Just so you know (you'll be tested on this later, so pay attention) there are three types of Business Partners: Member, Advanced, and Premier. Within each, Business Partners fall into different types or "tracks": software resellers, ISVs (Independent Software Developers), systems and services, personal systems, Web integrators, and ASPs (Application Service Providers).

Incentives of the financial kind, known as ILSAP (IBM Lotus Sales Assistance Program), are mostly reserved for those Business Partners that "sell Lotus products or influence sales." This excludes the majority of Business Partners who provide Domino development services, consultancy, help with designing and managing Domino systems infrastructure, or operate as ISVs, as their businesses depend on a Domino system already being in place. So, despite the market for Domino being healthy in Europe, Lotus has some way to go before its Business Partners are entirely happy with the program which merges into the IBM PartnerWorld offering at the end of the year.

Work as One
The main conference began on Tuesday with more opening speeches. Apparently, the theme for the week was "Verk uz Vunn." We had special headphones that provided a translation, but mine only supplied a German commentary, so I'm afraid I can't throw any light on the meaning of this new marketing strategy. But if it's anything like the slogan of one of my clients, "Taking our business into the 21st century" ("Aren't we already in the 21st century?" I asked.) I won't lose any sleep over it.

Mercifully, the opening ceremonies only lasted until lunchtime, after which the real sessions began. Of course the sessions are arranged so that no one person can attend them all, but fortunately my friends Lisa Vernalls and Simon Shaw provided reports on many sessions that I missed. Here's a summary of the best, the worst, and the middle-of-the-road of the week:

The best
Fortunately, the week's best comprised almost everything.

DXL (Janet Thomas and Dave Schlesinger, Lotus)
I wasn't sure why I should care about XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as a developer until I saw this presentation. A packed hall saw an entire Notes database, complete with design elements and ACL (Access Control List), exported to a text file. A simple search and replace, followed by putting the file back through the XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) parser, and we had yellow form backgrounds. Everyone's head was spinning with the possibilities as we left.

IBM Research (Alex Morrow)
Alex provided one of the most entertaining presentations of the week as he showed his home video of one of IBM's research labs at Poughkeepsie, NY in which was heard the following exchange:

"Hi Joe. Say, that's a nice watch you're wearing."

"Thanks Alex, but actually this is a Linux server running X-Windows."

Alex went on to explain the enormous leaps in disk capacity and the petraflop processing capability of IBM's most powerful computer, but I was still laughing from the video.