2005 has been a big year for Lotus -- with 5 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth. And, as Mike Rhodin, Lotus General Manager said, "When you have double-digit growth in a market that grew single-digit, you must be taking share from someone". It's pretty obvious who he means, and he went on to say "It's flattering to have our competitors in the audience, here to listen and learn".

Rhodin reported that there are now 125 million users, up from 118 million last year. There had been 21,000 attendees at Notes/Domino 7 launch events, over 70,000 downloads of Domino 7 since release, and 3 million users have already upgraded to Notes 7 clients. He spoke of a renewed and ever more focused commitment to innovation, and with accelerated delivery.

Lotusphere is also about announcements, from Lotus and from Business Partners. Lotus had three major product announcement sets, around the Notes/Domino line, Sametime 7.5 product, and the IBM Workplace family, along with many minor ones along the way. Accelerated delivery? Well, all of these are planned for delivery within the next 12-15 months. I'm not telling you every detail here -- your eyes would glaze over reading it all, and so would mine writing it. You can get the detail from the Lotus and IBM Web sites, and from the Business Partner Web sites.

Let me talk about what I think are the more important or the most cool announcements.

The Notes and Domino family
In Q2'06, there will be a 7.0.x Linux plug-in which will require the just-released Workplace Managed Client (WMC) 2.6. Also in the second quarter of 2006 will be some workflow-level SAP integration based on the existing SAP connector, including some things as time booking entry fields in calendar entries. In 3Q'06 we will see 7.0.2, with a full function Mac Notes client for OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and full support for DWA (formerly known as iNotes) on Mac Firefox. The Mac is back in the Notes family!

Later in 2006 will be the Innovation pack with four neat features. The coolest feature of which will be "Wander" -- the ability to put a full-function Notes client, with your personalisation of desktop, bookmarks, Notes ID and local databases onto a USB stick -- you'll need a big stick. You'll be able to take it to any machine, with or without Notes installed, and run your own Notes client. Now how cool does that sound?