OK, everyone was waiting for some big announcement and about two hours into the keynote, we got it. It’s interesting that the announcement wasn’t a brand new product but rather, a continuing vision and buildout of collaboration and social networking functionality in all products within the Lotus brand. Their main focus starts with Lotus Notes. What they showed is a complete redesign of the UI with federation of content, social networks, searches, etc all from a simple interface. They made sure to note that this is NOT just a Notes/Domino thing. Seeing as I don’t focus on that, I’m pretty happy. I think Ed Brill, a prolific IBM Blogger has some good information on it:
In the past, the complaint about Lotusphere is that we had become very focused on the here-and-now, and weren’t sharing enough long-term vision. New Lotus GM Alistair Rennie made the tough decision to go the other way, and start opening up the aperture early to allow the market to see what we believe that future should be.
IBM Project Vulcan is not a brand-new effort. It builds on the existing capabilities, and represents the future versions of, the IBM Lotus product portfolio — including Notes. One of its key themes is social analytics and business analytics combined and applied to industry-specific scenarios — making collaboration more focused and relevant. The vision of Project Vulcan intends to deliver collaboration across company boundaries; make it easy to deploy the technology; and include developer-friendly services and APIs.
One of the key evolutionary thoughts in IBM Project Vulcan is to move from what we currently refer to as “linked value” across the IBM portfolio to the notion of “loosely-coupled” services. This makes sense in an increasingly-expected hybrid environment, and will simplify deployment and adoption of collaboration and productivity within your organization. Web services, xPages, HTML5, RESTful APIs, will all be tools in pushing Project Vulcan forward. Alistair Rennie made a key point about IBM Project Vulcan — delivering to the Notes client, web browser, and mobile devices as a converged user experience.
IBM is issuing a press release today to talk more about IBM Project Vulcan, and we’re opening up a special Q&A for the credentialed bloggers here at Lotusphere 2010 on Tuesday to talk about it in much more detail. Meanwhile, if I can leave you with this thought: Project Vulcan is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going. We’ll continue to support your existing Notes apps — we have for 20 years, it only makes sense to continue — but we’ll add these loosely-coupled services to bring in more value, attention, and focus. Project Vulcan gives us a structure for innovation, for delivering on that next leap forward in collaboration and productivity.
You can read his entire post here.
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thanks for taking time to write. Great information.