Here's my recound of Day one at the Advisor Live conference. Click Read More below for all the details...
During the morning's continental breakfast, I had the opportunity to meet Ali Salamatian, a Lotus Notes consultant from CSC:



He's an experienced Notes developer (like myself) who wants to know more about developing J2EE applications using the WebSphere/Rational tools.

I also had the opportunity to speak with Christa Ayre (ne Coleman), whom I've worked with on several of the articles I've had published:

Christa said that there are around 300 people attending this year's conference, and when I last attended an Advisor conference in 1998, there were probably 1000 attendees. Christa said that if I'm interested in speaking, I should contact Liz Olsen this October. (I don't have a picture of Liz yet. Sorry folks!)

Here's Frank Neugebauer, IBM WebSphere guru and all-around cool dude:

Frank and I used to work together at Perot Systems back in 1997. Although few will believe it, I helped Frank learn how to develop Lotus Notes applications way back then. As you can see, my tutelage has been a big factor in helping him achieve the success he enjoys today (yeah, right!). I caught two of Frank's presentations today, WebSphere Application Server 6 - The Next Wave and Understanding the 2005 IBM Rational Development Platform. I may be biased, but I think that Frank is one of the best presenters I've seen. His understanding of his material is amazing, and his command of the audience is exceptional. The only time I felt for Frank was during his second presentation, when he was speaking about the original suite of Rational tools. I got the distinct impression that nobody in attendance had ever used Rational Rose or XDE. But Frank being the great speaker that he is, was able to handle that in stride and moved on to the rebranding of the WebSphere Studio tools, which the audience was more familiar with and did chime in more.

I also caught Larry Whipple's two presentations on J2EE Best and Worst Practices. I think Larry enjoyed talking about the worst practices more, but both presentations were very good. I really need to dig into stuff like Data Access Objects (DAO) and design patters more. Hopefully, my next assignment will give me the opportunity to do just that.

The last presentation I attended was Rob Novak's Sametime Instant Messaging & Web Conferencing for Domino Developers. Rob started off his presentation by stating that both IBM Lotus Instant Messenger and IBM Lotus Team Workplace would be re-re-branded back to their original names of Sametime and QuickPlace. I'll have to check the BP Forum, as I know several business partners have to be ecstatic about this news. Rob showed how chat transcripts can be automatically stored in your mail file in the Notes 7 Beta 4 client. They actually appear in their own view, which is cool. The rest of the material on STLinks and Bots I was already familiar with. (I wrote two articles on Sametime Bots last year for the Advisor.) Rob did a great job and handles the intermittent connectivity issues well.

I met up with fellow DNP member Michael Golden several times throughout the day, this time after he had just checked his e-mail:



Michael has his laptop configured to boot into either Windows or Linux. He confided in me that he only uses Windows for Notes. He also has his own weblog, which I will include a link to later on today.

Last but not least, here's a picture of the Welcome Reception:



Frank and I left for the strip shortly after using up our two drink tickets. I'll have more on our adventures later today. Stay tuned! (And no, bail is not involved.)

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