UKLUG was today, but NEOLUG was cooler!

From the "Our LUG is better than your LUG department"
Today was the day for the quarterly Northeast Ohio Lotus User Group, (NEOLUG) meeting at the IBM office in Cleveland and what an awesome day it was! I had the pleasure of being asked to be a part of the blogger round table discussion that included Phil Randolph, Gregg Eldred, Rob Wunderlich and some guy from the west coast named Bruce Elgort or something. Chris Blatnick, also a local blogger in all things Lotus, moderated the panel and did a fantastic job putting together a list of questions to grill us on. Really the drive of the discussion was to show those in attendance that blogging, twitter-ing and contributing to the Yellow Bubble can be both a fun and rewarding experience. The whole idea of this community having such a positive impact for everyone really came through I think. Chris videotaped the session so hopefully it will be up soon and I will post a link to it in this entry. Really was a great experience.
After a short break, Rob returned to the front to go over what is currently available in the marketplace both from Lotus and third party vendors for mobile access to PIM and applications in your environment. Rob also went on to show how easy it is to take your custom Domino applications that you already have in your environment and make them accessible on mobile devices. It's all about the interface. The one thing I most took away from the discussion was that the Palm OS is pretty much dead to most all the vendors. This is something that I am dealing with in my job since we still have a number of Palm TX's in use that work great on wi-fi but have trouble with out new application. I'm still holding out hope that a Traveler version for the Palm will show up, but I think we'll have a better chance at Shatner being the speaker for the OGS.
Now it was time for Bruce to take over and show us just how really cool the products from Elguji Software are. LinkJam and IdeaJam, both built to run on Domino, are great tools that can be used in your organization as a great primer to the idea of social computing and idea sharing. Easy to use, easy to set up and valuable in helping to drive your business forward. If you are not yet familiar with Elguji, take some time to check them out.
So after a busy day it was time for me to hit the trail south. Thanks for Bruce and Gayle for coming in to give the demo and for buying us pizza! And thanks to Rob for driving down from Detroit to present as well. Was a great meeting and I'm looking forward to the next meeting where Gregg has volunteered me to present. Ugh.