Ed Brill

Some reviews of Lotusphere Comes to You Australia/New Zealand

I've seen a number of reviews of Lotusphere Comes to You in the blogs...here are three from down under:

Adam Osborne has travelled along with the show, and says:

From conversations with people who sat through the presentations I can confirm that it was an overwhelming success for IBM.

I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with the IBMers that put the event together. You'd be hard pressed to find a more professional or dedicated group of people. They delivered time and time again and maintained an extremely high energy level right to the end. I really don't know how they did it.

James Dellow attended in Sydney and writes about Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections:

* On the face of it, Quickr is a big improvement on Quickplace but on the other hand some of the views felt very familiar. Personally I'd like to see more things (if they aren't already there) like support for simple Web 2.0 ideas such tag clouds and more complex Web 2.0 functionality like "widgets". And while you're waiting for Quickr to arrive on an intranet (or extranet) near you, Mike suggested we take a look at the free Blog and Wiki templates for Quickplace available from SNAPPS.
* The Lotus Connections concept ("Profiles,Communities, Blogs, Bookmarks, Activities") was also compelling and really suggests to me that IBM Lotus really do get this space. But to be honest I just want to get my hands on it to see how well it lives up to buzz in practice!

Ric Hayman was in Adelaide, has some compelling conclusions (and it's worth reading his whole summary):

*

• This strikes me as validation for Andrew McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 meme (maybe Wikipedia will allow his article now?) and confirmation that social software behind the firewall has legs.
• IBM has effectively resurrected the Lotus brand, and provides MS Sharepoint with some powerful competition.
• While it isn't exactly open-source, IBM's use of Eclipse (which is), support for ODF, Java Content Repository, JSR168 etc. is far more "open" than say Sharepoint, because it gives customers  better options for swapping software without losing control of their data.

(Thanks, James, for that last link)