The ultimate goal of all of this is to better integrate QuickPlace, Sametime, Domino, etc. to build applications that truly empower people to work together in a more meaningful and productive way. This is going beyond the portals we've known in the past to create next-generation portals and portlets that offer extremely valuable information and the tools to act on that information in a powerful way.

My priorities for the coming year
As I mentioned earlier, Lotusphere is an opportunity for me to refocus my priorities for the coming year. This year I came up with the following five priorities, which I'll list below in order:

• QuickPlace;
• Sametime Application Development;
• Notes and Domino 6;
• XML;
• Mobile and Wireless.

Below is a longer description of each of these priorities and why I find them so compelling.

QuickPlace
Last year I said that QuickPlace was the main technology I wanted to learn. Well, I did a lot of work with QuickPlace in 2001 that helped me with some high-profile projects within my company. I even did a "Hear From Your Peers" session about QuickPlace in December that you can find out more about by going to http://lotus.com/itmanager.

This year, QuickPlace is more important than ever to me. I want to continue to work with it and take my QuickPlace development skills to the next level. Presentations from people like the great folks at SNAPPS showed me once again that I've just begun to tap the potential of this powerful platform. And it's a development platform, make no mistake about it.

Sametime
We've been using the basic chat features of Sametime very successfully during the past year, and I think that we're ready to take our collaboration to the next level. After seeing some of the presentations at Lotusphere, my goal is to really learn how to create Sametime Java applets that leverage the power of Sametime within Web applications.

Lotus Notes 6 and Domino 6
Last year I said that the best sessions were the RNext previews, which had capacity crowds last year. Well, I didn't actually end up doing much with RNext this past year aside from downloading and installing a couple of the beta versions and playing with it for a few hours. My interest was renewed again at this Lotusphere, however, and I like the direction Lotus is taking with the Pre-release versions they started releasing this past week. I don't know about you, but pre-release sounds much better than beta, and I'm hoping to have as much success with the pre-release versions of Notes 6 and Domino 6 as I did with the pre-release versions of Windows XP.

Lotus Notes and Domino 6 offers so many productivity, development, and administration improvements that it's hard not to get excited about them. And with a more solid release path defined, it also helps to keep you focused on learning what's new before the products are officially released later this year.

XML
I've known for quite some time that XML was an important technology to learn and master, but this year the power it could add to applications really hit me. It will be extremely important for helping to integrate applications and data effectively, and the time has come for me to bite down and start working with this technology.