off the Hook - 911s Chief Lotu...

I'm usually not a big fan of Lotusphere Online, mainly because it has such a short life. This year though, it has a few features that may not be *new*, but are at least easier to use. One is the session scheduler. You can look at the sessions in each time slot, view the description (and the speaker's profile if they have bothered to fill it out) and easily add sessions to your personal schedule. Many of the sessions even already have the slides attached so you can get a sneak peek at the content. When you're finished, you can easily export them to an ics file and import them directly to your Notes calendar. Easy and useful. Note that the ics file gets emailed to your lsonline email account, which is accessible from the lsonline.info home page.

Maybe you remember seeing GROUP Business Software at Lotusphere last year, or maybe you noticed the name on this year's Knowledge level sponsors list. Maybe you recall hearing about GROUP acquiring Relavis or the IT Factory assets over the past couple of years, or about a recent strategic alliance with Unify Corporation for email archiving. Maybe you've heard some recent buzz, or maybe you've never heard of them and you're wondering why I would even bring it up.

GROUP was one of the world's largest providers of Notes-based CRM and extended email management solutions, headquartered in Germany. This past October, GROUP Business Software and Lotus 911 merged (relatively quietly) to form the largest provider of collaborative business solutions and professional service dedicated solely to the IBM Lotus software brand in the world (or so I am told). The Lotus 911 heritage will continue as the GROUP Experts division of GBS, just on a larger scale. By combining these two awesome teams, we now have a more global presence, the ability to provide our services customers with turnkey solutions to more business problems, a channel to market for some of the amazing technologies Lotus 911 has developed over the years, and a complete end-to-end service offering for customers worldwide.

I am enthusiastic about attending this year's Lotusphere as a member of GROUP Business Software. I am a little sad to retire the famous (or infamous) red shirts, but be on the lookout for our new black GROUP shirts. There will be at least 24 of them instead of just the 12 red ones. Over the next couple of weeks, we hope to put the finishing touches on our merger and hopefully emerge as the "go to" partner for everything Lotus.

For more information, visit www.gbs.com.