A Portal to a Portal

and it's only Thursday.

I've been closeted in a hotel with 100+ techie colleagues from around Europe, participating in an education event that is 100% purely focused on Lotus software.

It's been an eye-opener, and the residential format definitely makes a difference - not having to flog my way through 2 hours of traffic each way, each day, certainly helps.

There have been some really good sessions .... and my own WebSphere Portlet Factory evangelist session which, I'm hoping, was OK - will wait for the feedback forms :-)

I observed that, for some strange reason, presenting to an audience of peers is somewhat more intimidating than presenting to a room full of strangers. I guess it's a true-ism but it was interesting to note how my stress levels increased at 1028 yesterday morning and then dissipated at 1216 ( guess when my session was ).

Either way, I had a great time, and learnt a few more neat things about my favourite tool - I found some great examples on the wiki covering areas such as Quickr and Connections integration using REST - the Quickr sample worked like a dream, although we had some problems with Connections; need to dig into it further today.

Had a great session entitled "What's cool, and where to find it", which was a good way to identify where the wider team go for demos, code, videos, links etc.

I did observe that social networking could lead to less 1-2-1 communication - in answer to a simple question, the answer is starting to become "It's in my Dogear" or "It's in my Cattail" ( Dogear being a shared/social bookmarking service and Cattail being a shared/social/tagging file sharing service ). Still, it's all in the delivery .....

It was also interesting to note how many people are turning to Linux - either because they want to improve their skills, or because the Compiz rotating cube desktop in Ubuntu is just SOOOOO DARN nice.

PS As I write this, I'm just doing an update on Hardy Heron via the hotel's free broadband - apologies to any fellow geeks who are trying to do anything useful on the net this AM, but I'm sure they're all busy sleeping after some sporting event last night ( foolball, iirc ).

So today - more good techie stuff, around WebSphere Portal futures, mashups, Lotus Forms, competitive positioning, Expeditor etc. May need to borrow the TARDIS to get around all the sessions :-)

Will also spend more time with my BlackBerry having finally got connected yesterday - making/taking phone calls is pretty easy, but I'm struggling to text - I used to be able to text one-handed on my old Nokia, but the BB seems to need a two-handed approach, and I'm having to play H&P to get anywhere.

Still, back to coffee and Ubunu .............................