Jason Hook's shiny new blog......

Lotusphere 2009 was a better Lotusphere for me health wise I didn't have pneumonia (as I have had for the last two) for a start. I still haven't worked out how to get the balance of sessions, Labs etc right, too much do do and too little time! I'm getting better at it though.

I wanted to organise my thoughts into themes:

This was my second year of speaking, this time with two sessions. Preparation for those two was demanding. All new development, all new slides. Hard work but worthwhile. I'm sure the late nights contributed to my accident, and recovery from the accident reduced the amount of enhancements that I'd planned to make at least to the demos. I'm not sure if the Lotusphere Gods or my wife will let me back again but I would love to have a detailed go at xPage development for Mobile Devices, a deeper look at Mobile CSS or even some hardcore BlackBerry Java Development. If you came to the sessions, thank you. If you filled in an evaluation and gave feedback even greater thanks. A special thanks to Kendra for taking photographs.

I bought an iPod Touch at Gatwick. I shouldn't have but I did. And I loooove it. Instead of reaching for the laptop I can get a GOOD browsing experience from the Touch. During the conference I could occasionally twitter, exchange Skype messages with colleagues at work and it even made an appearance during BP107 instead of my Curve. All with zero roaming charges. The only problem now is that I hate losing the functionality when I'm not in range of a WiFi network. For my money the BlackBerry is still streets ahead as a corporate device but for personal use the iPod is more fun. The AppStore is killer. The major disapointment is the restriction on running background applications on the Apple mobile platform and therefore push capability.

I decided to skip the OGS this year. It's long, and my rear end struggles on the typical Disney chair. Last years invited speaker wasn't a good one for us Europeans. My hopes weren't high for this year so I sat in the speakers room fretting over the BP107 presentation that we were restructuring and listened to Chris Millers streaming of the OGS.

???? As an aside why does OGS guest speaker have to be a secret ????

How foolish I was. I missed the opening with the Blue Man Group. Later when I heard that they were going to close the OGS I threw my laptop in my bag and flew as only a little fat bloke can to the ballroom to see them. Choosing the BMG was inspired. After the show I bought their DVD, it's on my iPod and I keep going back to it. I'm trying to find my drumsticks and that length of piping that I had left over from last years plumbing work!

Benjamin Zander at the CGS. I was immediately attracted to his enthusiam but I wasn't quite ready for the feeling I got when he started to really play the piano. What effortless skill that man has, there was a beauty in the softness and fluidity of his playing I'd never heard before. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I'm not a singer (I play Guitar and Flute but I can't sing for toffee) but like all of the people in that room I sang unselfconsciously. That I think is the power of a good teacher and a good leader. The ability to gain trust, rally everyone around a common goal and inspire them to exceed their own expectations. Benjamin Zander brought out the best in us and we had fun doing it. He's the kind of teacher I would love every child to have, just think what could be achieved.
After the CGS I spoke to a colleague at work and told him that something BZ had said about not having to do things the way the had always been done reasonated with me: it's all invented. I haven't seen a complete recording of his talk if you have please let me know.

There were some fantastic sessions this year the standard was SO high. I caught up on the xPage fuss and commited to get up to speed rapidly. There was Chris Blatnicks UI sessions, and Julian Robichaux on charting, reports and JavaScript. I showed the charting stuff to my boss and if I can manage to get some of that implemented I will be a hero I enjoyed Matt White's work on xPages and more traditional web development. I went to as many of the upgrading Notes and Domino sessions as I could.

I went to the usability labs and gave some feedback about iNotes UL. Some search capability, views by sender and date please. I got a chance to use Connections 2.5. It's got promise, FaceBook for the enterprise. In small organisations I suspect it has more potential to be a disruptive technology than in larger ones. I could easily see myself spending lots of time building up content in Connections but that might not help get the day to day work done. I didn't play with it enought to decide if it could provide a useful intranet solution but the site wide searching, tagging, blogging, wiki and customisability will make me look at it again soon. The guy showing me around Connections was called Joe and you could tell he was proud of it.

There's never enough time to get the full value out of Lotusphere during that week. The slides offer a second bite of the cherry, and I always share them and the really excellent Genii sessions database with colleagues. But what happened to the MP3's this year? Admittedly they were hard to get at last year but at least they were available. Wouldn't it be cool in this digital age if sessions could be video recorded (without expensive and unecessary high production values) and made easily available after the show?

There was plenty of talk about the young. "Where are the people under thirty?" we said. Maybe if there were free access to video recorded sessions given at Lotusphere it would make Notes more accessible to the up and coming stars, who knows. Perhaps if there were high quality free learning resources available, take the Apple Developer Connection as an example. I never saw Notes at University or in schools. Sometimes I think the client is too complex, too nerdy. The complexity may be a barrier to entry for the young. What about an entry level mail and PIM version of the client. Perhaps Google have already won the hearts and minds of the young. xPages may help if they eradicate the bizzare hacks we all have to use to make web applications work.

Bob Picciano managed to impress us all. I got to shake his hand after the OGS and I can't remember any other General Manager making himself so available. It's a good sign I think. Oh and I'm not wishing Bob away, Lord knows IBM have a habit of moving managers around before they've completely realised their goals but with a nod to the NerdGirls I wonder when we'll see a female GM of the Lotus family?

NSF2DB2 is dead. Where I work people use NotesSQL to pull data out of Notes to generate reports and for other more arcane purposes. They were looking forward to making some use of NSFDB2. XPages will not cut it for them I think.

Commontime leaving the exhibitor floor early. As it turns out it's too late but I did want to find them and see what they had to offer.

• I hope I make it I hope my friends make it, including you Rob.
• We go back to DisneyWorld or Epcot for the party
• The roadmap for Domino.Doc customers become clear
• IBM announce that the have taken rich text in mail seriously and can now offer ibound and outbound mail fidelity not sure if that would involve offering GeniiSoft a lot of money for iFidelity (if that's the right solution)
• DDE is now fast enough to use, the UI makes sense and the LS editor is ready
• The food gets better and is more accessible between sessions