Lotus Nut

Mitch posted some great details on how we planned our session for Lotusphere 2009. It's a great case study for how Connections can have some real-world applications. Kim Greene and I also planned our other session this way. Mac Guidera also blogged that he used Activities to plan his session.

While we could have done this using other methods, using BleedYellow Activities to get this done was extremely beneficial and helped to keep us on track!

I'm excited to announce that I will be co-presenting two sessions at Lotusphere 2009!! One of the sessions will be related to Lotus Connections and will be given with Mitch Cohen. The other session will be given with Kim Greene. I have presented with Kim in the past at the Lotusphere and COMMON conferences in 2006. It will be great to present with her again! I've never presented with Mitch, but our session should be fun and challenging! Hey, both sessions will be that way, actually! :) Details below.

Title: Getting Your Feet Wet with IBM Lotus Connections (as Mitch said, this will be a lot more than just getting your feet wet!! You'll see a complete Lotus Connections environment be installed and configured in less than 2 hours on stage!)
Speakers: Mitch Cohen and Chris Whisonant
Track: Show and Tell - SHOW302
Abstract: If you're a Domino admin, there is no reason to be intimidated by Lotus Connections. Let us guide you, live on stage, from a single-server Domino environment up to a full, integrated Lotus Connections 2.0 implementation, in less time that it takes to watch a movie. You'll be provided with step-by-step instructions to build their own environment in the labs, giving you the valuable skills needed to launch Connections inside your own organization.

Title: Go Green! Reducing Your Collaboration Carbon Footprint
Speakers:  Kim Greene and Chris Whisonant
Track: Best Practices - BP203
Abstract: Is your company looking to reduce power consumption and maintenance costs? Then this session is for you. Learn how to utilize the Lotus offerings such as Bluehouse, Sametime, Quickr, and Connections to reduce resource consumption. See how Domino 8 and beyond further helps in reducing resource requirements. And don't forget your applications that may be over-utilizing resources - you may not need that new hardware after all! We will also show you details about finding and alleviating bottlenecks, and will shed some light on consolidation and virtualization possibilities that can have a huge impact on your business and address problems related to server sprawl. You will walk away from this session with the knowledge of how to make your company more green from both an environmental and monetary perspective.

If anyone out there has any stories related to these session topics, feel free to share them with me!

Are you looking for a central location to manage the planning of your Lotusphere Session proposals? Feel free to do so using the Activities section of BleedYellow.com! This can be very beneficial just for single presenters, but if you are planning on presenting with others this can work exceptionally well!

And, to make things simpler, we have created an Activity Template titled "Lotusphere Session Planning":



If you wish to begin using it immediately, just click "Start an Activity from this Template". You can then make your own activity and manage membership. I recommend that you create a separate Activity per Session. New with Connections 2.0 is something called "Sections". We have added 4 sections to this template - comment back here if you think of some other things that could be added!

1. Proposed Session Titles - create new entries in here for different session title ideas.
2. Proposed Session Abstracts - create separate entries for different abstract ideas. You may be extremely creative and would like to have multiple ideas. (Hint, if you want others to be able to "vote" on your Abstract ideas, just add them to your Activity and ask them to comment on the various titles or abstracts.
3. Links - This is pre-populated with a link to the official Lotusphere website. Add more links inside this entry to other sites related to your topic.
4. Session Slides - Create an entry in here and attach your presentation file. (Hint, even though you may like to do that all locally, consider posting one here anyway for a hot backup in case anything goes wrong at 'Sphere with your laptop and/or usb drive!!)

Again, this is a work in progress - feedback is welcome!! We are also working on making some other templates available, so if something changes with our recommendation on this template, we'll let you know!