Category Lotusphere Lotusphere2010 LS10
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Let's pick up where our story left off last. I had begun my Tuesday, and was looking forward to the rest of the day...

TUESDAY (AFTERNOON/EVENING)
The lab on building Symphony plugins that I attended yesterday was pretty good, and Paul Bastide and his crew have done a good job with these labs. I really like the idea of bulding plugins for Symphony products, and that surprises me. I have always done integration between Notes and productivity suites (read: Lotus SmartSuite and MS Office) with a "Notes-centric" point-of-view. However as I saw the power of plugins in Symphony, it made me realize that there may be some merit to having a productivity suite-centric viewpoint for getting work done. For instance, it may be interesting to have some type of plugin in your document editor that allows you to pull some type of information over to your document. Or, it may be interesting to have a nice spreadsheet app that allows you to find and load data from document sets in Notes that you select from a plugin. Just some food for thought. I'm going to go through the plugin lab more thoroughly when I get home, and I have time to explore, digest, and experiment this information more deeply.

Later in the afternoon I was honored to be a judge for the 2010 edition of Lotusphere Idol. We had five exceptional contestants who all had varying styles and expertise, yet they all were very competent, informative, and entertaining. The five contestants were:

• Wayne Smith with Karen Keeter - Virtual Collaboration using Sametime 3D
• Jim Casale - DAOS: What are the 'other' things to consider
• Martin Meijer - The power of XPages in the real world
• Jo Ann Card - Users: 10 things I hate about you
• Victor Toal - Lotus Connections: The Successful Journey from Pilot to Production

Ed Brill was our host (as in years' past) and once again he did an outstanding job. The other judges ( Paul Mooney , Bob Balaban , and Gabriella Davis ) and I had a tough time picking a winner because the contestants were so good, and unlike years' past there was no clearcut frontrunner. After careful deliberation we wound up choosing Martin Meijer. He did an oustanding job of delivering great content along with infusing the topic with his dry sense of humor. He kept the audience engaged, and imparted good information along the way. At one point he even faked out the crowd (and the judges) by displaying a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death for the uninitiated), and then saying "just kidding" (it was doubly funny because he was presenting on Ed's Mac ). I would strongly encourage everyone to come support Martin as he makes his full session debut on Thursday morning, 10AM, in the Dolphin Southern Hemisphere III ballroom. Good luck Martin!

I spent quite a bit of time exploring the Product Showcase yesterday as well. There are some interesting product offerings down there, and I enjoyed taking my time and getting to know some of the products better. Lance and I have also been discussing a possible product idea, so I was doing some research to see if there were already competitors in the space we're considering (luckily, there isn't ). As he and I begin fleshing the idea out, I'll let you know what we're up to.

Early in the evening I hosted SpeedGeeking, which is like speed dating, but with geeks sharing some kewl topic in five minutes. We had about 80 attendees, and after they were softened up a bit with free booze (along with the SpeedGeeks ) everyone had a great time. The SpeedGeeks themselves did an outstanding job, and I got many good reviews and praises for these guys. Overall everyone had a great time.

Later in the evening I attended the Engineering Party (i.e. the party held for the Lotus engineers; formerly known as the "Iris Party"), along with Lance Spellman (President - Workflow Studios ), Newbs, and Tom Truitt (another Workflow Studios associate). It had a Mediterranian feel, and the food was excellent. The decorations were very classy, and the company was good. However my knees started giving me trouble again, so I left early.

Later that evening Andrew Kelly and Bob Balaban stopped by Newbs and my room to sample some of Newbs' family bourbon, which is most excellent. We had fun just talking and hanging out, and once those guys left Newbs and I went straight to bed - we were both beat.

WEDNESDAY (MORNING)
This morning I got up bright and early to attend and support Bob Balaban and Paul Mooney as they delivered their session, BP201: Meet the Grumpies - Eschew Obfuscation!. The session was excellent, and the crowd had almost as much fun as Bob and Paul did. After that I started to sit in on another Symphony lab - this time on programming in Symphony using the new LotusScript API, but to be honest I just wasn't in the mood to do another two-plus-hour lab so I left early. Paul told me that I can get the slides and materials from him later, so I'll do that and dive into it at my leisure.

Well, that's it for now. I'll post more either late today or early tomorrow.

Until then...

Rock