Category  LS 2008

Last winter I attended the Michigan Brewer's Guild Winter Beer Festival, where I spent the day sampling dozens of local winter brews along with my good buddy Ray and his lovely wife. At some point whilst sampling the Tres Blueberry Stout from Dark Horse Brewing Company, the conversation turned, as conversations between Fellow Yellow Geeks often do, to Lotusphere; and (more to the point) sessions we have attended.

We both agreed that the "best" sessions had several things in common:

• The presenters were comfortable and familiar with the topic.
• The presenters cared about the audience's concerns.
• The presenters had some passion about their topic.
• The presenters included real world information.

I've attended some sessions where the topic sounded boring; but the presenter hit all four of the above points and the session turned out great. By the same token, I've also attended sessions that sound like they are going to be really cool; but the presenter missed on the above four points, and the session ended up sucking.

The conversation continued to meander along the path of presentations, and eventually we started discussing what we thought would be good sessions for the next Lotusphere.

One of the ideas we came up with was triggered some time after discussing the wildly successful Worst Practices session, co-presented by Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney. (In case you weren't there, this was hands down the most attended session ever)

The conversation had drifted on to development stuff: I was in the middle of a very animated explanation of some truly geeky code I was working on when commented about how it would make a good session. Things just clicked into place from there. I've come up with two "working" titles for the session idea, I'm just not sure which one would be better:

You can't do that with Notes!

-or -

Notes: Yeah, it does that too.

The idea is to present real world examples of truly cool things that have been done with Notes/Domino, things that are outside the realm of what most "normal" people would consider possible with Notes/Domino. Things like:

• Real Time PDF generation from DB2 data, formatted with XML/XSL, presented to a web client
• Text-Messaging / Polling / Binary Downloads for Mobile Phones
• Embedding Asteroids in Sametime (not Notes per se, but close enough)
• The list goes on and on....

Basically the kinds of things that would be good candidates are things that are truly cool, unique, or even bizarre. Things that in and of themselves would probably not warrant their own session; but are still worthy of presenting. Think of this as sort of a Show-n-Tell Thursday on Steroids.

This is where I need your help. I can't do this all on my own (well, I probably could, but it would make for a pretty boring session). I need your examples of these kind of things. If you'd like your example to be considered, please send me your abstracts as quickly as possible. I should probably put together a submissions database, but for now email will do. I'll go through all the submissions I get, and (along with some help from friends) pick out as many as I can squeeze into a Lotusphere2008 session, and (along with some help) try to present them in a session it at Lotusphere 2008.