I really wasn't expecting too much out of yesterday's Lotusphere Comes to You event.  I have been busy reading all the blogs and news since the opening session of LS08 and thought I had a pretty good grasp on what direction Lotus was going in.  I wasn't wrong, but I did have some thoughts on the event:

• Traffic to and from the event SUCKED!  It was 40 miles, each way, traveling almost exclusively on highways.  Total time wasted in the car:  2 1/2 hours.  Please, oh please, have the next event near a metro stop.  Even though the commute might be the same or longer for me, I won't blow a vein in my forehead while yelling at the idiot in front of me who doesn't have clue how to merge.
• The Opening Session was just a shortened version of the LS Opening Session, without the female violin player, bad guest speaker, and the really cool light show.  Nothing really new here, but at least it was short.  The Mashups demo was much cooler thank I expected and would really like to see what it takes for developers to allow users to include their applications in a Mashup.  It was definitely eye candy for the CxO level.
• The Desktop of the Future presentation was really good.  It had a couple of graphical slides that did a really good job of categorizing your user base and what functionality they really need.  The slides on everything you need to buy and manage to use Sharepoint were outstanding and very frightening if you think about having to support it.  These slides should be readily available to all IBM/Lotus Sales people who go into competitive bid situations.  Dwight Morse really kept pounding the "at the mercy of one vendor" message when talking abotu MS' collaboration solution.  I can't say I disagree at all, but perception is more important than reality and IBM has to work hard at getting this message out.
• In the "what's old is new" department, it seems that the iNotes moniker will be resurrected for Domino 8.5.  I think it's the right move in the current marketing environment.  Domino Web Access never made much sense to me.
• Sat at the lunch table with Donna Milano, a Marketing Manager for Sametime Unyte.  We had a good discussion about Lotus' presence and possibilities in the SMB market.  She gave me lots of info on ST Unyte and it's pricing structure.  In case any of you weren't aware, it's for online meetings only and doesn't do anything with presence.  It is definitely going head to head with WebEx.  A little later, she was kind enough to give me a demonstration of the Unyte interface and walk me through it's features.  Lotus did a good job of simplifying the interface for end users.  I signed up for a 30 day free trial and will see how the family reacts to the interface.  If the 10 year old can navigate it, then it's definitely been done right.
• I got a chance to meet Heyward Drummond and take a look at the Mac 8.5 Beta running on a MacBook Air as well as DWA on the iPhone.  We talked about the perceived lack of presence on the stage in Cupertino last week, and he indicated that he "thought" it had more to do with MS wanting to be on the stage by themselves than anything having to do with IBM/Lotus.  It seems that Lotus only received the SDK last week (like everyone else) and are still trying to figure out exactly what they are going to do with it.  We both agreed that the logical future step is to have a "Notes Lite" on the iPhone with replication, offline access, encryption, and NSF storage.  Now, that would be something that would make me buy the iPhone.  He also talked about the improvement in performance we should be seeing in the 8.5 client simply from the fact that they will be using an Eclipse version that is 3 or 4 versions ahead of the current 8.0 .1 code stream.  Welcome words to my ears.
• Jerome at the Ytria booth walked me through a quick demonstration of their products.  I kept thinking to myself how much time these things would have saved me over the years if I would have had them.  Hopefully, I will be able to get them into my toolkit shortly.
• Had a discussion with the guy at the Mainsoft booth about the reality of Sharepoint applications vs what MS says can be done.  Basically, he said that Sharepoint is just being used as a document repository and not much more.  That isn't what I call collaboration.  Maintenance, scalability, and management are all real issues that Sharepoint has to solve before it's ready for the big time.  Maybe I should start referring to Sharepoint as a File Server 2.0.
• It was really good to get to see Maurice Cogdell and Debbie Greenburg from IBM.  I have known both of them for quite a long time and it always makes me feel good to have a familiar face in the room.  I caught up with Jack Dausman and promised to make the next DCNUG meeting.
• Stopped by the Hands on Lab, but didn't stay too long as it was really oriented to the end user and not the administrator or developer.  Did get a chance to talk to Jian Shi about some issues I had been experiencing with the ST applet in the Notes 8.0.1 client.  He said he hadn't see the issues I was describing, but said that he would try to go back and do some testing on his own.  The main issues I have been experiencing have been when I change locations that change Notes IDs.  The ST client goes wacky and looks like it loses all it's preferences.  This is quite disconcerting and I said that I would just like clarification from Lotus as to what the expected behavior should be.
• The food at the event was mixed.  The breakfast was pretty well picked over by the time I got there, but the lunch was very good.  Enough choices to satisfy everyone.  The sun-dried tomato pasta was excellent.  There seemed to b a severe lack of chocolate on the dessert table, which was a shame.  And don't even get me started on the rocks shaped like pretzels they tried to make us eat.

All in all, it was definitely time well spent.