Coming Soon: Connect 2014 (a.k.a. Lotusphere)

December 16, 2013 Dan Burger

The IBM Connect 2014 conference is coming up next month January 26-30 in Orlando, Florida. For many years this conference was known as Lotusphere, but that changed last year shortly after IBM dropped the Lotus brand. Although the name of the event has changed, the emphasis remains the same. This is all about collaborative software, with a big dose of social media, plus mobile and cloud computing.

Less publicized but still a significant portion of the event is geared toward Notes/Domino development skills, certification testing, and product roadmap insights that include the business partners as well as IBM.

Traditionally, Lotusphere was known as a technical love fest, and it continues to offer hundreds of technical sessions that focus on creating new applications, updating existing applications, delivering a mobile experience, and including perspectives of on premise and in the cloud. Domino and Domino Designer 9.x education will concentrate on features for building Web and mobile applications with XPages, improvements for making applications social, and an examination of new APIs.

But in recent years the education at this conference has broadened the educational opportunities to include business-oriented best practices and business value topics. The speaker list still features the top IBM developers and researches, but also includes business process experts and strategists. The agenda includes 10 educational tracks featuring topics such as: social business, smarter workforce, application development, and infrastructure. A full session preview is available online.

IBM hopes upgrading IBM Notes Clients and Domino Servers to Release 9.0.x will be on the minds of many of the attendees. The IBMers will be discussing the newest features in release 9.0.x and fielding questions about the upgrade process.

Certainly the release of IBM Notes Social Edition 9.0.1 will be showcased with an emphasis on the business value of this messaging and collaboration client and the functional enhancements of social collaboration built in. Expect product demos and a glimpse of what’s ahead in 2014.

Also in the spotlight will be Notes/Domino Social Edition, which was first unveiled at Lotusphere 2012. It has just been released as a public beta and is expected to be generally available in Q1 2013.

Notes Traveler–the Domino mail, calendar, and contacts software for mobile devices–will be another featured product. In 2013, Notes Traveler extended support to Windows Phone, RT, Pro, and BB10 devices, and improved security control and MDM/MAM integration. Learn about these features and where IBM Notes Traveler is headed in the future. There will also be information on a soon to be released work-centered UI, further MDM/MAM integration, and an expanded collaboration suite.

One of the most popular of the educational tracks targets best practices. It is a technical briefing on implementations of social business, mobile, cloud and portal projects that includes tips and techniques with learning from the experiences of others as the focal point.

Blended into Connect 2014 is the Kenexa World Conference. Kenexa, an IBM acquisition in September 2012, is focused on the human resources aspect of collaboration solutions, client experience, social business, and smarter workforce. Session topics include how to attract and keep the best people, develop employee skills, cultivate leaders and capitalize on collective intelligence and analytics.

Also count on more information regarding IBM’s acquisition of Fiberlink, a provider of enterprise mobile management capabilities. Adding Fiberlink is expected to assist organizations optimize the mobile enterprise infrastructure through a set of mobile management and security technologies.