The Lotus User Group (at http://www.lotususergroup.org) had live blogging from the showcase, of admittedly varied quality. Paul Mooney was presented with a pair of Lotus yellow boxing gloves by Ed Brill, for his so-thorough debunking of Microsoft's "Red Bull" Notes "migration" tool (see http://www.pmooney.net/blogsphe.nsf/d6plinks/PMOY-6L2TN4). And of course, last laugh on that subject is that Red Bull (the company) are Notes users, and were represented at Lotusphere.

Many sessions were live-blogged, and some blog quotes were up on the screen at the closing ceremony. Many bloggers also sported "I'm a Sicko" badge, to commemorate (see http://www.thesickos.com) the famous Radicati report furore of last summer.

While we are discussing reaction to inaccurate reports, Lotus also pledged to react within 24 hours to Microsoft FUD. That's an interesting turn of events, when you consider that FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) as an acronym first appeared attached to IBM marketing, way back in the 1960s.

I preferred Surjit Chana's description of it all as, and I quote, "Bullshit". See the Lotus homepage, and the responder blog at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=808 for more. [For the record, that's the first time either of the words "bullshit" or "shit" have appeared in DominoPower. Ever. -- Ed.]

My favourite session was Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney talking about Worst Practices in Lotus Notes and Domino, BP106 if you get a chance to download the slides. Not only was this session hilarious, but it was also a little creepy.

Bill and Paul presented a dozen cases from their personal experience of things that had gone seriously wrong, with an analysis of why and what should have been done to prevent them happening. Creepy, because I've also seen quite a number of them in my career too -- and fortunately have not perpetrated any of them. From the audience reaction, I wasn't alone, either. A great session, well presented, with a lot to take away.

My favourite in the showcase, was pointed out to me by Dieter Stalder. I'm sad to say, it's not a Notes product at all, though it will make Notes more available. It was Sun's Sun Ray terminal system. Basically this consists of a screen with a graphics adapter and very little else besides a smart card slot, connected back to a server. Insert your card, and within a second or two, your current desktop appears. Pull out the card, and it's gone. Plug the card into another Sun Ray, and two seconds later, your desktop is back. Take a laptop home, VPN into the system, and log on, desktop appears in a couple of seconds. It apparently keeps the desktops active for days, before automatically shutting down. Very cool.

Jim-jams and giveaways were ever present, and fun was had at the JAMFest, shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


There's a whole lot of jamming going on. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The Lotus User Group had another set of buttons, and almost every stand had stuff to collect, ranging from the inevitable T-shirts to Hadsl's very neat stainless steel Domino sets, which were real hard to prise away from them -- I failed.