Episode 37, recorded Wednesday 2nd February 2011, live at Lotusphere 2011.  Darren and Start are joined by Mary Beth Raven, Kat Mandelstein, Paul Mooney, Bruce Elgort, Mitch Cohen and an audience of Lotusphere attendees for a discussion of topics surrounding the event…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Mary Beth Raven Ph.D (blog | twitter) is IBM Senior Technical Staff Member in the Lotus User Experience Design team

Paul Mooney (blog | twitter | company) is Senior Technical Architect from Bluewave Technology with 15 years experience supporting Lotus messaging products?

Kathy Mandelstein (twitter) is currently oversees worldwide marketing programs, web and events in IBM Software Group for the Lotus portfolio of collaboration tools designed to empower people to be more effective, responsive and innovative within the context of the work they do. It includes email, calendar, instant messaging, electronic forms, web conferencing, portals, team spaces, business dashboards, document management, and enterprise social software. Previously Kathy led the IBM Rational marketing team focused on the business value of effective software delivery.

Bruce Elgort (blog | twitter | company) is the president of Elguji Software, the creators of the hugely popular IdeaJam collaboration site for the Lotus Community. His other megahits include co-founding the Lotus Notes open source community OpenNTF.org and hosting the Taking Notes Podcast with the famed Julian Robichaux.

Mat Newman (blog | twitter | company) is a consultant for ISW (a business partner in Australia), Lotusphere speaker and owner of the coolest yellow suit around!

Topics

Lotusphere 2011 – what else?

A special ‘thank you’ to all those that helped organise this, ran the PA and got us the recording.  Thanks too to all the folks that attended and made it such a fun event!  All being well, we’ll be back live at Lotusphere 2012!

Episode 36, recorded Thursday 28th January 2011, discussing why Notes is definitely not dead, IBM’s exceptional web experience, LotusLive’s pre-Lotusphere announcements, working at IBM, Lotus advertising, Domino on SSDs and even a few mentions of Lotusphere 2011!

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Topics

Notes is definitely not dead!

Jon Rolling – Lotus – Not dead yet!

Karl-Henry Martinsson – Lotus Notes – Not dead here either!

Chris Connor – Notes Dead? Not here either…

Brian Benz’s Deloitte XPages application series

What do these kind of posts mean? Can we extrapolate?

Ah, but what about Jake Howlett – Am I Still A Domino Developer?

Does IBM Practice what it preaches?

Ben Poole’s retort

Lotuslive announcements

New website

New partners – Ariba & SugarCRM

New customer references

Working at IBM

Susan Bulloch – Living the Dream

Mac Guidera – I’m an IBMer

Will we ever see another ad campaign like this?

Lots of discussion about advertising vs. marketing

Product vs. Brand etc

Is it time for a new Lotus Notes/Domino ad campaign?

James Governor: Lotus Gears Up To Embrace The Web, Rebuild its Developer Story, pwn Social Business

Is James right?  Is the appdev story the key to IBM success with ‘platforms’like Connections, LotusLive and Quickr?

Domino on SSDs – Erik Brooks marvels at speed of Domino solid state disk

NSF versus transaction logging

Notes client on SSD

SametimeGuide.com launched by Chris Miller. Sametime admin tutorial videos

$199 – special promo offer of $49.99

Connections Files plug-in for Notes released

IBM Social Business Jam, Feb 8-11

Lotusphere 2011

Episode 35, recorded Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st January 2011, discussing Sandy’s new Sales and Evangelism VP roles, plans for 2011, her involvement in Lotusphere and more.  We then move onto a discussion about IBM’s 4Q10 figures, Lotusphere events, the return of the XCast and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Sandy Carter (blog | twitter) is Vice President, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Sales and Evangelism, where she is responsible for setting the direction for IBM’s Social Business initiative, working with companies who are becoming Social Businesses, and being the evangelist for the concept and best practices around Social Business.

Kathy Mandelstein (twitter) is currently oversees worldwide marketing programs, web and events in IBM Software Group for the Lotus portfolio of collaboration tools designed to empower people to be more effective, responsive and innovative within the context of the work they do. It includes email, calendar, instant messaging, electronic forms, web conferencing, portals, team spaces, business dashboards, document management, and enterprise social software. Previously Kathy led the IBM Rational marketing team focused on the business value of effective software delivery.

Paul Withers (blog | twitter | company) leads the Domino Development Team at Intec Systems Ltd, an IBM Business Partner in UK. Co-presenting session at Lotusphere XPages: Enter The Dojo, Tuesday 3:30pm.

Topics

A two-part episode, first a 20-minute interview with Sandy Carter.  We covered:

New role at IBM – VP IBM Social Business and Social Solutions Sales and Evangelism

‘IBM Social Business and Social Solutions’?  Can you describe what this includes?   

Sales and Evangelism?  Wow thats a tough combination…

Unusual to see a VP focused on Evangelism?  Will you continue to blog and tweet in the new role?

Lotus has seen a good long run of quarterly growth, then a few quarters that have been tough in a generally low market.  How do you see 2011 going? (will not ask you directly about Q4 figures, if you want to mention them then great…)

Will we see the yellow boxing gloves return? 😉 (i.e. will you look to take the fight to the competition)

Previously (before your role with partners) you were VP  Websphere.  What differences have you found coming across to Lotus?

Have you been surprised by the ‘community’aspect of Lotus, or are there similar communities around the other IBM brands?

Lotusphere 2011

What are your expectations for Lotusphere 2011?

Are you speaking at the OGS or other sessions?

Looking forward, If you had a message for the Lotus community as we get into 2011, what would it be?

We then spoke to Kathy and Paul, covering:

IBM/Lotus Q4 results

IBM up 16%, WebSphere up 32%, Lotus down 3%

Lotusphere 2011

Lotusphere 2011 Online now online

Combination of Connections, XPages (using Extension Library?)

XPages Mobile controls look great!

Gowalla checkin

Episode 34, recorded Thursday 13th January 2011, discussing preparations for Lotusphere 2011, Lotusphere IDOL, Gurupalooza, the Blogger Open, being a booth babe and tips for first-timers…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Susan Bulloch (blog | twitter) Susan Bulloch has worked for IBM Lotus Software since 2000 in software support and development positions. Susan currently works as a Support Engineer on the Lotus Products SWAT Team, supporting the entire Lotus product line, specializing in Lotus Notes and Domino.  One of her specialities is Calendar & Scheduling. She has worked with Lotus Notes and Domino since 1992 as an administrator, instructor, developer, and architect in banking and utility industries. Susan has a Bachelors degree in engineering and a Master’s degree in Information Technology.  She holds certifications in all current Lotus Notes product releases, and is actively involved in quality testing Beta versions of new IBM products. Susan is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, including Lotusphere, the View Admin conferences and at regional user group conferences worldwide. This year, she’s Track Manager for the Best Practices track at Lotusphere, Host of Gurupalooza, a Judge at IDOL and one of the many Nerd Girls working to produce some interesting activities.

Roy Rumaner (blog | twitter | company ) Roy has been a Lotus Notes Developer since 1994. In that time he has consulted for many of the Fortune 50  companies in and around the Chicago area and across the country. He has been a speaker at Lotus conferences, was the co-author of two Lotus Notes books, is a regular presenter at GRANITE (the Chicago Lotus User Group) and most recently at MWLUG. Roy is the IT Director for The Essential Business Software Group. Roy is also the Director of IT & Training (US) for MyDealerSoft – a fully web enabled Auto Dealer Software suite that covers all business needs, inbound and outbound for Dealerships.

Mikkel Heisterberg (blog | twitter | company) Been working with Notes/Domino, Sametime and Java for the last 17 years and have a strong foundation in the Lotus portfolio. I have written five articles for THE VIEW, spoken at several conferences (Lotusphere, ILUG, DNUG) and I’m a Design Partner for Domino NEXT and Lotus Connections. I am a frequent blogger (http://lekkimworld.com) and I am the author of the open source documentation framework LotusScript.doc and the TwitNotes sidebar plugin for Notes 8.x. I am a partner at IntraVision, a Premier IBM Business Partner from Denmark. IntraVision is the creator of the OnTime suite of products (http://www.ontimesuite.com).

Mike McGarel (blog | twitter | company) Mike has been a Notes/Web developer for over 12 years. He currently works for Czarnowski, a North American exhibit services company, responsible for both intranet and customer extranet applications. He has concentrated on XPages development since last year’s Lotusphere. Mike co-presented (with Roy,

Episode 33, recorded Thursday 6th January 2011, discussing the Lotusphere 2011 Business Development Day, events for partners and get an exclusive on the location of the Lotusphere party!

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Colleen Hayes (email) is program director, Marketing Strategy and Channels for IBM Collaboration Software and is leading the business partner development day for Lotusphere 2011.  Colleen joined IBM in 1994 where she has marketing, sales and strategy positions at regional, national and global levels.  Prior to joining IBM, Colleen spent three years at Mall of America as director of Tourism Marketing and Group Sales, and three years at the St. Paul Convention and Visitor’s Bureau  where she held positions sales and marketing.   Colleen has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and holds a Bachelors degree in Communications.

Jan Zeuthen (company | twitter) is the CEO and co-founder for Business partner Opus Neo. Opus Neo was founded almost 10 years ago and during that time Jan has been doing development, project management, marketing, sales, administration and got coffee for the developers. Jan is also the idea man behind Neo.Dashboard for Quickr.

Topics

Lotusphere 2011 

* Now just 23 days away!

* Lots of buzz around the conference

* Tweets with #ls11

* Blog posts re: Lotusphere

Sessions finalised, and applications available 

* Ben’s Notes database

* Turtle Partnership apps for iPhone and Blackberry

* Mikkel’s OnTime web app

Business Development Day 

* What is Business Partner Development Day?

* What is the agenda for the day?

* Why should partners attend Business Development Day?

* Are there any limits on what you can reveal on Sunday?

* There are certification labs at Lotusphere, right?  Would you encourage partners to take exams whilst onsite?

Why would partners attend Lotusphere as a whole?

* Are there any special deals for partners that haven’t yet registered?

For the partners

* What have we gained by being at Lotuspheres past?

* What are you plans for LS11?

* Do you genuinely do business at Lotusphere?

Other news

* App Store rears its head again – Paul Mooney posts on why the Notes App Store hasn’t taken off

* Sametime Gateway Yahoo Support Extended for Existing Customers

* Caleb Barlow announced as new leader for UCC – new IBM structure in that Directors (Ed, Caleb etc) report to Jeff Schick as VP

* Al Zollar retiring – what did he do for Lotus when he was GM?

Tips

Darren

Episode 32, recorded Thursday 23rd December 2010, discussing the first 7 months of This Week in Lotus, our review of 2010, and our wishes for 2011…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Lisa Duke (twitter | company) is Business Development Manager for Simplified Technology Solutions, Inc. (also known as STS), an IBM Lotus business partner specializing in collaboration, mobility, and virtualization.  STS also resells IBM System X hardware and related storage.

Topics

This Week in Lotus 

* What have we learnt?

* What can we do better?

* Plans for Lotusphere 2011

Review of the year 

* Bob Picciano moving on, Alistair takes over.  Mike Rhodin now owns Lotus at higher level

* Lotusphere 2010

* William Shatner – best guest ever?

* Lotuslive win at Panasonic

* Project Vulcan launched

* Lotus Traveler on Android plans announced.  Just delivered on December 14.

* Lotus knows a big part of the conference, including Steve Porter remix

* New releases:

* ND 8.5.2 released (August 24)

* Quickr 8.5 arrives (September 13)

* Launch of LotusLive Notes (October 5)

* Launch of Symphony 3 (October 21)

* Lotus Connections 3 launched (November 24)

* Old friends leave us:

* Domino/Notes 6.5 drops off support (April 30)

* Community events go from strength to strength:

* BLUG (March)

* IamLug (early August)

* NLLUG (September)

* TriStateLug (October)

* ILUG (November)

* many events from STS through the Southeast US

* LCTY again a success

* A year for mobile devices:

* Apple iPad launched in US (April 3)

* Android now biggest selling platform (in US at least)

* A strong year for social media

* This Week in Lotus launches (May 25)

* Taking Notes and iDoNotes going strong

* VideoFest a success

* Lotus fan sites taking off:

* ILoveLotusNotes.net launched (September)

* NotesisCool launched by Darren Adams (November 2)

Episode 31, recorded Thursday 16th December 2010, discussing use of Collaboration software within Academia, the issues facing Higher Education, what IBM do well and/or could do better, academic initiatives at Lotusphere and much more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

John Gallagher is the Application Architect for City University London  which involves defining the interaction between applications, data repositories and our middleware..  Prior to City, John has worked for a number of consultancies on the use of J2EE application server technology, middleware and service orientated architecture. This has typically included the initial definition of the architecture, helping to setup a development capacity and the supporting the teams through the initial projects

Andrew Frayling (twitter) is currently self-employed working mainly with Atlassian technologies.  Prior to being self-employed Andrew worked as Web Services Development Manager for Cardiff University and managed the teams implementing WebSphere Portal, Lotus Connections, Lotus Forms, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Business Monitor and the Atlassian software stack (Confluence, JIRA, Fisheye and Bamboo).

Topics

Collaboration Tools in Academia 

* What are the pressures on higher and further education right now? (4:40)

* Are those pressures affecting the types of projects that you are running? (7:18)

* Students are very used to social tools – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.  Does that create demand on Institutional IT to integrate those services? (12:21)

* Andrew mentioned Cardiff University’s Joe Nicholls’presentation on ‘core and chore’

* We hear that Email is Dead amongst teens – is that born out by your experience? (25:48)

* Do you discussion your projects/technology decisions with other universities?  Is it a competitive environment? (31:40)

* With relation to IBM/Lotus…

* Do you have any idea of how IBM is seen by students or staff at Universities? How they would view IBM versus Microsoft and Google for instance? (34:43)

* What could IBM do to market better to this sector? (42:18)

* IBM Academic Initiative

* Is price a major influence on your technology decisions? (47:23)

* Lotusphere 2011 is coming up soon… Are you attending? (49:59)

* Send Sharon campaign!

* Do other vendors (such as Atlassian) have the same kind of community as Lotus does?

* Is there anything that IBM could do at the event (or at LCTYs) to get universities involved? (52:48)

Other news 

* Lotus Traveler for Android released (59:29)

* Lotus Quickr for Domino 8.5.1 due to be release (1:00:28)

* Lotus Domino 8.5.2 FP1 due “this week”(1:01:03)

* First LTIE Community “ListenCast” took place this week (1:01:09)

Tips (1:03:14)

Darren

If you’re looking to build a fast, fast, fast Intel Domino server (or any other server for that matter) take a look at the

Episode 30, recorded Thursday 10th December 2010, discussing Lotusphere 2011…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Kathy Mandelstein (twitter) is currently oversees worldwide marketing programs, web and events in IBM Software Group for the Lotus portfolio of collaboration tools designed to empower people to be more effective, responsive and innovative within the context of the work they do. It includes email, calendar, instant messaging, electronic forms, web conferencing, portals, team spaces, business dashboards, document management, and enterprise social software. Previously Kathy led the IBM Rational marketing team focused on the business value of effective software delivery.

Tom Duff (twitter | blog) is Lead Developer for an insurance company in Portland, Oregon.  My speciality is Notes/Domino development, but I’m always pushing to learn more stuff all the time.  In this field, standing still means falling behind.

Topics

Lotusphere 2011 

* Just 50 days away!

* What sessions did we get?

* What are the tracks?

* Ben Langinrich’s Sessions DB also now available

* When will you fly in? What can we do on Saturday?

* Lotusphere 2011 Social Media Aggregator (http://www.ibm.com/social/lotusphere)

* What video will be streamed?

* What’s it all about?

* How does one get involved?

* Three keynote sessions (OGS plus Day 2 and Day 3 General Sessions)

* What are the changes to tracks this year?

* Social Business Symposium (Mon and Tues, sponsored by Wired)

* Track Five: Customer Case Studies

* Will there be a blogger program?

* How does the planning work?

* BOFs

* Attendee’s get to vote on BOFs

* Shameless plug for the “Meet the podcasters BoF”

Episode 29, recorded Thursday 2nd December 2010, discussing Enterprise 2.0, collaboration styles, evangelism, Twitter’s effect on community behaviour and more…

Please note: we have started to put times in the show notes for when we start to discuss each topic, in order to make it easier to fast-forward through the show to the topics that are of particular interest.  If you would like us to produce an enhanced podcast (AAC format) version of the show with multiple chapters to cover the individual chapters, please do let us know.

Also, we have made the decision to move to recording this show on Thursdays from this point forward, in order to allow additional time to get the podcast produced and still release on a Friday in time for the commute home (in Europe and America at least). Hope this meets with your approval!

This does mean that in this case we recorded before the first Lotusphere abstract confirmations were emailed out late on Thursday – we mentioned this on the podcast…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Luis Suarez (blog | twitter) has been working at IBM for the last 13 years, specialising in the areas of Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Community Building, Learning and Social Computing / Enterprise 2.0. He is currently working as a Social Computing Evangelist within the Software Group, under the BlueIQ team, with the joint mission of helping accelerate the adoption of social software within IBM. In my spare time, I took on the challenge of living “A World Without Email”nearly three years ago, ditching corporate email and instead relying more heavily on social software tools.

Susan Scrupski (linkedin | facebook | twitter) is founder and Executive Director of The 2.0 Adoption Council, a Dachis Group company. The 2.0 Adoption Council is a peer-based, information-sharing private community interested in the latest concepts, best practices, case studies, and helpful tips associated with executing socio-collaborative strategies and projects in the large enterprise.  Susan has been analyzing the IT Services market for 20  years, with her insights having been featured in industry research, as well as mainstream media such as The New York Times, Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. Her interests are in Enterprise 2.0 and the next generation web. Susan is on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, blogs for the Enterprise Irregulars, and spends most of her time supporting the council members in their efforts to evangelize social business in their own organizations.

Luis Benitez (blog | twitter ) is one of the Social Software Product Managers at IBM.  He’s been with IBM for 9 years and loves to promote the concept of accelerating innovation in the workplace by socializing.

Topics

Luis Suarez – Enterprise 2.0 Internal Evangelist of the year (03:58) 

* Congratulations

* What does it mean, who ...

Episode 28, recorded Friday 26th November 2010, discussing reasons to be thankful, Connections 3.0 GA, Transformer demo, ‘classic’ applications, XPages performance in the Notes client, the new XPages URL Shortner and more…

Please note: we have started to put times in the show notes for when we start to discuss each topic, in order to make it easier to fast-forward through the show to the topics that are of particular interest.  If you would like us to produce an enhanced podcast (AAC format) version of the show with multiple chapters to cover the individual chapters, please do let us know.

Also, we have made the decision to move to recording this show on Thursdays from this point forward, in order to allow additional time to get the podcast produced and still release on a Friday in time for the commute home (in Europe and America at least). Hope this meets with your approval!

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Tony McPhail (twitter) is IT Technical Manager with The Salvation Army, Southern Territory, responsible for Enterprise application and infrastructure, including CItrix, VMware and Lotus Domino portfolio. Domino, Notes and iNotes clients, sametime, quirck and connections.

Pim van Wetten (blog | twitter | lotuslive) has worked with Lotus related software for over 11 years. After finishing his studies in Management and Information Sciences in 1999, Pim van Wetten (1974) started working at e-office. e-office is a Dutch IBM Business Partner that consults organizations about the way they can use technologies to collaborate more efficiently independent of place or time. During the first six years of his career Pim has taken a deep dive in technology by programming in Lotus Notes, WebSphere and WebSphere Portal. Then, he broadened his activities with project management and consultancy. The last three years he specialized in enterprise social media consulting. Pim is a regular speaker on this topic and has hosted several Lotus Connections sessions at the Dutch Notes User Group (NLLUG).

Tim Clark (blog | twitter | lotuslive) is an IT Specialist working in IBM Lotus Technical Sales in the UK and Ireland. Tim has been working for Lotus since 1994 and still loves it. The last few years have seen Tim focus on XPages, but now that focus is shifting to help customers understand how they can improve their collaboration using Lotus Software products. Tim is also a founding member of the XCast, an XPages podcast, which will be re-launching for Lotusphere 2011 with new hosts.

Topics

Thanksgiving week – what is your ‘reason to be thankful’? (04:52)

Lotus Connections 3.0 GA (07:43) 

* First available to customers, then partners – what were they thinking? 😉

* Lots of useful resources, not least a checklist for the upgrade

* Demo video

* Several HowTo video’s

*