The Lotus strategy for the future
He then outlined the Lotus strategy for the future. A-ha! I was about to receive the information I came for. Mr. Zollar outlined what he believed were critical success factors to the industry and Lotus as a whole. The first was a solid infrastructure of collaboration and messaging. Second was the importance of being an e-learning facilitator both to customers and within your own organization. Finally came the buzzword we've all been hearing so much about this past year, Knowledge Management.

Al finished his speech and then gave way to Jeanette Horan, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Development and Support for Lotus. She told us how Lotus technologies are primed to be the best of breed in modular e-business solutions and how Lotus' adherence to standards and the openness of the software continue to contribute to its success.

The demo of the day
This is when things got fishy. The demo of the day was Fish.net, a global business-to-business portal that allowed fishermen to interface directly with restaurants and suppliers. Fishermen could upload counts of fish and sell them directly to eating establishments. Restaurant owners could create menus for the month and buy enough fish to support them. The whole demo was done entirely with Lotus and IBM technologies and really highlighted how collaboration can enhance B2B commerce.

Quickplace technologies were used for customers to create their own portal space, Sametime could connect users instantly with one another, and Domino provided an excellent framework to piece it all together. As seen in Figure D, fish delivery was quick too, with one Mr. Zollar from "Al's Deliveries" delivering a huge tuna to the stage.

FIGURE D

When Al walks in with a 20 pound Tuna, people take notice! Click picture for a larger image.

As fishy as this demo was, it actually came out smelling like a rose.

6:00 PM, Friday, June 23
This is when I was finally able to catch my breath. For the remainder of Wednesday and all of Thursday and Friday, I continued my info gathering. My quest for knowledge was insatiable, and I picked at the flesh of every breakout session. I turned up some interesting facts.

First and foremost were major changes happening in Domino Designer. In the future, the Designer client will have support for script libraries, multiple embedded views in a form, the ability to easily lock design elements from co-workers, and support for layers! These are all things to look for in one of the next major releases.

Next, there seemed to be lots of support for many code-word acronyms, such as DOLS (Domino Off-Line Services), Lotus ESB (Enterprise Solution Builder), JSPs (Java Server Pages), LHMS (Lotus Hosting Management System), DECS (Domino Enterprise Connection Services) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML seemed to be a favorite topic of conversation. There were four sessions specific to the topic and several others that touched on it as well. Lotus also had a very nice tutorial in the Lotus Education Lab that gave an introduction to XML. This is obviously one TLA (three letter acronym) that Lotus is excited about.