Historically, there's been a strong track record where items shown here would eventually appear as part of Lotus products later, so it's always fascinating to go and see what's on show.

Very cool projects
Among the more than 20 projects on show was Concord, slated to be available in LotusLive labs this year. It will offer cloud-based collaborative document editing functions, letting teams work simultaneously on the same document, with each participant's work being seen as it happens.

In the vein of shared editing, Planet showed how Lotus Connection activity content can be visualised and edited in a calendar-based paradigm by more than one person at a time, while Workboard showed a different way to visualise team and project issues and work with them.

Visualizing text showed how the data analytics of ManyEyes -- itself first seen in the Innovation lab a couple of years back -- can be used to analyse blocks of text in various ways. The demo showed how legislative bills can be analysed to highlight pieces that are out of context, for example.

Then there was a project looking at the mail triage process that many smartphone users do already. I know I do. I'll often preview email on my Blackberry, delete some, answer quick questions and then remark unread those items that I want to handle later. The project showed a model of how that might be supported on an iPhone.

Agora came back as Agora Next, adding the ability to search and tag recorded meetings, and able to collaborate around snippets from those recordings.

Most intriguing, to me as writer and blogger, was Blog Muse. Blog Muse adds huge power to the collaborative value of Lotus Connections blogs. It offers a mechanism for blog readers to ask for subjects to be covered, and for bloggers to search for potential blog subjects from the requests made -- all to help stimulate greater engagement with the blogging process and improve in-company collaboration and expertise spreading.

Next up: Sametime, Quickr, and Symphony updates.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.