Lotusphere | HeyHeyJP's Blog

My 17th trip to Lotusphere, the annual gathering of all things Lotus. No, not the car, the software. Lotus Notes, WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Content Management.

Seems that Lotus Notes is taking a hammering again. Happens every 3 – 5 years as analysts get bored with a technology that just keeps working. XPages brought a whole new development ability to the table, but corporations always look for ‘new technology’ to swap in for old stuff. So Micro$oft has been wining and dining the decision makers while we just keep on developing. Sooner or later the decision makers start believing what Redmond says, even though quite a bit of it is complete balderdash. Doesn’t matter though, as long as MS gets it money. Who cares of the corporation has to spend millions upon millions to just get back to where they were before the tech swap.

Oh well. Such is life.

So I’m getting antsy to get down to Orlando. As much to start the geekfest of Lotusphere as to also get in some warm weather. It looks like the freeze in Florida is about over and the temps will be in the 70 to 75 degree range during the conference. This will be my first year staying at the Dolphin. I’m not sure what to expect being closer to the action, although I’ve been at the Boardwalk Villas the last 7 years, so I wasn’t THAT far away. It should be nice to just drop down for breakfast in the morning. I’ll miss the free internet though. I don’t think that the wireless will make it all the way up to a room, so I’ll have to hit one of the wi-fi spots downstairs for updating the iPod Touch apps and such. Staying at the Boardwalk Villas as a DVC member allowed me free internet access. Very nice.

So I bought a Belkin surge protector, the same one that Rockey Oliver reviewed in his blog . Allows me to forego the charger for my phone and iPod, as well as providing 3 protected outlets for laptops and battery charger. I also bought two 6-outlet powerstrips to share the all too scarce outlets in the session rooms. It’s always a hunt for the floor outlets and they now police the sessions to yank anyone’s charger out of the wall outlets.

My session planning is done (well, as much as it can be ahead of time). I can access my schedule from a mobile device, or without connectivity, I’ve downloaded and imported the .ics calendar file into my work Notes calendar. I’ll have both my personal BlackBerry and my bank BlackBerry with me. I only have data on my bank BB. And my personal BB has all my personal email access. In addition, I loaded my schedule on my iPod Touch. Of course, since it’s a personal device, there could be no synching with bank system. And since iTunes will only sync with Outlook, I had to *gasp* use Outlook to import the .ics file and then synch to the Touch. The Touch DOES present the schedule the nicest of all the devices. The only problem is I can’t change the schedule now unless I go through the whole process again, and my personal laptop has Notes 8.5.1 running on Ubuntu. So I’ll really have to use the browser in one of the devices to access the Lotusphere Online schedule if I want to have the current schedule and make changes to it real time.

So . . . power access – CHECK. Confusing scheduling options – CHECK. ScottEVest jacket to carry all this stuff – CHECK. Owner’s Locker scheduled for delivery – CHECK. Too many receptions and such to attend – YEP. I’m gonna need a vacation from this conference for sure.