Jumbo and Real-Time Translation Service were both translation machines attached to Sametime. Between them they offered speech recognition, spoken word transcription and translation of conversations such that a complete multilingual conversation can be held, and transcribed on the fly.

Another demo showed versions of Symphony working in a browser, with in-place edit of shared documents.

SlideRiver converted Symphony or PowerPoint slide shows into a storage of single slides, allowing slides to be found and reused, singly or in sets.

Wormhole enables Web apps to operate virtual worlds. Just imagine a Web-based virtual reality shop where you can see what's on the shelf, pick it up and do pretty much a touch-and-feel before deciding whether to buy. Include the appearance of stock on the shelf to display stock availability.

Cattail offers Web-based secure file-sharing via the web, with social additions such as notifications of change, feeds on people and topics, and searches -- with the aim of eliminating emailed attachments. I'd specifically highlight this one as a likely addition to the product range somewhere, reasonably soon.

And my favourite -- because I'm already using it -- is IBM OmniFind Personal Search (IOPES). This is a search tool for Lotus Notes mail (there is a version for Outlook, too) which provides a different search mechanism from the Notes Full-text index. Currently surfaced via Firefox, this is able to search for things like phone numbers, or someone who sent an attachment that may have been about some particular subject. I'd like to see this as a product, integrated as a composite app into the Notes 8 sidebar, so that I could use it directly from Notes. Check it out at the Alphaworks site.

So what?
Ok, so why is everything that went on so important? Why did Lotusphere 2008 succeed so well?

Well, it showed off a different Lotus and IBM, one that, to mimic the conference theme, is emergent, confident. Lotus is clearly fully at home with the choice of the Eclipse RCP -- Expeditor -- as the foundation of its next generation of collaboration products. That product line is clearly led by Lotus Notes, with the rest of the suite complementing Notes and each other via the Expeditor framework.

There's a whole new focus on application development, for Expeditor, for Notes and for Web 2.0, targeting both professional developers and end users, with products like Designer 8.5, Portlet Factory 6.0.2, Mashups Widgets and Atlantic.

There's a clear attack on Microsoft's core platform, with Symphony, turning that area into a commodity provision. There's now even talk of Web 3.0, adding intelligence into back-end data such as authors sources and so on so that these data structures are more than just documents, but become self-linking into networks of knowledge and people.

This is just great. Notes and Domino are back in IBM's corporate conscience and are being invested in aggressively to bring them technically right back to being leading-edge products, fully able to deal with the challenges that our companies -- you and I -- will make of them.