Thus spoke Zollar
Al Zollar opened the conference with a real showman's address. His theme: Working as One. A promo video, accompanied by an ear-splitting soundtrack, showed the usual scenario of people all around the world using Lotus software to produce a line of shirts.

Al's speech picked up on two big points: Knowledge Management and collaboration. He emphasized the importance of capturing information, referencing it, and then enabling people to share that knowledge and expertise through a Web site, WAP, PDA, instant messaging, or chat.

Raven uber Berlin
Raven was the star, however. Raven is a collective name for the Lotus KM (Knowledge Management) product family. It has two basic components, K-station (the client side portal tool) and the Discovery Server.

K-station is a handy portal platform for Domino Web sites and all the other products in the Domino stable, particularly Quickplace. (The release of Quickplace 2.0 was slightly overshadowed by the Raven release.)

The Discovery Server is the real killer app. It incorporates bits and pieces from every corner of the IBM empire and beyond. It relies partially on administrative tools, but principally on observing network document usage (and Internet usage) to compile profiles of expertise and knowledge. It reads the metrics of the documents. In other words, it actually reads the entire document, ignoring pronouns, articles, and the like.

It builds up these metrics and creates catalogs of information. It doesn't rely on full text searches to compile them. This technology is called Vector Map Classifiers, as opposed to the old, more manual, Keyword classifiers. It's pretty cool, though it might affect Internet usage at work. Imagine coming in one day and finding yourself classified as an expert on Champion's League Soccer--and you work for a mining company.

This is not a product you'd lightly throw on a server. It's almost like a business partner in a way, and you'll have to look long and hard at deployment.

Do WAP
The collaboration side of things was interesting, although there was very little new there. The questionable parts of Zollar's presentation and of the ones following were the parts dealing with WAP. Al told us we use WAP to book hotel reservations. You could see heads turning and looking at each other as if to say, "We do?"