For Lotus, a Brand New Day by David DeJean

If you're a Lotus-watcher, then you miss the Monday morning General Session—the opening program at Lotusphere—at your peril. And this year was no exception. Where else would you learn that a human being blinks an average of 350,000,000 times? Or that the new general manager of IBM Lotus Software is Ambuj Goyal? Or that the WebSphere Studio development environment is beginning to look a lot like Domino Designer?

It was a two-hour session so jam-packed that it took three hours and five minutes to get it all in. Some ace dribbling by a precision basketball drill team called Bounce opened the show and provided the thematic underpinnings for outgoing Lotus Software general manager Al Zollar's passing of the ball to incoming Ambuj Goyal. In three years, the personable Mr. Zollar has presided over the melding of Lotus and IBM at all sorts of levels, including products and cultures. He sets a high standard for Mr. Goyal. The new general manager immediately offered a personal credo: "The things I’m good at," he said, "will be things that are good for Lotus. I'm good at opening things up—I don't like to be boxed in. I'm an eternal optimist—always looking ahead."

What he's looking ahead to, he indicated, is IBM's continuing emphasis on open standards and the benefits that will have for customers. This means a continued emphasis on open standards such as J2EE, Web services, LDAP, and Linux, and product-development efforts like the next generation of Lotus collaboration products—"next gen"—that are aimed at creating standards-based applications that "future-proof" IBM customers.

Domino wasn't neglected. Goyal led a panel of major customers who talked about their successes with Domino 6, and marketing vice-president Bryan Simmons presided over the demos, which stressed new features in Notes/Domino 6, like policy-based administration, anti-spam controls, and editing attachments in place. QuickPlace's and Domino's integration with WebSphere Portal server were shown off, as well.

Jeanette Horan, vice-president for Lotus Software, traded in futures, showing off next gen mail, a standards-based mail application that runs on the next gen platform—DB2, WebSphere, and Tivoli—Lotus Learning Management System, and Rapid Application Development for J2EE.

Special guest star
No Lotusphere General Session is complete without a headliner, and this year's Mystery Celebrity Guest turned out to be Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, who thanked the Lotus community for its help during the crisis days following 9/11 and revealed that his office is a Notes shop. In between, he talked about leadership in a presentation that showed the hallmarks of the best kind of Lotusphere session—common-sense information, clearly stated, that you could take away and put to use: In other words, several cuts above the typical inspirational speaker. Here are a few nuggets from Mr. Giuliani:

"Leadership is about people—you have to say, 'I have strengths and I have weaknesses and I have to build a team.'"

"Prepare relentlessly. You can't prepare for everything, and the unexpected will come up, but you'll know the answer because it will emerge from your preparation."

"You have to have beliefs and ideas . . . . Ultimately, honestly, if you spend some time in life thinking about what you believe, if you know your core principles, if you prepare relentlessly and build a team, then when the time comes to communicate, it will be you talking and acting, communicating in words and symbols, not scripted, but real."

Lotus (re)branding
Just to prove that you can't tell the players without a program, a handout from the General Session summed up the Lotus Brand Architecture Project in an Easy Reference Guide.

This project is a follow-up to research results that concluded last year that while "Lotus," "Notes," and "Domino" were brands to reckon with, other Lotus product brands weren't as easily recognized by customers. The result is a renaming program that will stress the recognition value of the Lotus name and that will add descriptive, generic terms for particular products. IBM Lotus QuickPlace, for example, will, in the next few months, become IBM Lotus Team Workplace. A component of Sametime will become IBM Lotus Web Conferencing. LearningSpace will be phased out as a brand name, along with several other product names like iNotes and EasySync Pro and Domino.Doc. You can read the complete list and get the latest information at Simplifying Lotus Product Names.

Class is in session
Monday the labs opened and the breakout sessions started in earnest, and once again the Lotus team disproved the conventional wisdom and proved that those who can, not only do, but also teach. Personal favorite presenters and sessions included Gary Devendorf and Maureen Leland on Designer 6; Irene Greif and Dan Gruen, whose annual report from the research group always highlights the importance of studying user behavior and working at user interface (UI) design; and the Agent Queen, Julie Kadeshevich, who drew a full house to her examination of the changes to agents in Notes/Domino 6. (If you're a developer, her presentation is required reading.) The list could go on, and tomorrow, with nearly 60 more breakouts, it undoubtedly will.