Pipe Dream: Custom Apps offered by LotusLive

I was daydreaming during Cavanaugh’s opening session at IamLUG. Nothing against his speech… I was just hoping for more of a William Wallace speech.

Ed: “My Yellow Sons and Daughters, I am Ed Brill”

Yellow person: “Ed Brill is seven feet tall”

Ed: “Yes, I’ve heard! And if he were here, he’d consume Microsoft with fireballs from his eyes…and bolts of lightning from his arse! I AM Ed Brill! And I see, a whole army of my people.”

Sorry… that’s where my mind was at the moment. But then I saw a slide about LotusLive and I started dreaming about the “cloud.” The LotusLive product hosts collaboration applications like Lotus Sametime, Lotus Notes, and Connections. These applications are core Lotus products but what about the real “strength” behind Lotus (for the past 10+ years)? Custom applications.

I quickly popped into my old “There’s an app for that” mindset. I thought how great it would be if Lotus allowed for custom applications to be selected and added by customers into their LotusLive environment. Like the Apple App store. The applications would obviously have to go through a vetting process like Apple Iphone applications. I can’t imagine the process would be cheap or easy.

Wouldn’t it be great if IBM presented LotusLive to a company and said “We have this great online store full of custom applications. With one click of a button you can have this IdeaJam application installed in your environment. Check out the HR tools section of the store… it has many applications to fit your needs.”

It’s a pipe dream… but that’s where my head during Kevin’s speech.

p.s. I loved IamLUG. I hope they do it again. I’ve attended one Lotusphere and it was overwhelming. IamLUG was perfect.

EDIT: Nathan Freeman posted something similar in his popular blog and folks seemed to like it.