I’m here at Lotusphere, the first conference of the year. I confess to being impressed by what I’ve seen so far. Lotus puts on a good show—the best—great special effects and entertainment. The overture to the keynote session was a large gang of rock star impersonators, including a faux Elton John, a faux David Bowie and quite a few other fauxs. They sang a series of rock numbers then they all got together on stage to sing Pinball Wizard;

He ain’t got no distractions,
Can’t hear those buzzers and bells,
Don’t see lights a flashin’,
Plays by sense of smell,
Always gets a replay,
Never tilts at all,
That deaf, dumb and blind kid,
Sure plays a mean pinball.

Not much of a collaborator that deaf, dumb and blind kid, so I’m not exactly sure why singing about him was the appropriate overture for Lotus, because Lotus is very much about collaboration these days—and they have technology to prove it. The Lotus portfolio now consists of five products; Lotus Notes, Sametime, WebSphere Portal, Quickr and Connection.

Unless you’re prescient you won’t know what Quickr and Connection are. Let me deal with these two new offerings first:

Lotus Quikr is about Web 2.0 era information sharing. On the surface it looks good (thus far I’ve only seen a demo). The idea is simply for the user to be able to make their information available and for them to pull useful information together. Good interface, simple but effective capabilities.

I’m less certain about Lotus Connection. What Lotus has done is assemble all the social networking capabilities it thinks are useful under a single umbrella. So you can tag information (good idea), register your profiles (as on MySpace but with a corporate slant, of course), blog, create wikis and build ad hoc communities. What I’m not sure about here is whether the software scales down—to be compelling in smaller companies. All the advantages that IBMLotus trumpeted in the press release were large company advantages like discovering “new people and resources with similar interests”. Pretty much all of these capabilities have been tested by use within IBM for quite a while. They’ll probably work reasonably well in GE and General Motors too.

If one question on your mind is what happened to Lotus Workplace, you’ll be relieved to know (if, like me, you were impressed by it), that it has not been sent to the knacker’s yard. It has been merged with WebSphere Portal and is now, strangely enough, called WebSphere Portal. I’d be happier if IBM didn’t call it “portal”, because I think it gives the wrong impression. If you put it together with Lotus Notes and Sametime and the two new Lotus products, then what you get is what I referred to in SOA for Dummies as Presentation Services or what could legitimately be called a “Presentation Platform”.

No other product or product portfolio can make as broad a claim as Lotus in this area. And as regards SOA, Lotus is actually providing all five products as “SOA ready” services, while at the same time integrating them together in a very tight manner. It feels like they’ve squared the circle, because (Lotus claims) you can buy any one of these as an independent product and it will still deliver its set of core benefits, but if you put them all together, they hold hands like well behaved children and work together.

Now I could write a lot more but, hell, you can be here and experience the Lotusphere atmosphere like any of the 7000 delegates that have come here from all over the world, because Lotusphere, the full show, is also being put on in Second Life—complete with lasers and light shows and irritating doormen who check your badge.

So go to the Second Life website, put your avatar on and seek us out. If you manage to find us there, avatars of Lotus presenters will assure you that Lotus Notes is much improved and growing at something like 30 percent and Lotus Sametime is also going wild. Then they’ll start to rattle on about the new features in the latest releases and when you’ve had too much of this you can go to the bar. There, slumped in the corner, drinking something alcoholic, you’ll see the avatars of various peripatetic analysts. Try to guess which one is me.