I’m writing this on this Saturday morning (January 24th) at Oslo Gardermoen airport. Gunnar, a colleague of mine, and me are travelling Orlando in Florida, US. We are attending the annual IBM conference, that used to be called Lotusphere. I think IBM has changed the name of the conference every year since it stopped being called Lotusphere. This year the name is Connected2015.

I will be blogging every day from the conference to keep those who are not there, and for those who might be interested, in what’s going on when it comes to social business. But also what thoughts IBM has about this and how I think the technologies and solutions could have an impact on my working day. And maybe yours as well.

As I’ve mentioned, this is what used to be called the good old Lotusphere, since the focus used to be on the Lotus portfolio. First and foremost Lotus Notes/Domino, but also Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and so on. Since the Lotus brand was killed a few years ago the conference changed it’s name, and focus.

In the past few years the focus has been on business and social collaborations as much as it has been on administration, development and other nerdy stuff. In fact, the focus was shifted so much to the business side that some of the old timers stopped showing up. So this year the focus will be more on the nerdy stuff, but not just that. Also: The conference is much, much smaller.

My first Lotusphere was attended by over 10 000 people. This year I’ve heard reports that less than 1000 people are signed up. This is not surprising. The demise and death of Notes has been touted since the late 90s, but in the past few years it’s pretty obvious that the Notes client is on life support.

And contrary to IBM’s hopes, everybody that is, or was, using Notes, hasn’t shifted to Connections and other IBM solutions. It’s Outlook og Google all the way for mail and documents, but also Sharepoint. So the market is much smaller. In addition, like everybody else, IBM is going for the cloud market now.

IBM also sucks at marketing. So instead of visiting all their Notes/Domino customers and showing them how relatively easy it is to mobilize and web-enable their Notes solutions, their customers are in the dark about it.

I still have great love for the Notes client, but in this day and age, a big bloated client is not the future. Web and mobile is. So me and Gunnar’s main priorities here are learning more about how to web-enable all our data on Domino, as well as getting the latest news on IBM Connections *

So watch this space! It’s currently 24 degrees Celsius in Orlando, but I’ve still brought a jacket. January is winter in Florida as well.

*= IBM Connections is a social tool for companies where people can share files and information, create wikis, have discussions and a whole lot of other stuff. The key is: Do not hide things in people’s mail boxes. Get it out in the open and collaborate!