A final thought on Workplace and Portal. I went to Rob Novak's session where he actually described his experiences installing WebSphere Portal, and enough add-in pieces afterwards, such as DB2, linking to a Domino directory via LDAP, installing WebSphere Studio, and adding applications such as some of the Lotus Workplace items or Lotus Collaborative components, to have something that could do some useful work.

To get that far, it took him 100 hours or so -- and it needs some big tin. Rob also made some crucial comments about reading the documentation, especially the Troubleshooting sections. Advice ignored at your peril. His view is that you should not assume that you can just do the installation when you need to do it. Start planning now to get a Portal installation up and running. And if you don't believe me (or Rob), find someone who went to Lotusphere and ask for slides for session BP115.

Enough of the Geekery, what else happened?
Lotusphere isn't all about technical stuff. It's a party, and a reunion. You look around Lotusphere, and you realise that you are part of not just another software conference, but a community, and a corporate fan club.

There can't be many companies around, software or otherwise, that have such a loyal following. Lotus understood it, and I think, after some years, that IBM now understands it too. Lotusphere Online -- the online service provided just before, during, and after the show -- featured, as always a set of forums, and this year they used DomBulletin from OpenNTF.org (http://www.openntf.org), and rightly were praised in the forums for so doing.

And the community stepped in too to extend Lotus's wireless network -- Lotus provide a wireless network in the Swan and Dolphin fountain areas, and it got greatly extended by a co-operative venture from attendees, led by Scott Wenzel, alias Turtle, author of the Totally Unofficial Gonzo Lotusphere sites (try http://24.89.5.208/ls2004.nsf for the 2004 site). Thanks, guys.

A notable downer was the almost complete absence of Lotus yellow. The staff shirts were grey, the screen backgrounds for presentations were blue and grey, with just a yellow-backed Lotus logo for highlight. Almost the biggest yellow splash was one of the two colour options for this year's CULT (Completely Unofficial Lotusphere T) Shirt.

Kevin Cavanaugh, VP Messaging Development at Lotus, compired the must-see Ask the Developers session on Thursday afternoon in a yellow shirt, one of the few official ones seen all week. More yellow to be seen about Lotusphere would be good.

It would also, in my opinion, be good to see less rather than more of the overlong product names around. They -- IBM Marketing -- say that "IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing" is more descriptive a name than "Sametime", but I'm not so sure -- I thinks it's just longer, and actually less useful. Talk to a prospect about Sametime, and the first question to be asked will be "...and what does that do?". There's a cue to start describing all the things it can do.