Episode 42, recorded Thursday 10th March 2011, discussing upcoming Lotus User Groups in Belgium and the UK, why the Lotus community should ‘put up or shut up’ in Australia, IBM’s stance on Nokia devices and more…

Hosts

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

Guests

Warren Elsmore (blog | twitter | company) has worked in the Lotus arena for 15 years and is a Senior Architecture Consultant with the Bluewave Group.  Bluewave provide technical architecture consultancy and advice to a range of large and small customers across the globe. Warren has spoken at many Lotus events including Lotusphere, Collaboration University, the View Admin conference, ILUG and UKLUG. He also writes for Clippings and in any spare time he has left he runs the UK Lotus User Group!

Theo Heselmans (blog | twitter | company) has been doing Notes/domino development for almost 20 years. He became an independent consultant about 10 years ago and founded Xceed. He’s been to almost every Lotusphere, and got involved into the Lotus community when he started blogging about 4 years ago. He’s been running the BLUG now for 2.5 years.

Topics

User groups

• What are Lotus User Groups?
• Why did you chose to organise them?
• What’s involved in organizing such an event: find Venue, Date, Speakers, Sponsors, Attendees, Staff, Merchandising
• Who attends user groups?
• What is the format of your events, days/numbers?
• What are the benefits of attending?
  • to attendees?
  • to sponsors/exhibitors?
  • to speakers
• Shouldn’t IBM be responsible for running these events?

BLUG

• When is it? (March 31th – April 1st)
• Where? (Crowne Plaza In Antwerp, we needed a bigger venue, as we grew: more than 200 people per day)
• Why Antwerp this time? (Great city, we wanted to a change from Brussels)
• Now a two-day event – why the change? (so many topics to cover, and we had to turn down too many excellent speakers last time)
• Who is speaking? (70% international Lotusphere speakers)

UKLUG

• When is it? (23rd-24th May)
• Where? (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry)
• What is planned? (2 days of conference sessions with a fantastic line-up of speakers)
• What are you looking for in session abstracts?

The future of LUGs

• Are more user groups required around the world?
• If someone wants to organise a new one, where do they start?
• How do you get the word out?
• Does the move to Social Business change anything?

Other news:

• Lotus fans: Show me the money or shut the hell up
  • Interesting article from Australia, asking Lotus advocates to tell them about wins/upgrades or else stop protesting
  • Started with Steinhoff dumps Lotus for Telstra T-Suite
• IBM platform statement for Symbian/Symbian^3 and Windows Phone 7 relative to Nokia announcement.
  • ‘The IBM 2011 strategy for the Symbian platform remains unchanged. IBM will continue to support its mobile products on Nokia Symbian devices that are in market today and intends to add support later this year for Nokia Symbian^3 devices based on customer demand. IBM Collaboration Solutions organization has no plans for Windows Phone support at this time. ‘
  • Is this the correct stance for IBM to take given the current state of the market, particularly in USA/UK/Europe?
• Lotusphere Comes to You re-branded as ‘Get Social Roadshows’
  • Continued re-branding of Lotus and loss of name
  • As 2011 goes by, how are we feeling about this?
  • In Australia it seems to be call “Collective Intelligence Summit”

Tips