With the launch of the iPad yesterday I've read a little bit on it, not a whole lot as it really doesn't interest me that much. However, at my previous employer I did a lot of work on disaster response applications. These applications were designed to run locally out in the field and when an internet connection was available (usually via a tether to their blackberry if signal was available) to then replicate to the company servers. While in the field the techs used a tablet PC running Windows with Lotus Notes to enter their data. We tried using a laptop but it just didn't meet the requirements as they were difficult to tote around and use without dropping. The tablets fit the bill perfectly.

Enter the iPad. From my understanding, which may be wrong, this is just an overgrown iPod Touch running the same OS as the iPod touch, in other words, locked down tight by Apple. I guess it could still fit the bill with a custom app but I assume (and it's a pretty big assumption) you would need to be connected to the internet in some form or fashion in order to use this application as I'm not sure if these apps are able to run locally and then replicate their data. This provides a road block to using this thing, at least from a disaster response point of view, for any business type roles. Also, how many IT shops are willing to leave their security up to Apple, as I assume there won't be much you can do about customizing it's functionality/security settings. So for business I would say the iPad just won't fit the bill, and from my experience a business use of some type is the only thing a tablet is good for.

Now, for home use.... I can see a fairly good argument for purchasing an iPad. It's bigger than an iPod and smaller than a laptop and the iPod apps are mostly geared for an individual, but you still have to go through the iTunes store to install them. Also the price is good which is another plus for personal use but I still just see it as a toy more or less. Also, being bigger it'll probably be easier to see the text on the thing, especially easier to see and read than the iPod.

Me personally, I really don't see a purpose for me purchasing an iPad as it just doesn't seem to fill a void that my other gadgets of some sort don't fill. Maybe I'm missing something but that's the way I see it...

OK I'm currently sitting in the Orlando International airport waiting on my flight back home. But while riding the bus to the airport I was thinking about Disney. They really got it together on several fronts.

• Moving people from point A to point B. Once you're in the Disney system, they'll get you where you need/want to go in a fairly reasonable amount of time and with good service too
• Making Money. While watching the video on the bus Disney now has a Cruise Line, Adventure Vacations, Disney Land, Disney World, Disney Japan, etc, etc, etc. They do a very good job of marketing their vacations and services
• Feeding lots of people. While at LotusPhere at the Dolphin Pacific Hall, they would feed some 7,000 people in less than 2 hours. That's a rather large feat no matter who you are.
• Building a resort. I don't know how true it is, but I heard that Disney World was 47 square miles. Several resorts, heck we stopped at 4 on the way to the air port, and however many theme parks. All this draws an enormous amount of people, services and businesses to the area. Plus it's simply amazing.
• Entertaining people. No matter your age you can find something to entertain you while at Disney World.

These were just a few of the observations I made while at LotusPhere this year and also that people are crazy (pick one hair color folks and stick with it). So, with the laptop battery starting to complain I guess I'm done. Hope everyone had fun at LotusPhere and have gotten ammo for selling Lotus Notes within your organization and to your bosses who may/may not be looking at some other product.

Yesterday was a pretty full day and attended some good sessions. Of particular note was my visit with Martin Donnelly about a calendar view for XPages. He was battling with a nightly build of Lotus Domino Designer so he was to say the least experiencing some issues, coupled with a software update being pushed to his computer, the experience left me a little wanting to say the least. As I told Martin there are 7000 people at LotusPhere and only a handful of IBM developers and everyone wants time with them, so I understood his predicament.

I also met Declan Lynch down in the product showcase and we spoke about BlogSphere a little bit. He welcomed me to put the changes I made to BlogSphere on my blog, so expect to see the changes, typo corrections and bug fixes I've made to BlogSphere here in the coming weeks.

As for sessions, Declan's "Make your XPages POP with CSS and Themes" was an excellent session in which a lot of information was put out which really showed off the power of themes. The "Project Management: Jedi Mind Tricks" session was also good with a lot of information on tracking the status of your project and more of asking the right questions and discovering what your customer "really" wants.

Today the session load is quite light. I've got the "Import! Export! Write a Report!! Access Lotus Notes Data in ways of all sorts!" session here at 10:00 which should be good and then GuruPalooza and another meeting with Martin whose machine is hopefully all sorted out now

Unfortunately I will not be staying for the Closing General Session as I must leave to catch my bus to the airport at 2:30, but LotusPhere 2010 has been excellent. I enjoyed meeting all the bloggers, attendees and 99% of the sessions. Hopefully I can make it back in the next couple of years. But going by my track record it'll be longer. So, for those of you who can stay, I hear the Closing General Session is always really good and recommended to attend and an excellent wrap up to LotusPhere.

OK, so I started the day off meeting "The Grumpies" which consist of Bob Balaban and Paul Mooney. It was a very entertaining session and they gave good advice on when to say no or direct your customer in another direction or to just ask the all important question of why. I don't think we ask this question enough as developers and just go about doing whatever the customer asked us to do. But we need to learn to say no sometimes and ask more questions.

Later today I will be on the quest of determining if you can display a calendar view on an XPage. I saw a couple of posts over on Declan Lynch 's site and I've been attempting to work with that in the little bit of time between sessions. I will be speaking with Martin Donnelly of IBM later today to try and come up with a solution to that. This whole quest is to hopefully find a more dynamic solution for my customer who has an application that is all hard coded with about 40 or 50 navigators and a view to go with each navigator. Hopefully I can find some kind of solution.

I'm now in the XPages just keep getting better session waiting on it to start. Later today I'll be at Declan's session on making your XPages pop by using CSS and then later tonight we've got the party at Hollywood Studios. I'm still undecided on if I'll be attending, but I'll probably go. Hope to see you then.

Well day 2 of LotusPhere 2010 is in full swing. Today's sessions have been excellent. "The Great Code Giveaway" showed some awesome techniques for extending a lotus notes application to any type of platform whether lotus notes is present or not, which some of it I would have never thought of, especially the sametime bot, very cool.

The session on migrating your existing apps to XPages was also very cool. Since that session I have come upon a question of: Is it possible to replicate the functionality of a Lotus Notes Calendar view? I've done a quick web search but have only come across a demo by Declan Lynch on creating a calendar with XPages. If this functionality isn't there yet I see that as a BIG hole left out by the IBM Lotus Notes/Xpages development team, hopefully this hasn't been left out.

I'm currently waiting on the start of "XPages in the IBM Lotus Notes Client - A Deep Dive". I do plan on asking the calendar question if it is not covered in the session.

Later today we've got the "I'm a Programmer Not a Firefighter!" session by Bruce Elgort which should be another good session and then after that Speed Geeking. So while the day is mostly done still some Lotus goodness to come.

OK, well all my sessions are done for today. I attended the Worst Practices session by Paul Mooney and Bill Buchan and as usual they were very entertaining and informative. This is a must see anytime they do this. I also attended the Filthy Rich User Interfaces session which was a little misleading. It was about extending the Lotus Notes client with widgets, plug-ins, etc. While they did put out some good information it was a little dry.

I've spent the rest of the day speaking with IBM employees about various issues I've encountered and how to go about tackling a monster application full of hard coding. So, not really much to report.

I would like to comment on the OGS though, it was pretty good. William Shatner was the guest speaker as I'm sure you've heard already. He was a very entertaining speaker and spoke a lot on the collaboration that happens during the process of making a movie and he kept it very light and enthusiastic. I really didn't care a whole lot about the customer testimonials which seemed to take up the most time of the OGS. The demos were pretty good and showed the power of Quickr, Connections, Sametime all within the context of Lotus Notes. A few product releases were announced for Quickr and Connections.

So, even though my LotusPhere day is pretty much done, I will be spending some time down in the product show case and trying to go ahead and at least start putting the ideas I've garnered so far somewhere, so that hopefully when I get back to them later this year I'll retain some of the knowledge.

Tomorrow should be a pretty full day. A lot of good sessions in the works and I believe we've also got Speed Geeking which is always a fun time. So, hope to see you tomorrow and I'll try to blog more about the sessions I attend.

I just arrived at the LotusPhere 2010 General Session. I was able to get a decent seat right off the bat which is surprising seeing as how I overslept this morning. But if you're following along I'll keep refreshing this post as things are added. I'll fix the formatting later...

Got slides scrolling by... lotusknows.com had 19,000 visits on it's first day
3.5 millino seats added to Lotus Quickr
10 million seats added to Lotus Symphony
12,000 new customers for Lotus Notes and Domino since the 8.0 release
1/3 of all new sametime installations are microsoft exchange customers

Lights dimming, and some violinist and drummer on the stage
More drummers came out
The music is very powerful and they're putting on a good show

Bob P. is coming on the stage
Rembering Dr. King and IBM is working with the red cross to help Haiti, visit booth 900
Who might the special guest be? Drama comedy, sustaining success... William Shatner!
Corny joke...
Priceline.com joke...
Making movies is a collaborative effort
Handling the collaboration is the most difficult part of making a movie
collaboration is what makes a movie happen
Getting answers to problems is best done by surrounding yourself with 1000s of people in which to collaborate
collaboration brings very creative solutions and thus success
Lotus knows how to achieve that kind of collaboration
Willaim Shatner leaves the stage

Bob P is back
speaking of Transformative opportunity
While other companies are ramping down IBM is investing is research, people and technology
Business partners grew by 20% in 2009
Partners help drive innovation
Look for cloud based solutions in the Product Showcase from business partners
Thanks crowd for pushing him
IBM has ramped up marketing efforts
Lotus Knows campaign reflects IBMs attitude and progress
18,378 new customers since Launch of Notes 8
House of cards with various competitor faces on them
Next version of Symphony in 2nd quarter, download beta next month
Speaking of leveraging the cloud
speaking of hybrid environments which is melding your interal data with people and data in the cloud for collaborative advantage
Improve human capability and productivity
The lotus community is about to tstep up and help Lotus leave their customers in the dust
Progress and change are constant Bob is moving to top of Lotus Sales
Bob spent 20 years as a developer and knows good software when he sees it

The new general manager of Lotus Software is Alastair Rennie (sp?)
Alastair introduces a Customer testimonial from David Yach CTO RIM
RIM implemented Lotus Connections
Missed the deal between RIM and IBM, but has something to do with distributing solutions via Lotus Software
Lotus To-Go?
Visit RIM at booth 511

Silvia Steinman of Zurich Insurance Company
Had to decide to keep Lotus Notes or implement Microsoft Exchange
Moving from Lotus Notes 6.5 to 8.5.1
Best tool as a protal to blogs, wikis, etc
It's a single access point for Quickr, connections and email, lotus is the best point of entry for all these technologies
Lotus needs to stay aggressive
People are the focal point for changing technology
The collaboration agenda is vital
Happy Birthday Silvia!

Video from Panasonic speaking of the Panasonic and Lotus Live deal

Dr. Oliver Frohlich of Continental

Kirk Gutmann from General Motors
Drove a car out! Couldn't see what kind of car
On start mobile app released

Demo time... Kevin Cavanaugh and Jeff Schtick
Lotus Quckr, Web, File Systems and connectors within notes and other tools
In Q2 Lotus Quckr next version
Close alignment with Domino 8.5.1 and Folder level access control, improved document versioning
access quickr services within XPages applications
IBM Multimedia Library announced(?)
All available from Lotus Notes, Quickr and Connections
Can keep email text with the Quickr attachment in the Quickr repository
Can now integrate team calendar with your personal calendar

Common shared services between Quickr and Connections
Enable seamless access to content of all types, CMIS
CMIS service layer in Lotus Quickr
Allows sharing of documents between many different systems
Announcing Lotus Notes Traveler for Android
Will include mail and calendar client for android devices
A new encryption plug in for iPhone for encrypted email on the iPhone

Customers Exhanged thier mail client from Outlook
New partner agreement Gist. Speaking about the Status updater from OpenNTF allows you to update your micro-blogging in connections, twitter and sametime status
Lotus Connections leading platform for enterprise ready social programs
Social Everywhere
2nd half of this year a new version of Connections
Demo from Suzanne
A Mobile browser interface
Connections profile enhanced to include recommendations. It's based on things you comment on, tag, connect to, etc

Sorry folks gonna have to sign off as battery power is getting low (I know, old laptop), I hope you enjoyed the live blogging. I should be able to post some more later today

Today was a great day. I learned a lot in all the sessions I attended and they were all very informative. I'm looking forward to tomorrow, my feet already hurt, but it's all worth it.

At the Reception party I met a few other bloggers. Bruce Elgort spotted me and said hello, I also got to meet Kevin Petit for the first time really and also met Richard Schwartz. I saw Jess Stratton but didn't get a chance to meet her, she was hanging out with Julian Robicheaux among others. I ate entirely too much, kept following the prime rib slabs of meat around and getting more

In the morning we start off with the OGS, so I hope to see you there.

The JMP 105: XML and Web Service Jumpstart session was very good. Paul Calhoun put out a lot of information on XML and Web Services. The tympo was very fast paced as he covered what was normally a 2 session agenda. But he certainly inspired me to delve a little deeper in to XML and Web Services. He also cleared up a lot of my misconceptions of XML and Web Services. I'm looking forward to messing with both topics in the very near future.

I'm now awaiting the start of Show112: How to build an XPages Application from Start to Finish. Got good music playing and some entertaining slides going by on the screens. This is another session I've been looking forward to. ideajam.net is also being displayed prominently on one of the slides, which is cool.

After this I'll be heading over to Swan 5-6 for the Javascript, JSON and AJAX session. Hope to see you there!

I arrived at LotusPhere 2010 last night! I wasn't able to make it to the B.A.L.D party unfortunately, but I was there in mind. After finally arriving at my hotel, there seemed to be a mis-communication on the status of the bill, but it was all resolved and as always the Disney crew were very helpful and courteous. So, after checking into LotusPhere I headed back to the hotel to eat and get some rest before the long week ahead.

I started this morning off by attending the JMP 101: Lotus Domino Designer 101 jumpstart session. It was a very informative session and the presenters covered a wide array of features in the new Domino Designer client. Including quite a few I wasn't familiar with yet. If you get a chance to get to the repeat of that session I would certainly e advise it.

I'm now sitting in the Dolphin S. Hemisphere III ball room awaiting the start of JMP 105: XML and Web Services Jumpstart. Seems here lately I'm looking for more web services to consume to fit some bill at work. Whenever I've needed this type of functionality I usually kludge along and get it to kind-of work, but not completely. So I'm looking forward to the session.

My next session will be SHOW 112: How to Build an XPages Application from Start to Finish (R1) in the Swan Osprey. Another session I'm looking forward to. You should be able to find me, probably with Laptop in lap wearing my LotusPhere 2006 "Listen Up, Taking Notes Podcast" shirt. Hope to see you there!

OK, I just participated in my first multi-person edit of a Google Wave and I must say that is cool. My Team Lead asked me to provide my comments on an email from our customer and send it to her so she could add her comments. So, I started a new wave, pasted the original email in and invited her to the wave. We were both able to edit the email at the same time, format the text and then copy/paste it into a Lotus Notes email. It kept all the text formatting with no problems. We figured it would loose the formatting in the copy/paste exercise. It would be nice if an email option was available to email part or all of a wave. But, that's something a gadget may be able to add in the future or it may be added natively, who knows at this point.

For the most part editing of the wave went pretty quickly and without too much trouble. We did encounter a couple of errors while we were both editing at the same time. An error was produced at the top of the page with a field to enter what you were doing when the error occurred. Click submit to send the error on to Google (I assume) and a refresh button is provided. Click refresh and nothing was lost, the wave still had the edits we both had done up to the error, which to me was pretty impressive error handling.

While for one man shops and very small companies I really don't see that big of a use for Google Wave, but for corporations or large teams who collaborate on documents, brain storms, code and emails this is an awesome tool. It just needs to come out of preview mode.

I will be attending LotusPhere 2010 this year

While preparing for LotusPhere I have found some pretty cool stuff, so I thought I would document it here...

• Volker Weber has made available a DropBox folder that contains all the LotusPhere presentations. Way cool.
• Somehow while poking around I ended up coming back to Google Wave which I never really delved into very deep. That is a truly cool application that I'm sure will be useful once it's out of preview
• LotusPhere Online is using Connections now. It also supports exporting your calendar out in iCal format so that you can import it into some other calendering tool. More on that in a moment...
• IQJam on Android and the iPhone will be demoed at LotusPhere
• Setting up a portable Domino Server for use only at LotusPhere while disconnected from the internet. Useful, but a pain and probably un-needed, but we'll see
• An iPhone/Mobile/Android app to assist you with planning your LotusPhere 2010 sessions from Mikkel Heisterberg can be found here
• Check out Mary Beth Raven, she has a lot going on, check out all her posts
• The LotusPhere 2010 Sessions Database is now available here
• Trying to predict anything I may need from the house in case a work issue comes up, another pain but hopefully means I'm prepared in case anything comes up
• Plus a lot of other stuff floating all around the Yellowverse

Now, onto Google Calendar. I'm using my personal Android phone while at LotusPhere and wanted to have my LotusPhere calendar available via the Google Calendar. I created a new calendar and imported all my sessions and the overall LotusPhere schedule into the new calendar, however it seemed to mess up the times that these events take place. It was rather anoying. Especially when I shared the calendar with my co-workers and boss.

On Google Wave, I was thinking this would be a good Live Blogging tool, however since you must have a Wave preview account with Google, not such a good tool for this instance, for now

I intend on making it to the B.A.L.D event this year. In years past when I've attended LotusPhere I didn't get there in time. This year hopefully I'll get there around 4:30 or 5:00. I look forward to seeing everyone. Hope to see you at LotusPhere!

From consumerist.com comes this article which goes into a full review of the changes and value of purchasing the Geek Squad PC Optimization package when you purchase a new computer at Best Buy. The article describes the steps taken and the results compared to buying an un-optimized computer.

It's kind-of a long read, but the detail it provides is rather eye opening.

I came across Last.fm last week or so. It allows you to play music for free. There are apps for iPhone and Android so you can listen via those devices also. But you define your favorite artists across different genres and Last.fm will provide recommendations of music you might like. For example, if you make one of your preferred artists say Trace Adkins, there is a link called "Listen to Trace Adkins Radio" and that will play music from Trace Adkins and also other artists like Trace Adkins. It's very cool and allows you to find music you otherwise wasn't aware of. As tracks are played you have the option of purchasing the track, tagging it, sharing it or send a ringtone to your cell phone. As you listen to different tracks they are added to your Library which you can then listen to.

There are way too many features of Last.fm to describe here plus I don't know what a lot of the features are for, but the whole premise is that as you listen to music, comment, tag, mark and search tracks everything is kept track of and the options seem to grow over time and use. The best part about all of this is the price, it's free! So, if you like to listen to music and don't feel like using iTunes or some other tool running locally on your PC or you're just tired of your music collection then Last.fm is probably for you.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

- George Bernard Shaw