Skip to main content

My Lotusphere 2012/IBM Connect 2012 Highlights, The Good, Bad, and Ugly

This year I attended both the Lotusphere sessions and the IBM Connect sessions. I am glad that IBM has devolved a portion of the conference to business cases. We need to remember that as technologist our job depends on the business side of an organization. That is why it is important even in a technology conference that the C and VP levels are on board. However, there was too much focus on how Connections is the savoy of all.  Overall, IBM's message was more clear and concise at this Lotusphere. Food was the same including the Lotusphere cookie. I avoided as much of the breakfast as possible this year because of my low-salt diet.  It would not surprise me that one breakfast exceed your total allocation of salt per day twice over. The Sunday party was average with the quality of food being average.

The Good
  • Meeting all my Lotus colleagues
  • Meeting new Lotus colleagues
  • Mike J Fox's Opening Session Presentation
  • Guy Kawasaki's Opening Session Presentation at IBM Connect 2012
  • MWLUG Gathering on Tuesday, 17 fellow Lotus Geeks and Beer. What can I say. Russ Mather thanks for the beer.
  • The incorporation of OpenSocial technology into the next version of Domino
  • Social Mail client, (just make the iNotes client the official client for Domino)
  • The Notes plugin for the iNotes client
  • A chance at the Ask the Developer to request the ability for ISVs to create custom XWork/Domino installation packages. Contact me if you are interested. Need to create enough interest.
  • More business focused sessions.

The Bad
This year unlike previous years, I entered in most of the showcase vendor raffles, but
  • I lost the GBS Kindle Fire and I was so close, I woman who pick just before me won 
  • Losing the iPad, iPhone, iPod, HTC Tablet Pro raffle
  • Social Business for SMB session was only opened to the press. It would have been nice if Business Partners can attend given that the Business Partners are the one in the trenches in the SMB market. 
  • As the organizer of MWLUG I know how hard it is to organize an event like Lotusphere, but would it hurt to have the old used Lotusphere signs on the highway exits to point to the auxiliary parking. Many went to Blizzard Beach instead and waste an hour of travel time including myself. 
  • The bad PR disaster that IBM created with Andrew's and Gabriel's session
  • WiFi was down and down so many times
  • The attendance was down definitely. Many I know did not attend.  There was so many IBMers that I figure 50% of the attendees that I past by or met were IBMers.
  • The 750 to 1000 students got preferred seating in the front
  • Too many Connections sessions

The Ugly
  • An ingrained images of a naked Darren Duke twittering during the OGS. 
  • Interface for SocialBizOnline.com 
Now that Lotusphere 2012 is over, the detailed planning for MWLUG begins.  Mark your calendar, August 15-17, 2012, Pittsburgh, PA.

Comments

Darren Duke said…
Ugly? Nah.....maybe wrinkly.
You are too young for wrinkles.

Popular posts from this blog

The iPhora Journey - Part 8 - Flow-based Programming

After my last post in this series -- way back in September 2022, several things happened that prevented any further installments. First came CollabSphere 2022 and then CollabSphere 2023, and organizing international conferences can easily consume all of one's spare time. Throughout this same time period, our product development efforts continued at full speed and are just now coming to fruition, which means it is finally time to continue our blog series. So let's get started... As developers, most of us create applications through the conscious act of programming, either procedural, as many of us old-timers grew up with, or object-oriented, which we grudgingly had to admit was better. This is true whether we are using Java, LotusScript, C++ or Rust on Domino. (By the way, does anyone remember Pascal? When I was in school, I remember being told it was the language of the future, but for some reason it didn't seem to survive past the MTV era).  But in the last decade, there a...

Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part II - Let's Assemble

Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part I - Anatomy of a Widget Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part II - Let's Assemble Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part IIIA - Using Dojo To Bring It Together This is two part of my five part series "Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets".   As I mentioned in part one of this series, Twitter Bootstrap widgets are built from a collection standard HTML elements, styled, and programmed to function as a single unit. The goal of this series is to teach you how to create a Bootstrap widget that utilizes the Bootstrap CSS and Dojo. The use of Dojo with Bootstrap is very limited with the exception of Kevin Armstrong who did an incredible job with his Dojo Bootstrap, http://dojobootstrap.com. Our example is a combo box that we are building to replace the standard Bootstrap combo box. In part one, we built a widget that looks like a combo box but did not have a drop down menu associated with it to allow the user to make a select...

The iPhora Journey - Part 3 - Creating an Integrated UI Framework

The iPhora Journey - Part 1 - Reimagining Domino The iPhora Journey - Part 2 - Domino, the Little Engine that Could The iPhora Journey - Part 3 - Creating an Integrated UI Framework There are many ways to create the user interface (UI) for a web application. The HTML page could be created on the server and then pushed out. It could be static with the data generated on the page by the server with JavaScript, providing a more dynamic experience, or the server could generate new HTML content to update portions of the web page. XPages or PHP are good examples of this. Another method is to have the web page partially generated by the server and have JavaScript build the rest of the HTML by pulling data from the server via an API. This is the approach used in the Single Page Application (SPA) model. In all cases, it is still dependent on the web server technology being using.  As mentioned previously in this blog, XPages is dependent on complete integration between form and document, whi...