Review of Lotusphere 2010

Last week, I was very fortunate to attend Lotusphere in Orlando – and it was not just because of the weather.  For starters, this was my first official Lotus event and I was looking forward to being part of a recognized high-quality event.  It also presented me with a golden opportunity to learn about innovative solutions, network with fellow peers, and discover new trends.  So for what it’s worth, here is my review.

E-mail archiving is everywhere

There were at least ten different vendors at the event offering e-mail archiving.  I am not surprised since e-mail has captured the attention of the media, executive management, U.S government, industry analysts, and IT surveys.  I managed to speak to most of these vendors and tried to identify the differences between the various offerings.  It all came down to user interface, references and scalability.  IONET Software (all the way from New Zealand who flew 27 hours for the event) had a neat simple user interface, Extracomm from the Toronto area seemed to have a solid reference base, and Symantec claimed scalability (measured in number of mailboxes).      

The perfect storm – it’s not just about e-mail

One of the reasons executive management takes e-mail archiving to heart is the challenge of eDiscovery.  As I indicated last month, when it comes to eDiscovery readiness there is much more than e-mail.  It’s about anything stored electronically – statements, transaction reports, documents, letters, databases, audio/video files, images, etc.  It is not me saying this…read Rule 26(a) to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP).

Most of the vendors at Lotusphere who touted eDiscovery used it only in the context of e-mail.  A couple of vendors went beyond e-mail including EMC (thanks to their acquisition of Kazeon).  This will change at next year’s Lotusphere.

Quickr is taking off

We all like (or pretend to like) collaboration – wikis, blogs, social media, file sharing, documents, etc.  Lotus Quickr seems to be a pretty good team collaboration suite for helping users share content.  On the surface, it looks very competitive to Microsoft’s SharePoint.  In 2010, it will be interesting to see if Quickr takes market share away from SharePoint and if companies will really migrate their documents to the Quickr platform.

Just like with any collaboration suite, companies will need to address the challenges around lifecycle management, scalability, and integrating with other corporate content buried in enterprise content management (ECM), records management (RM) and information archiving suites.  Alfresco made an announcement at the event to address some of these challenges and Infosys seemed to have an innovative solution to bridge the gap between Quickr and ECM systems.  For a nominal fee, IBM should be able to address some of these challenges as well.

I will make sure my next year’s budget includes a trip to Lotusphere.  In the meantime, please let me know what you thought of Lotusphere 2010.

Comments

[Peter Smith]

Thanks for the mention Tamir. And due to the other content in your post, I should also mention that our archiving product (http://www.ionetsoftware.com/archiving) also archives Quickr (in fact any Notes Database). So hopefully, we'll be in a good position as more people migrate to Quickr and their Places fill up.....

Cheers

Peter Smith
IONET

[Marten]

Hi, Symantec can not archive unpersonal mail files, so mail-in databases.

[Tamir Sigal]

Peter,
You are welcome. Regarding Quickr, I am not yet convinced Lotus will take market share away from SharePoint. Obviously, you have the anti-Microsoft guys however for good or bad, Microsoft owns the desktop. The price point for products like SharePoint and Alfresco will force Lotus to give Quickr away for free and have a low implementation cost. It will be an interesting year.