Lotusphere News from a distance

Well unfortunately I couldn't make Lotusphere this year as fortunately Jayne is due with our first baby in Feb. A little too close to be on the other side of the world.

So I am watching the news come in from afar and here is the latest news I have been able to find out. ISW has a number of our team at Lotusphere so I am sure we will get more info coming in soon as well.

• IBM announces that since Lotus Notes 8 was released they have added 12,236 new customers. From my knowledge there used to be approximately 50,000 so this is a huge increase in new organisations that have adopted Notes & Domino.
• Lotusphere is bigger this year. Customer attendance is up 2% on last year.
• RIM introduced their first Blackberry 10 years today.  Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.16 released to support Domino 8.5 (only 10 days after the release of 8.5).
• New Blackberry Client for Lotus Connections 2.0.1 announced for release in early 2009. Supports all Connection services.
• New Blackberry client for Sametime as well. Also plans to support Quickr and Lotus Symphony.
• Blackberry XPages support in Domino Designer through an Eclipse plugin coming later this year.
• Lotus Bluehouse has been renamed Lotus Live - http://www.lotuslive.com
• Lotus Symphony for the Mac can be downloaded today including the ODF Toolkit for Open Document workflow
• Symphony 1.3 will support Office 2007 file formats.
• Lotus Notes is 20 this year.
• Quickr is integrated into the iNotes 8.5 client.
• XPages is a huge hit in Designer 8.5. This will revolutionise development of Domino Web Applications.
• Xpages will be supported in the Notes client in 8.5.1. This is truly a major new capability. Imagine the interfaces we can build for the Notes client now.
• LinkedIn Integration via the Notes Sidebar.
• Lotus Quickr will offer XPages support
• IBM is going to release SmartMarket - ibm.com/smartmarket . An store that partners can promote and distribute applications
• IBM and OpenNTF are going to form a partnership. IBM is going to provide more support for OpenNTF.
• Domino 8.5 offers 50% reduction in I/O
• Lotus Foundations will ship with VMWare support
• New release of ST coming in 2009 - ST8.5, including iPhone support
• Sametime 8.5 web client - No Java Applets required. You can export recordings of Sametime meetings as Quicktime
• Lotus Connections 2.5 - Can customise interface across the product. Profiles will support Microblogging (like twitter and Wall).
• Connections will have Widgets to integrate Flickr and Twitter etc. Will also have bi-directional sharing with LinkedIn and more. Connections extended to iPhone. Wiki's can be part of Communities with support for versions and ratings. Lots of new Connections capabilities. New file sharing capability in Connections.
• Quickr 8.2 for Domino to ship later this quarter, including LC integration and Domino 8.5 support
• Websphere Portal now to include entitlement for ePhox Live rich text editors. This is great news. Portal really needed Ephox for Rich editing of web content.
• LotusLive is a portfolio of integrated social software and collaborative services. Seems to be Connections, Sametime, Quickr all rolled into one service.
• LotusLive partnerships with Salesforce, LinkedIn and Skype

And that is it for now. More as it comes in.