Lotus Leadership Alliance 2008

I'm here, and as Karoona already mentioned my Starwood hotel membership thing paid off with a nice room overlooking the ocean. A bit wierd looking down at passing helictopers though!

I've just finished the sessions of the first day, which have been about the Lotus strategy in 5 areas :

• Notes & Domino Roadmap
• Ultimate Web Experience
  
• Unified Communication & Collaboration
  
• Social Software
• Online Collaboration

I won't go into the specific details of each session, but the key message I took away was one of strong product interoperability and stability.

In other news, there were some nice tasters on mobile device integration across Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices - it looks like we will finally be able to retire OneBridge!

There is an interesting product called Foundations Start which is an appliance type model for small businesses or branch offices. In theory it covers both Messaging & Collaboration as well as Client Architecture. Possibly a solution for "Office on a Box"

Lots more to say but I will save it for the detailed sessions over the next two days.

The last session of the day was a surprise guest speaker, which turned about to be Chris Gardner who wrote the autobiography "The pursuit of happyness" which you may have read/seen. He is a hugely motivating speaker, although I did notice that some of the audience were reduced to tears ;-) If you get the chance to hear him tell his story then I'd encourage you to take the opportunity!