I've been making some aggressive statements about track planning, and I've been tossing some warning statements about trying over-play the hand on pushing products that don't have following. I can now much more more clear about what's good and what's not. I imported the preliminary session list from the web site into a spreadsheet, and just marked off which sessions fell into which categories.

Keep in mind not all sessions fit in a category as I didn't make a million categories. I'm likely wrong about a couple of these, as I took some guesses, and a couple of these I put in more than one category. Its mean to be a preliminary rough look at the break out.

Here's my count:

41	Designer -- including Xpages and general development strategies that I think you'd use Designer on if you're going to be at Lotusphere.
43	Notes/Domino -- including sessions related to deployment, administration, security, and so on.
30	Portal/Websphere -- including product topics that pretty much assume or require the use of Portal or Webshere
12	Quickr
17	Sametime
9	Connections
8	Bluehouse/SAAS -- several of these were Business or BP day focused sessions
11	Symphony -- including some related to dumping Microsoft office

This could easily be interpreted as "84 Notes/Domino/Designer" if you want to look at it that way.

What's Great:

I've been really impressed by the Application Development track. From what I can see, there is a TON of good content on XPages and Plug-In development that covers introductory level development up through more advance topics. I'd been really pushing hard in suggesting that, and it looks like IBM did it anyway.

The stuff I do see around Portal is much better targeted this year. It looks to me like it goes back to the basics to try the selling process from scratch again in a less threatening and arrogant way. I may even (gulp) attend one or two of these.

What's Not to Love?

I think there's a lot of great stuff here. As this list fleshes out, we'll see more but I have no issues with anything I see. I can't imagine that there will be a single session slot that doesn't have several good choices for those of us tree huggers who focus on the core products, while there's enough content around the new stuff to to begin exploring it if we want.