Of course, this year is a bit different from previous years. It's bizarrely warm in the northeast, with temperatures in the 60s in New Jersey and even as high as 50 in Maine. Usually, by the time Lotusphere rolls around, everyone has so had it with the cold that a trip to Orlando is desperately needed. This year, the pilgrimage isn't for the warmth of the air, but for the warmth of the company.

The big theme for this year's Lotusphere is likely to be "Hannover", soon to be known as Lotus Notes 8. This new Lotus Notes client is expected to provide users with a single, innovative and intuitive client for messaging, custom applications, and productivity tools, plus J2EE-based functions like activity management, document management, and team workspaces.

As with all Lotuspheres, it's also an opportunity for us to see what the full Notes universe has to offer. On the exhibit floor will be hundreds of innovative companies, each showing off amazing tools and resources for expanding on Lotus applications or using them in interesting ways.

And, as has been the case with virtually every Lotusphere I've attended (and I've attended all but the one that occured while I was getting married), someone will say "Notes is dead" or some such other drivel. For years, one of our own Senior Technical Editors has made this claim. In fact, he's been so consistently claiming this for so many years that the claim itself has now become its own source of amusement.

Unfortunately, some outside the Lotus sphere of influence also tend to denigrate Lotus offerings. One such recent example was a posting on Tuesday by RSS innovator Dave Winer.

Buried in a commentary about Microsoft and Vista, Dave made a comment, stating "Lotus is now a forgotten division of IBM".

Dave is one of the smartest people in the computer industry. He's responsible for popularizing RSS, podcasting, OPML, outlining, and even the expand/collapse user interface element we see now in operating systems and, in our case, in the little twisties Notes uses everywhere. The guy is a serious out-of-the-box thinker and even if you don't know it, you're probably deriving some benefit from something Dave's created in the last 20 years.

But he's very wrong here. Lotus is anything but forgotten. Nearly 100 million people use Domino or Notes as their mail system. Although IBM doesn't release any numbers, DominoPower's internal estimates place Lotus revenue at well over a billion dollars last year. Our own database contains more than 1,000 companies who create Lotus-related products and services.