What it's all about.

Lotusphere 2008 is now wrapped up. Even as the closing session was wrapping up Disney personnel were on site beginning the process of removing every trace that the conference happened. By some time tomorrow they will begin setting up the signs and booths and chairs and screens for the next conference.

I think this year I finally get it. What the whole message is about... collaboration. I know that it might seem stupid to say that... of course it's about collaboration... Lotus Notes/Domino is software built for collaboration... but it goes beyond that Lotusphere is about the collaboration that exists between the administrators, developers, consultants, vendors, bloggers, journalists and Lotus folks who come here every year... and collaboration is not a one way street.... it requires everyone to be engaged.... to give back to the community... and I haven't been giving back the way I should.

I've never seriously thought about starting a blog before. I've read many of the blogs in the Lotus blogging community and I'm proud to call the people who write them my friends. But I always felt I didn't have enough interesting to say. The administrators and developers who participate in the community, the people who present in the best practices track at Lotusphere are seriously talented and I feel very intimidated about my lack of technical depth when I'm around them but I have worked for over 20 years in small businesses, the past 15 for my current employer, where a part of my job is to be the "Lotus Guy" - a roll that has encompassed - administration, development, management and evangelism - so I know something about the pains and problems of small to medium businesses (SMBs).

SMBs - are a market that IBM has generally never really had a handle on and one that Lotus Notes was not initially focused on.... but many of us in SMBs could see the strength of the Lotus blend of email, calendaring, document centric databases and rapid application development.

IBM's definition of a small to medium business is anything under 10,000 employees. That range cannot be treated as a monolithic group. For purposes of discussion here I'm talking an order of magnitude lower - businesses with 1000 employees or less.

SMBs have unique issues and resource constraints. They get by with less and individually have much less of a voice within the community.... but there are a lot of us and we've got important things to say.

SMBs are much more likely to be supported by a single administrator and possibly only one developer. There may be a single person who fills both rolls or there may be a much larger reliance on outside support and development resources. It's also more likely that the Notes Developer and Domino Administrator in a SMB are covering several different jobs and have less opportunity to focus and increase their skills.

SMB personnel are also more likely to be isolated without local support community. They may be the only Notes / Domino shop in town or may not have a local users group to fall back on for advice.

My hope is to turn this blog into a place where the SMB community can be heard. A place where an on line SMB community can be formed that will allow us to create an SMB focused users group - get a BOF session on the schedule to meet and get more SMB specific sessions on track.

One of the primary new announcements in this year's opening general session was Lotus Foundations - a new class of products aimed at businesses with less than 500 employees. This announcement tied to the announcement last week of their acquisition of Net Integration Technologies - a company with a track record supporting the SMB market. Hopefully this signifies a new focus for IBM on those of us in the lower end of the user count. We'll all be waiting hopefully... but we need to push back and provide feedback on what we expect. We don't want to be pidgeonholded into a Windows only ghetto or be asked to give up features we've grown to expect in the full product.

Over the next few days I'll work on some technical and organizational tasks... in the mean time contact me if you have ideas about what you'd like to see from IBM Lotus for your small business. If you are a consultant who works with SMBs please share this site and ask them to contact me with their feedback.

Let's collaborate!