Look forward to more analysis on this topic from Amy. We've got a link to her Web site at the end of the article. If you can, you should definitely subscribe to her email update. She's got a unique and valuable insight into our industry and her newsletter's a worthwhile read.

Jack Dausman gives it some thought
We've had the pleasure of publishing a number of Jack's articles. Jack's VP IBM/Lotus Services at ICI Systems, Inc. in Washington, DC and brings us a unique beltway perspective. He's one of the most comprehensive product reviewers we've ever had, and really gives the issues their due consideration. Here are his thoughts:

What do I expect from Lotusphere? I think the easiest way to answer this is to simple list off my impressions and prospects.

I expect to hear from IBM how important Domino is to everything IBM. Those outside of the Business Partner channel don't really understand how tenacious IBM/Lotus is about Domino. Lotus intends to win every competition with any other product, and that attitude works down to each person with whom I interact with at IBM/Lotus. Now, this observation is about the Lotus part of IBM. IBM, on a higher level, has not always done a good job aligning with the vision of Lotus (this is a long discussion from which I will defer expanding further).

I expect to learn more about integration.

Web services in Domino 7 is going to be very important. If it is easy to implement, then I expect an early adoption for Domino 7 because it ends the data silo of Domino NSFs. Yes, it is possible to handle data transfers between Domino databases and just about anything else (Lotus has ODBC drivers and provides C/C++ APIs and even their Lotus Enterprise Integrator data pump). But because Notes databases include the logic as part of the data store, Web services is a much better solution than trying to make an object store answer SQL queries.

Mobile integration with SameTime (hmmmm...I'm going to ignore their new too-long-marketing-name) into everything from VOIP, Blackberry, to SmartPhones.

Data integration with the DB2 option.

WebSphere portal integration.

WorkPlace integration. Big story, here, but it is hard to give an elevator speech which summarizes why WorkPlace is a great concept and will strengthen Domino's reach.

The Rich Client for WorkPlace, and Domino integration.

I don't expect to hear much about open-source integration (e.g., JBoss and Domino JSPs). But I do expect to hear more about an end-to-end Linux solution, which I think is a strong message, but I haven't heard much about it.

Rational development integration: cool tools that cost more than a Domino server (not a great business model for most Domino installations).

I expect to hear more about lower operating costs. Cheaper, faster, better administration. Many administrators and even programmers pretty much do their work at the level of which they were introduced to the product. Lotus ND6 changed a lot of the administration architecture with Certificate Authorities for the Lotus PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), and Policy/Settings documents. Yet, many admins ignore these advantages and continue to slog away with very slow, tedious, manual operations. Most admins don't even know about the Active Directory Integration Synchronization tool.