Lotusphere2009 Reflections

I don't know if it's just me, but coming home from Lotusphere is much like a diver coming up from a deep sea expedition. You've seen it on the Discovery Channel or the movie, The Abyss. They have to get into an isolation chamber for several days and slowly acclimate themselves back to the normal atmosphere so their blood doesn't bubble, get the bends and go all crazy.
Well, I've had my time in the chamber and I'm ready to emerge. There was so much I wanted to do at Lotusphere this year. That included cutting daily video updates with my cool mini digital camera and posting them to YouTube. But after staying up late a couple night cutting video and trying to upload it, I gave up on that real quick. I have a few more videos to upload and will hopefully get those cut and uploaded this coming week.
Lotusphere 2009 was nothing short of excellent. What more can be said about this years meeting of the yellow minds that hasn't already been blogged be me last week or others? Well, I came up with a few

The Good:

• The message was clear and to the point. Notes/Domino is not dead. It never was. And now there is a new leader at the helm that is not going to allow any more of this nonsense continue to propagate any further because he gets it. Mr. Picciano immediately took command of the audience and the Yellow Bubble as it's leader. He gets us gang. Lets hope that more good things will come from it.
• Notes/Domino 8.5 and 8.5.1 looks to be the best release of the product yet. As soon as 8.5.1 hits the streets, I will be all over it for production. Until then, testing will commence hopefully soon on 8.5.
• Great selection of sessions this year. I still have yet to go through all of the slides from all of them.
  
• The community. Someone posed the question in their blog entry, "What other community actually wants to show up to conference early just so they can hang out with their friends?" That statement is so true about the Yellow Bubble.
  
• College kids were one of the winners from Lotusphere Idol. Is the next generation starting to take notice? I really think IBM/Lotus needs to come up with some sort of competition for college kids to do something innovative with the Lotus product line and then win a trip to Lotusphere to show it off. Get the local sales people involved to do the recruiting and see what happens. College kids are always looking for something free!
• Watching history at lunchtime on Tuesday with a bunch of other folks.
  

The Bad

• Is it just me, or is the food getting worse?
• No MP3's of sessions this year. Actually used those in the past.
• People getting all caught up in the numbers of who showed up. Face it peoples, the economy obviously sucks right now.
• Not enough hours in the day when you're at Lotusphere. I seriously wish I had Hermione's "Time Turner" so that I could have hit everything I wanted to while I was down there.

So that's it for my thoughts on Lotusphere2009. Now let's get to work!