Lotusphere 2012.  I have had a week now to think about Lotusphere 2012.  I usually blog during the event, but sometimes it is better to sit back a week and collect your thoughts.

I’ll start with the Opening General Session (OGS).  The OGS sets the tone for the entire conference.  I noticed last year when the OGS was bad.  That was the talk of the conference over the next several days.  Attendees were expecting big news.  We were expecting that, “one more thing.”  We thought after the 10th panel of customers that there would be some meat for the crowd.  No such thing happened.  I also noticed that in 2011 there wasn’t a whole lot of “wow” out of the Lotus brand.

In 2012, the OGS was much better.  Customer panels or testimonials are good, but save them for 3-5 min videos in the hall or individual sessions.  One striking thing I saw, or should say did not see, was a focus on Notes/Domino.  The theme was around the Exceptional Web Experience and Social.  I also heard Sandy Carter say something I have been waiting for.  Portal is social.  It is the foundation of a social experience.  I have noted this earlier, but social software adoption drops when the tooling is in a separate environment.  If I am working in Office, or email, or my CRM application, I don’t want to go over to my Connections site to save a File, microblog, or post to an Activity.  There is a solution out there that allows you to have portlets and widgets on a single screen.  It is called WebSphere Portal.

IBM is also renaming LotusLive.  It is now IBM SmartCloud for Social Business.  This will unify the IBM cloud offering under a single pillar, whether it be collaboration, business analytics, commerce, whatever.  I noted two changes in the offering.  1) ProjExec from Trilog is now offered through the SmartCloud.  If you are looking for a social Project Management solution, take a serious look at this one.  2) IBM Docs, formerly LotusLive Symphony.  The Beta is available on Greenhouse.  I am a little stubborn, but I do not want another productivity tool on my Mac.  I have Office and iWorks.  I can now open those documents that IBMers send me on LotusLive.

The last, and I felt the most important, and most exciting announcement came with Connections Next.  I finally see Connections starting to make its move in the market.  This is following the trend of general interest among companies.  Two features in Connections Next hit home for me.  1) Accessing my mail and calendar in Connections.  Each morning, I open my Lotus Notes client, then open up my Phase 2 Connections environment.  With this, I just dropped the client.  I want to see my high priority mail I need to work on, and get an overview of my calendar.  I can do all that within my Connections environment.  2) Activity Stream.  This blew me away.  I can now work on activities within this stream.  It may be accessing a vacation request from one of our reps, approving an expense report in NetSuite, or acting on a pipeline report in our SugarCRM system…..all within Connections.

I took this final piece directly from Ed Brill’s Blog.

The opening general session can be viewed via http://ibm.co/w9vfSC (registration required).

Beyond that, there is a ton of content on LiveStream.com/ibmsoftware. The other general sessions, many strategy and focus breakouts, and a series of “conversations with Lenny Liebmann” — on camera interviews on a range of topics.

You can access the full Lotusphere video library here. My conversation with Lenny about the value of IBM’s service & support program (S&S) is included, along with the stream of my INV101 Strategy session on Messaging and Collaboration.

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