Supporting Workplace are some 750 Business Partners with either shipping product or developments well under way. There were 60 Workplace solutions on show in the Product Showcase. There are 2,895 Workplace customers, too.

Activity Explorer
Last, but not least, is Activity Explorer. This first appeared at Lotusphere three years ago in the IBM Research Innovations Lab, and yes, we missed it then. Last year it was mainstream, and now it's shipping as part of Workplace 2.6.

I went to a session where the reasoning behind Activity Explorer was examined, followed by a demo using the upcoming Activity Explorer 3.0 development. Briefly, what Activity Explorer does is define a collaborative activity in terms of the things created and used, rather than the tools used to work with.

So an activity, shared by all those people involved, may consist of Word files, URLs, saved Sametime chats, Notes documents and so on. What Activity Explorer does is catalog all these things together -- as a collection of links, not by storing all the stuff -- and enabling the users to get directly to the content they need to work on their activities and projects.

Activity Explorer can be reached as a Web application, or, as you should by now have realised, as a plug-in to the WMC. Activity Explorer is likely to be big -- certainly Lotus are betting a reasonable chunk of their farm on it -- and as a move forward in the whole collaboration space, it's a clear competitive differentiator.

Lotusphere itself
OK, enough of announcements. What of Lotusphere itself?

Well, there was buzz, lots of it. Lots to do, in fact this year there was even more that you didn't have time to get to than in previous years. Not just over 150 regular breakout sessions and 50 birds-of-a-feather, but also the various labs, hands-on sessions, 16 of them, as well as vendor presentations and the Showcase.

More than 6,000 attendees, including apparently over 400 walk-ins, with over 10% of the them being first-timers. A very upbeat opening session that overflowed into the Swan ballroom, sessions that overflowed into not one, but two, extra rooms, and believe this, repeat sessions also into overflow rooms. I didn't personally go to a single session that I didn't get something out of, and all of them were full.

The Showcase was buzzing too. Ed Brill said that they had reconfigured the Showcase twice in planning to be able to get more pedestals in, and then closed it well before Christmas. Vendors I spoke with said that business was good, customers were back, and that they were taking good leads. Which itself shows that the Lotus aftermarket thinks that there is new life in the old dog, as well as in the new dog of Workplace.

The bloggers were buzzing, too, and are now a major part of the show. At least 50 and probably a fair number more Notes bloggers were there, and blogging made it into a panel session this year, as shown in Figure A, as well as a BOF.

FIGURE A


The blogging panel session was hosted by Libby Ingrassia with Ricky Oliver, Ed Brill, Volker Webe, Declan Lynch, Jack Dausman and Chris Byrne. Roll over picture for a larger image.