LS09 OGS - As reported by a bald guy in sandals

The OGS started great, with the Blue Man Group.

Then a small introduction from Bob Picciano, followed by Dan Aykroyd coming on stage as an alien. It might have been a reference to one of his films, but I didn't recognize his performance.

While a great speaker, I felt his jokes/etc. fit more with the american crowd than the rest of us.

On announcements.

IBM is joining forces with OpenNTF. They mentioned that they would provide code and templates, and I guess they also will provide server space/hosting.

Bluehouse changes name to Lotus Live (Engage). Sounds a bit to close to Windows Live in my ears..

Sametime Unified Telephony. This seems to bring IP Telephony to Sametime. They showed some great demos of conference calls/etc. You should be able to call to regular phones as well. Not sure how this is set up. Maybe through a third party.

Sametime Meeting - No more Java Applets. Lotus seems to have done a great deal of work on Lotus Sametime. Among the new features is being able to share documents in a meeting without the need for any (Java) plugin. All demos were showed in Firefox, so no ActiveX trickery. Videos are stored in quicktime format. Not sure why, but could be to make it more Mac friendly.

After the OGS, I went to a session about the future of Lotus Domino. Not a lot of exciting news, but there were a couple interesting things mentioned.

Improved NSF quality and recovery, the ability to save script libraries with errors, class browser, improved performance of XPages, improved usability in DDE, new components in DDE; outline, menu bar, tool bar and tag cloud.

They didn't specify a date on these improvements. Some of them should be included in the 8.5.1 release.

More sessions to attend.. Busy busy.. :)