An amazing September and October on all fronts
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
Over the past two months Gayle and I have traveled to Boston, Edinburgh, London and we are off to New York City in less than a week. Let me walk you through our journey.
In Boston we attended the Lotus Leadership Alliance as a member of the Business Partner Advisory Council. At LoLA we met Elguji customers, demonstrated IdeaJam, IQJam and LinkJam to Lotus executives and customers, participated in chalkboard sessions, attended several product briefings and attended breakout sessions. Of particular fun was filming video footage covering Elguji, the Taking Notes podcast and OpenNTF for the Lotus Knows campaign. It's been a few years since I did any video shots and I forgot that striped shirts don't work well when being filmed. The video team was prepared and had a perfect fitting dress shirt ready and waiting for me. We also spent some quality time with many Lotus BP's including Mike Smith from the Turtle Partnership, Lance Spellman from Workflow Studios, Darren and Lisa Duke from STS, Paul Mooney and Harry Dunn from Bluewave, Julian Robichaux from SNAPPS and many others.
One of my personal highlights from the trip was finally getting to meet David Hsu, Jeane Staten and Colleen Hayes from the IBM PR team. Elguji worked with David, Jean and Colleen on the Lotus Knows IdeaJam. Here's a picture of Daivd and I which I display proudly in my office.
We also had a chance to have dinner and share laughs with our good friend Erica Topolksi of Lotus PR fame.
Oh and how can I forget..... I got to sit in the drivers seat of the Lotus Knows bus:
October started off with the UKLUG in Edinburgh, Scotland and I have to say that this is one of the best Lotus conferences around on all fronts. Speakers, vendors, organizers, attendees - all, totally top-shelf. Elguji was a spnsor of the event and had a blast demoing IQJam, IdeaJam and LinkJam. Some sessions of note included "Mr. XPages" himself - Matt White's session on XPage design patterns. Matt knocked it ouf the park and delivered and A+ session. Unfortunately, I had to sit next to Steve Castledine and have this facing staring at me for an hour:
Other sessions of note were the Flex and JQuery session by Ben Poole and Mark Myers, The Hairy Bikers session given by Bill Buchan and Steve McDonagh as well as Julian Robichaux's "Free Your Data!" session. Again, all of the speakers were all fantastic. UKLUG was also allowed me to meet many faces that I have only known through the interwebs - most notably Jeff Gilfelt, Paul Westlake and Phil Warner".
Gayle was able to perfect her Scottish dancing on Thursday night as you can see in the photo below:
We spent the rest of the trip sightseeing Edinburgh before heading down to London with Matt White and Bill Malchisky via rail. Gayle and I both wish that we could have spent more time in Edinburgh as it's truly a beautiful city.
We had the pleasure of spending 3-1/2 days in London. Matt was an excellent host and ensured that we saw as much of London as one could see in the short time we had. As I mentioned earlier we had a chance to spend a few hours with an Elguji business partner who uses IdeaJam as part of their innovation consultancy. Matt also arranged a "Lotus Beers" event on Monday evening where we got to have a couple of pints with Roy Holder, Ben Poole, Bill Malchisky, Paul Westlake and others. And of course getting to see a good friend and my Dutch "brother" Vince Schurrman was also a highlight.
Next weekend we are off to New York City where I will be speaking at the Tri-State Lotus User Group and giving a presentation that Steve Castledine and Vince Schuurman delivered at UKLUG and NLLUG. The presentation is entitled "OpenNTF - The Lotus Notes and Domino Open Source Organization". Earlier today I ran through the presentation with Vince over Skype and it should be an excellent session. Lots of good things to talk about.
On the Elguji Software front there is nothing but good and productive things happening. IdeaJam and LinkJam continue to sell very well, feedback from customers is extremely positive. We continue to make inroads into non Lotus shops through our Software-as-a-Service offerings. IQJam which will be commercially available on Tuesday, November 10th has pre-sold very well. If you have not yet seen IQJam in action go have a look here. The team is currently planning for Lotusphere 2010 where Elguji will be participating in the product showcase at booth 622. We may also have a few surprise announcements for you. Gayle also has put together some excellent customer case studies which she will be making available on the Elguji website shortly.
Julian and I were finally able to record episode 100 of the Taking Notes podcast where we got to interview some of the XPages experts including Declan Lynch, Matt White and Peter Presnell. Many thanks to our friends who sent in the audio clips you hear at the beginning of the show. Planning for future episodes is also under way and include topics such as the new Lotus Symphony API with John Di Gorgio from Integra4Notes, a fireside chat with Julian and myself and a show with some of the IBM developers working on the XPages technology inside of Domino. Many thanks to all of you for tuning in and listening. The download stats say it all.
The XPages Blog has really taken off in a very short amount of time. This would not have been possible without dedicated people like Jeremy Hodge, David Leedy, Julian Buss, Paul Hannan, Declan Lynch, Paul Calhoun, Matt White, John Mackey and Peter Presnell. These guys are truly the XPages experts and have shared some really great content.
That's it for now as it's time to go hand out some candy to the neighborhood kids.
In Boston we attended the Lotus Leadership Alliance as a member of the Business Partner Advisory Council. At LoLA we met Elguji customers, demonstrated IdeaJam, IQJam and LinkJam to Lotus executives and customers, participated in chalkboard sessions, attended several product briefings and attended breakout sessions. Of particular fun was filming video footage covering Elguji, the Taking Notes podcast and OpenNTF for the Lotus Knows campaign. It's been a few years since I did any video shots and I forgot that striped shirts don't work well when being filmed. The video team was prepared and had a perfect fitting dress shirt ready and waiting for me. We also spent some quality time with many Lotus BP's including Mike Smith from the Turtle Partnership, Lance Spellman from Workflow Studios, Darren and Lisa Duke from STS, Paul Mooney and Harry Dunn from Bluewave, Julian Robichaux from SNAPPS and many others.
One of my personal highlights from the trip was finally getting to meet David Hsu, Jeane Staten and Colleen Hayes from the IBM PR team. Elguji worked with David, Jean and Colleen on the Lotus Knows IdeaJam. Here's a picture of Daivd and I which I display proudly in my office.
We also had a chance to have dinner and share laughs with our good friend Erica Topolksi of Lotus PR fame.
Oh and how can I forget..... I got to sit in the drivers seat of the Lotus Knows bus:
October started off with the UKLUG in Edinburgh, Scotland and I have to say that this is one of the best Lotus conferences around on all fronts. Speakers, vendors, organizers, attendees - all, totally top-shelf. Elguji was a spnsor of the event and had a blast demoing IQJam, IdeaJam and LinkJam. Some sessions of note included "Mr. XPages" himself - Matt White's session on XPage design patterns. Matt knocked it ouf the park and delivered and A+ session. Unfortunately, I had to sit next to Steve Castledine and have this facing staring at me for an hour:
Other sessions of note were the Flex and JQuery session by Ben Poole and Mark Myers, The Hairy Bikers session given by Bill Buchan and Steve McDonagh as well as Julian Robichaux's "Free Your Data!" session. Again, all of the speakers were all fantastic. UKLUG was also allowed me to meet many faces that I have only known through the interwebs - most notably Jeff Gilfelt, Paul Westlake and Phil Warner".
Gayle was able to perfect her Scottish dancing on Thursday night as you can see in the photo below:
We spent the rest of the trip sightseeing Edinburgh before heading down to London with Matt White and Bill Malchisky via rail. Gayle and I both wish that we could have spent more time in Edinburgh as it's truly a beautiful city.
We had the pleasure of spending 3-1/2 days in London. Matt was an excellent host and ensured that we saw as much of London as one could see in the short time we had. As I mentioned earlier we had a chance to spend a few hours with an Elguji business partner who uses IdeaJam as part of their innovation consultancy. Matt also arranged a "Lotus Beers" event on Monday evening where we got to have a couple of pints with Roy Holder, Ben Poole, Bill Malchisky, Paul Westlake and others. And of course getting to see a good friend and my Dutch "brother" Vince Schurrman was also a highlight.
Next weekend we are off to New York City where I will be speaking at the Tri-State Lotus User Group and giving a presentation that Steve Castledine and Vince Schuurman delivered at UKLUG and NLLUG. The presentation is entitled "OpenNTF - The Lotus Notes and Domino Open Source Organization". Earlier today I ran through the presentation with Vince over Skype and it should be an excellent session. Lots of good things to talk about.
On the Elguji Software front there is nothing but good and productive things happening. IdeaJam and LinkJam continue to sell very well, feedback from customers is extremely positive. We continue to make inroads into non Lotus shops through our Software-as-a-Service offerings. IQJam which will be commercially available on Tuesday, November 10th has pre-sold very well. If you have not yet seen IQJam in action go have a look here. The team is currently planning for Lotusphere 2010 where Elguji will be participating in the product showcase at booth 622. We may also have a few surprise announcements for you. Gayle also has put together some excellent customer case studies which she will be making available on the Elguji website shortly.
Julian and I were finally able to record episode 100 of the Taking Notes podcast where we got to interview some of the XPages experts including Declan Lynch, Matt White and Peter Presnell. Many thanks to our friends who sent in the audio clips you hear at the beginning of the show. Planning for future episodes is also under way and include topics such as the new Lotus Symphony API with John Di Gorgio from Integra4Notes, a fireside chat with Julian and myself and a show with some of the IBM developers working on the XPages technology inside of Domino. Many thanks to all of you for tuning in and listening. The download stats say it all.
The XPages Blog has really taken off in a very short amount of time. This would not have been possible without dedicated people like Jeremy Hodge, David Leedy, Julian Buss, Paul Hannan, Declan Lynch, Paul Calhoun, Matt White, John Mackey and Peter Presnell. These guys are truly the XPages experts and have shared some really great content.
That's it for now as it's time to go hand out some candy to the neighborhood kids.
Comments
Comment posted by Steve Castledine11/02/2009 12:29:37 PM
Homepage: http://www.stevecastledine.com
Gee thanks Bruce - I should send you a photo when I've hardly had any sleep and look rough as a badgers a**. Wait you already have one :)
Comment posted by Bruce Elgort11/02/2009 03:25:12 PM
But Steve notice how I said nothing about your "Fauxhawk" 
