Ed Brill

One of the best parts of Lotusphere each year is a little bit of "Lotusphere magic".  There's always a new type of session, format, event, or speaker as part of the event.  While, as Sandra Marcus says, we love all of our speakers equally, for 2009, I am excited to be a part of putting together a very special best practices session at Lotusphere.

The magic on session BP304, "IBM Lotus Notes and Me: Maximizing Personal Productivity with Lotus Notes", is the speakers.  This session will be presented by Eric Mack, creator of eProductivity for Lotus Notes, and David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.  I have been working with the Lotusphere team, Eric, and David's company to put together this session and everything around it.  Eric has been a huge advocate on the power of eProductivity, and when that meshed with his advocacy for the power of Lotus Notes and Lotusphere, we mashed that up into a session that is guaranteed to be pretty special.  

Here's the abstract:

People often talk about Lotus Notes being an "organizational" productivity tool; that's the way Lotus Notes is marketed and it's often the way organizations deploy it -- as a top down solution. Seldom do you hear about Lotus Notes being used for "personal" productivity or knowledge management. As a consequence many users see Notes as a "company" tool and not "their" tool. When tools become "personal," productivity increases and when personal productivity increases so does the productivity of the workgroup and the organization. This session will show both expert and novice Notes users how they can use Notes coupled with proven best practices to make them immediately more productive.

I've mentioned David Allen on the blog before.  Mr. Allen has been described as "one of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity" by Fast Company.  He recently keynoted the Office 2.0 conference and spoke on the power of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology.  His feature in Wired last year showcased the man behind the method in a powerful essay.  In short, Eric's invitation to David to put the two of them on stage at Lotusphere is very exciting to me, and I'm looking forward to a sell-out capacity in their session (which will be scheduled on Monday afternoon the 19th, likely in the last speaking slot of the day...I will introduce the session).

Eric and David will be around the conference for a couple of days before their session, and David will be signing copies of his new book, "Making It All Work" in the product showcase immediately following their session.  We're expecting to see a birds-of-a-feather on the topic of getting things done with Lotus Notes selected as well (it's doing well in the pre-conference preferences voting), which Eric will lead later in the week.

In short, if you are a fan of GTD and want to learn how the inventors and experts put it into practice, you now have a very good reason to attend Lotusphere.  For me personally, this aligns well with one of the longer-term objectives for Notes....combining a focus on organizational collaboration with individual productivity.  You see components of that in Notes 8 with the sidebar, RSS reader, widget support, and Symphony productivity tools...and you'll hear more at Lotusphere about how our development team is thinking about this aspect of Notes.