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Each month I outline different things that can help you to use IBM Lotus products to really enhance your intranet offerings. This month, I want to encourage you to use another tool, the IBM Lotus user conference Lotusphere.

Lotusphere is held every year during the end of January in Orlando, Florida. Lotusphere is IBM Lotus' conference dedicated to all of their Lotus software offerings. This is also where Lotus generally makes its big announcements of the year. For example, the unveiling of two new products, Quickr and Connections, were the biggies last year.

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But make no mistake, this show isn't just a giant marketing spiel, it's one that I would argue has more benefits and value for an attendee than pretty much any other conference I've been to. There's a slew of information, great networking opportunities and maybe even a little bit of fun.

Technical Information

The strength of Lotusphere is probably the vast amount of technical knowledge that you can glean from breakout sessions. There are five official tracks, each covering a different type of information:

Futures and Innovations -- This track discusses upcoming technologies, new product releases and directions that Lotus is looking to for the future. This track is great for people in charge of system architecture or managing your environments. It's also good for administrators and developers who want to know what the future holds.

Application Development -- This is exactly what you think it is. There are sessions on everything development related. Whether you are a new developer in Notes to an advanced code-slinger building composite applications, you will find great information here.

Planning and Managing Your Collaboration Infrastructure -- This is primarily for your administrators and system architects. The sessions here go in-depth on all of the back-end features of the Lotus products as well as security and architecture.

Best Practices -- These sessions focus on the best of the best no matter whether you are interested in development or administration. The best way to craft a GUI, the best way to web-enable applications, the best way to set up your Sametime environment. You will find some of the absolute strongest content here.

Customer Case Studies -- These are for your management types (although techies can benefit from it too.) Basically these sessions showcase some of the best success stories from customers. You'll find out what Lotus products various companies implemented and how it helped their business. You can get tons of great ideas to help further your business.

Getting your hands dirty

One of the other innovations that have really enhanced Lotusphere the past couple of years has been the inclusion of Hands-on Sessions. These are lab sessions where you actually get to sit down with hardware and work through various training sessions. Some people aren't as good just sitting in a lecture, they need to touch and play with the stuff. They need to be able to ask questions. Well that's what these labs provide.

These two hour sessions have some of the biggest experts in the Lotus field teaching you how to actually configure a server or code a solution. This year you'll be able choose from over 15 labs and try everything from implementing AJAX in a Notes web application, to customizing the look and feel of Quickr.

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