ILUG
went off very well last week, and that is a credit to the team who spent
so much time setting it up - hats off to Paul Mooney, Bill Buchan, Warren
Elsmore, Rob Novak, Julian Woodward, Kitty Elsmore, Matt White, Eileen
Fitzgerald, Tom Duff and all the crew. There were hundreds of attendees
(from 24 countries), the speakers were great, the organisation was brilliant,
but more than that they delivered a relaxed and friendly event that had
the "Lotusphere buzz" that is so hard to generate outside Orlando.
RIM were Platinum (that's the highest
level) ILUG Sponsors again, in other words they really helped make ILUG
happen. They also sent key people to Dublin including Valerie Wang, Jen
Ortiz and Lizzie Hancock, Senior Manager Technical Marketing EMEA. For
me that's pretty hard evidence of RIM's stated commitment to the IBM Lotus
community and they too are due some applause.
Valerie Wang, Product Manager for IBM
technologies at RIM, presented "Taking Lotus Collaboration beyond
the office on your
BlackBerry Smartphone". Valerie underlined the
close relationship between RIM and IBM and outlined how they are mobilising
the Lotus range of collaboration tools. As at Lotusphere Valerie emphasised
the value of going beyond messaging to make your enterprise apps mobile
and gave some good pointers to successful development. Valerie also covered
the forthcoming BES 4.1.6 release - including the increased use of Sametime
presence, emoticons and support for Sametime 8.
Jen Ortiz, RIM Global Technical Account
Manager, and Valerie also took part in the "Speedsponsoring"
- The Idea: Each sponsor presents on one cool thing in a five minute timed
demo - then repeats it 16 times as a new audience clusters round! The Result:
A sort of manic double-speed IT streetmarket and a lot of fun. Jen and
Valerie presented a neat little BES tool called "Pusher" that
lets you centrally emplace and manage a browser bookmark icon on all the
BlackBerrys in your organisation.
One last bonus was that Jen also had
the new
BlackBerry Bold which looked very cool. Hope to have more about
the Bold soon.