Yesterday was "Lotusphere Comes To You" (LCTY) for Sydney - there was a pretty good turnout for the 4 or so hours of information on offer - a good sign for those of us in the local industry to see that there is still a lot of interest in Notes8. It was a bit hard to tell, but I think there were around 5-600 guests - most of which who were pretty excited about some of the things they saw and what's just on the horizon for Notes and Domino.
[executive summary - again, another great year of development in the Lotus brand - lots of new stuff on the horizon, looks like a lot of fun to play with, but more importantly it looks like creating a more effective and efficient user experience in the Lotus suite - good stuff guys]
Unfortunately I don't really have a lot of time at the moment but just wanted to kickstart myself into blogging about some of the details - I hope to give a bit of detail about the sessions, but this entry is a more general outline of the (half) day's events.
First, the location - the event was held at the same place as last year - probably one of the nicer hotels in Sydney and it showed - well turned out, relatively comfortable chairs (although after a couple of hours people get fidgety), good audio/visual presentations and visibility, good catering, and when you needed to get outside for a little break, you were literally on the doorstep of Sydney's famous Circular Quay and the Sydney Opera House.
The sessions were pretty good - especially the keynote - lots of great stuff, mixed in with some demos (I don't remember them from last year so that seems to be a great new addition to the day - way more like the "real" Lotusphere).
I guess I'm pretty hard to please (but I also think I'm pretty indicative based on the people that I talked to), but I'm still not sure as to exactly what the concept of LCTY is supposed to be - or more correctly, I'm not sure if my concept of LCTY is the same as the concept IBM have. It wasn't as bad as last year (which could have been called Portalsphere or Workplacesphere), but, being a technical person, and recognising that this is effectively the *only* event that IBM will throw during the year in relation to Lotus, I would have liked some more technical presentations, or demos, or hands-on, or whiz-bang stuff that we can all take back to our places of work and really show off some of the cool stuff that can be done with this tool that we all support so much.
As a technical person, and due to the name LOTUSphere, and after being at the Orlando event, I kind of expect it to have some breakthrough information, and a lot of it about Lotus Notes in particular. It's just that.. well... LCTY kind of doesn't have a very technical, nor Lotus feel about it... ok now... before I get everyone jumping up and down at me... I know that there seems to be some plans afoot to have some more technical sessions throughout the year in Sydney but part of me really wishes IBM would spring for at least a day-long session - morning for strategy and direction, afternoon for technical and breakout.
Ok... so.. that's off the chest - I'll post some more on the sessions later in the week