This Week: Lotusphere

Greetings from Lotusphere 2007. I arrived Sunday night after a plane ride made longer by poor weather. This week I will be attending sessions, meeting with IBM'ers as well as vendor partners and assessing the announcements made this week. My focus on the conference will be concentrated on real-time collaboration, unified communications, and social software (e.g., blogs, tagging, social bookmarks, XML syndication and social networking).

I may post on topics during sessions but more likely I will try to write posts that reflect some analysis of what I'm seeing and/or hearing. There are enough press releases and live blogging going on that you will have plenty of options for general news.

First impressions: Overall, good crowd, excited about the commitment IBM continues to make with its Lotus brand, event itself is well-run and the press conferencing this morning was well attended (seemingly more crowded than the past few years). The big news from my perspective was IBM better defining its vision for unified communications and the announcement of Lotus Connect - a new social software platform targeting enterprises. I'll comment specifically on these announcements later.

Gaps: Nothing mentioned on unified messaging and speech regarding unified communications, some overlap that was not well-explained between Quickr and Connections.

Guest speaker: Neil Armstrong. Very nice.