We’ll here we go, less than a week until the Lotusphere OGS, and what am I looking forward to seeing?
Look out for a series of posts, in no particular order, covering my tips on what to be looking out for at the ‘Sphere. Remember, I’m just a humble blogger and IBM BP, so I have no insider knowledge – these are just my vague and hopeful suggestions, ok!
Well, number 1 – Lotus BlueHouse
Collaboration Matters has had the pleasure of being part of the BlueHouse Early Adopters program since the SaaS solution was launched for European companies much earlier this year. Since then we’ve used BlueHouse for both internal and external collaboration, including sharing documents, hosting meetings, arranging appointments and much more. I personally think it’s a great solution for small businesses – it covers the vast majority of collaboration needs (with the exception of email at this stage) and does it with some panache – the look and feel is really appealing and the site is intuitive and fast to use.
So what am I expecting for Lotusphere 2009? Well, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see BlueHouse formally launched at the conference – it certainly looks ready, and there seems to be no better time to get it off beta status and into production use. No pricing has been revealed as yet, so that should be part of the announcement. Lastly, the roadmap needs to be laid out for future iterations – possibly including how BlueHouse will integrate better with (or even include) mail in the future, if content will be able to be taken offline, and what integration there will be between BlueHouse and other Web2.0 collaboration tools.
So where will you hear the news about BlueHouse? Possibly at the OGS, but also at the Online Collaboration Keynote, on Tuesday morning at 8:30am, hosted by Sean Pooley.
