It was also cool to realize that half the people there were from other countries. You start to forget about us being all over, and that’s a good thing. The fact that we are all part of a community that doesn’t really know, nor adhere, to geographical boundaries is amazing.

There were also no less than 12 IBM employees there. It’s nice to see a committment to the community from IBM. The fact that there were blogging sessions, a blogging BOF, and an OpenNTF.org booth prove this.

So here’s the challenge to you as a reader. Let’s continue to grow this community. If you can, try to comment on other’s blogs more often. If you are a member of a user group, let them know all about blogs and how they work. If you have simply been lurking, grab one of the templates and add your voice.

In our room was a bunch of VERY diverse people, all with different styles, skillsets, and content. No matter what you’re into, now is the time to add your voice. Let’s prove that Radicati is dead wrong!

Duffbert Phallic Java. Yes, we are google bombing Duff. Pictures will be available soon that explain why! 🙂

Well the rest of yesterday was okay, there was one really snoozer session on Workplace that I walked out of early, but that gave me time to hit the Product Showcase for another round. A highlight of the day was Richard and Declan’s session on blogs and wiki’s in Domino. Very cool stuff. Of course I knew most of it already, but I was there to support a fellow blogger. Also, IBM already understands the value of blogs, but the fact that the session overflowed to a second room should hammer home that point even more!

I do have to publicly thank Declan though, because it is completely due to him that I know how to program RSS feeds in Domino. I used and dissected his code in Blogsphere a ton, and learned all I need to from it. Thanks Dec.

After the sessions, I hooked up with a lot of the usual suspects last night, and then we headed to a party thrown by Salesplace.com. They rented out the Mission Space ride at Epcot center. So we took the bus, rode the awesome ride twice, grabbed a beer and headed back to the land of Disney. It was a ton of fun.

However, on the way back, the bus driver gave me more motion sickness than the ride itself! Couple that with the wooziness from Mission Space, the beer I had thrown back, and the sauna-like bus conditions, and I was REALLY nausous. I headed back up to the room to try to settle my stomach a bit. When all else failed, I laid down on the bed to try to calm things, and ended up basically crashing. I woke up at 2AM feeling a bit better and realizing that I had missed the fun at Kimono’s. Shame really, as I heard it was quite the awesome time. Tonight after Universal I will be there, I swear. Kristina at ZipLip still owes me a duet!

This morning I hit Ed and Libby’s session on Selling Notes in your organization, and I got up and publically committed to something that got pretty good applause from the crowd. More on that later.

Now? Off to the Blogger BOF 🙂

You should all definitely stop by the LotusUserGroup.org booth in the showcase if you are a member of a strong user group, or even one that needs some help. There finally looks to be a great centralized resource around this effort. Lord knows Valu.org sure as hell wasn’t it!

On the social side of things last night, we had the vendor showcase reception which was nice. More free food booze (always good) and snacky type foods. The OpenNTF booth was totally hopping. They weren’t selling anything and they weren’t giving anything away that you couldn’t already download, but they were extremely popular. I think it was due to booth babes Mac and Jerry 🙂

Anyway, many of us were still hungry after the event, so we made a pilgrimage to Peaches and Cream, an old style ice cream fountain. We were there for food however, and the chili dogs did NOT disappoint.

Next was off to the Penumbra group’s suite. It was very nice to be invited (thanks Melissa and Dan) and it was great hanging out with such intelligent people.

Then, when I was thinking bed was an extremely good option, I was told that Joe was making rum drinks over in Le Chateau de Duffbert. Well I couldn’t turn that down, so we hoofed it back over there. Well it was a blast. Pretty much every person there was a blogger and the conversations were awesome. Rocky was finally introduced to the magic that IS Ass Tools. Julian was so proud.

Jess, Jonvon and I were marvelling over Joe as he created his drinks. We all envisioned him as a mad scientist with a huge wizard hat cackling over a steaming brew. Joe is SERIOUS about his mixology. And we were all the beneficiaries of his furrowed brow. Once again a great time had by all…

Around about midnight, several people remembered that the special CLP Breakfast was in the morning at 7AM. We all looked at our drinks and the time and laughed about the plausibility of us all making it. Well I’ll probably get shit for this one, but I overslept and missed it completely, and I was one of the first to leave the Duffbert unoffical blogger BOF. Well, it turned out that the breakfast was really nothing worth turning out for (except for the fine company) so I think the extra hour and a half of sleep was a good trade off!

Off to more adventures… OpenNTF BOF, blogging and collaboration in Wiki’s by Dec and Richard, Rocky’s Formula BigTop and more… good content day!

I know that some of the community think there is no compelling reason to install Workplace in their organization, but I definitely think differently.

Yesterday’s final session that I hit was on Workplace Designer. Let me tell you, I really think they are hitting all the right Notes (pardon the pun) on this one. They are designing a RAD tool that Domino developers will be VERY familiar with. It has many of the same paradigms we’ve all been used to, but instead of creating .NSF’s it’s creating J2EE apps for Workplace Portal. It’s still in its infancy and I’m already excited.

This morning I hit the overview of Workplace Services Express, and I’m not as geeked out over that. I think it’s a great platform, but I don’t know if it will benefit my employer. We already have Domino and Sametime installed and used heavily, so those need to integrate. Well, you can use Domino’s LDAP as your authentication, and you can use Domino mail (served up through a portlet) and they also have portlets to serve up custom Domino apps. So far, so good. But, the Instant Messaging is separate of Sametime, and even though it’s based on SIP, the speaker didn’t think that Express will support talking to the Sametime community. Also, even though it wasn’t said, it didn’t look like rich client would be a part of Express either. Lastly, there didn’t seem to be good ways to geographically load balance while he said that the full-blown Workplace portal does.

So, I’ll be in several more Workplace sessions today because I need to figure out exactly which path I’m heading down, but in all, Workplace is impressing me from the portal side of things. There is a lot of great integration points, and when the rich client hits, it’s going to be phenominal.

Since I’m an admin first and a developer second, I always like to see what’s going on in the Admin client realm. Well I just got out of the “What’s New” in the admin client session, and things look good.

There will be a full web admin client on Linux/Mozilla which finally accomplished an end-to-end Linux solution on Domino. It looks as good as the Win32 client and definitely proves IBM/Lotus’ committment to Linux. Bravo.

In addition, there are more policy options available to us admins. You can now create mail and calendaring preference configs via policy docs, and you can now LOCK all policy docs so users cannot change them back. It even shows this graphically on the users machine. Preferences that are locked will either be grayed out or will have a padlock icon next to them. Excellent stuff.

Smart Upgrades get a facelift as well. You can limit how many upgrades happen per hour, and you get a lot more granular control over how the downloads and installs work out. Should make a good feature better.

Last big thing was Domino Domain Monitoring, an all-inclusive reporting database that really grabs all the reporting data you need on the health of your servers and puts it at your fingertips. This one is a biggie, but they didn’t go very in-depth. There’s a full session dedicated to DDM so I look forward to hitting that and letting you all know what’s up.

Time to hit the product showcase before I head to the Workplace Designer session. I can’t wait to see a giddy Maureen Leeland on stage!

I’m currently sitting the the What’s new in Lotus Notes 7 session but I cannot get a wireless connection. Bummer. Oh well, this is why we have replication! 🙂

Anyway, the opening session was awesome. John Cleese was the guest of honor and he was very funny. We also had a big surprise as Ray Ozzie took the stage to a standing ovation. It was great to see Ray again. There was also a little video showing Notes from conception all the way through today. Seeing the old interface and things such as the Notes is Dead article again really brought back the memories.

The message this year was definitely clearer than in days past. They really showed that Lotus Notes and Domino are not going away, they are just being moved into the Workplace client architecture. They showed Workplace with a Notes icon on the left side, and clicking that icon brought up your Notes bookmarks. Clicking a bookmark brought up the exact application as it would be shown in Notes itself. It was actually very impressive, and it seems like they actually tamed the beast they told us about last year.

Workplace itself seemed very cool too. Workplace Designer looks a LOT like Domino Designer, so you should be able to utilize your skills in the new framework. Seeing the Forms and Views paradigm in a Java app was WAY cool. It should make transitions for people like me MUCH easier.

And one of the things that I thought was huge was that on Domino, they increased Notes Bench numbers by up to 80%. That means many more users on a single server, or much less overhead on the servers you already have. Talk about an awesome way to reduce TCO. As John would say “Brilliant!”

In the “What’s new” session I’m in now, the crowd actually clapped about a sortable Subject line in email. Wow, will people clap for ANYTHING nowadays? Who HASN’T done that in their own templates before… Christ. And I have to say, this session started late and has been a technical nightmare. Anti-Virus popping up, trying to demo in Island mode, no connectivity to Lotus servers for their live demo stuff… Wow. Hopefully it can only get better from here…

Lastly, in between sessions I ran back up to my room. As I left my room to head back to this session, I almost ran directly INTO John Cleese! He was walking with an assistant down the hall. When I realized it was him, I smiled and said Hi. He chuckled and returned the greeting. I was far too star struck to ask for a picture, and I didn’t want to bother him, but it was cool nonetheless.

Most excellent start to the day!