Comments overflow from events topic

February 26 2004

For some reason, three of the comments from Tuesday's posting are not showing up.  Can't explain why, but I'll post them as responses to this new posting.

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category: Add/View Comments [6]

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  1. 1  Alan Lepofsky  | 2/26/2004 8:44:04 PM

    David... has the customer you mentioned read the whitepapers:

    Protect and enrich your Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino investments within a collaborative platform to drive productivity.

    http://www-3.ibm.com/software/swnews/swnews.nsf/n/jmae5sxlzr?OpenDocument&Site=lotus

    Domino Applications and the Lotus Workplace technical strategy

    http://www.lotus.com/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/d3ecdf4b0897dda885256dc10054a4e2

    and/or watched the webcast of Lotusphere's keynote?

    If so, please tell me what messages they are still unclear about, and how I can help.

    They should be feeling very excited about their 3000 seats, about upgrading to 6.5... not having any worry.

  1. 2  NotesDude  | 2/26/2004 8:44:35 PM

    For those of us unable to attend the actual Lotusphere in Florida, the "Lotusphere comes to YOU" event in various cities has always been an interesting and valuable experience. Can we continue to look forward to seeing these ? Thx !

  1. 3  Bob Balaban http://www.looseleaf.net | 2/26/2004 8:45:08 PM

    Since Lotus dropped the spring/summer devcons a few years ago, the gap seems to have been well filled by Advisor Media and others. In fact, Advisor is having one in Las Vegas in June (I will be one of the speakers).

    There's also a great event in Germany in May (DNUG), and another next week (I believe Ed is a speaker at next week's, and is usually a speaker at DNUG as well).

    And whatever happened to DeveoperWorks Live, anyway?

  1. 4  Scott Good www.teamsol.com www.scottgood.com | 2/27/2004 7:53:22 AM

    It seems to me there are a lot of constituencies you need to address, from hard core geeks who want nothing but CODE, to IT managers who want vision and futures. Maybe more important are the bulk of folks who fall somewhere in the middle and want some of each.

    Trying to get all of this out of one event is hard. Well, not hard so much as big. Lotusphere addresses all layers but it's a big deal to put on. And expensive.

    As Bob said, there are events out there to address the coders' needs. Advisor Magazines put on excellent sessions of which another is coming in Las Vegas in June. I will be speaking along with a lot of other Lotus regulars and I can tell you from the last several events that it's a good show. They address some of the concerns stated by others in this thread by offering not only Lotus-focused topics but also sessions on WebSphere, .NET and even mobile technologies. There's plenty here to satisfy the geeks.

    The View has similar events. Between Advisor and The View you have significant events which already exist and address an entire segment of the market. Rather than try to resurrect Lotus' DevCon, why not piggyback on these sessions?

    Make some of the better (technical) Lotus in-house speakers available to augment those of us who make up the bulk of the speaking. More importantly, use the IBM and Lotus soapbox to help promote these events so more people get to them.

    Then, turn your real attention to the un-served groups; those who need more information about futures, about how technologies can be applied to real issues, and about how IBM's technologies fit into an overall IT plan. This, to me, means something like the Lotusphere Comes To You roadshows except with one exception: Do it all with live speakers. Last year I worked the product showcase at three of these events and at each one I heard a surprising amount of grumbling about coming all that way to watch TV.

    Having live--and quality--speakers would go a long way toward showing Lotus' commitment to the education being provided. Yes, that would cost more but in the long run it's not THAT much more. There are lots of us out here who are regular Lotusphere/DevCon/whatever speakers who would be quite happy to work some or all of a series of events like this. Yeah, you'll probably have to pay us for this (unlike Lotusphere), but we work for cheap. OK, cheap-ish.

    So, in summary: Support the Advisor and View and whatever other technical events there are out there, then do your own complimentary--not competitive--sessions to spread the word more broadly.

    That's what I'd like to see.

  1. 5  Ed Brill www.ebrill.com | 2/27/2004 11:03:52 AM

    several people have pointed out that I didn't mention the Advisor Live event that just so happens to be in Vegas in June. http://lotus.advisorlive.com for details like that. In addition to Bob and Scott, my trusted colleague Alan Lepofsky will be speaking there, as will other bloggers and assorted interesting characters.

  1. 6  David  | 2/27/2004 12:47:32 PM

    Alan...unfortunately the issues with this client are ... um, unfortunate. It is basically poor IT management decisions, and one senior person in particular who has stalled progress in the environment for 4 years (he wanted to rip out Notes and go to IPlanet or MS, or anything).

    So, my hope would be some local show where some senior people in this org would get invited or attend and some excitement would be taken back into the org.

    How can you help ... how about getting a real Notes Marketing person to come here (the local talent isn't doing much)and sell them on what they have ... if they'll let you in the door. I'll see if I can pass on the information you mentioned. Thx.