Speakers - By Name

Bob Balaban (Looseleaf Software LLC)

Bob Balaban has been a fixture in the Notes/Domino community for many years. He was a Lotus/Iris developer working on Notes in the mid-1990s (creator of the LotusScript and Java back-end classes), and again from 2005-2008. He has been a consultant and Lotus Business Partner for many years, as well as a frequent author. workshop leader and speaker. Bob has presented over 40 sessions at various Lotuspheres, in addition to speaking at many Lotus Advisor and View events. He is the author of numerous articles on diverse development topics in Notes and Domino. He can be reached at: bbalaban AT gmail DOT com, his blog can be found at http://www.bobzblog.com.

Bob Picciano (IBM)

As general manager for Lotus and WebSphere Portal Software, Bob Picciano has oversight for an extensive portfolio of collaboration tools designed to empower people to be more effective, responsive and innovative within the context of the work they do. It includes email, calendar, instant messaging, electronic forms, web conferencing, portals, mashups, team spaces, business dashboards, document management, social software and software as a service. He also serves as a member of IBM’s Performance Team and the IBM Integration and Values team, two select communities of executives who provide guidance across IBM on various operational, business, and strategic issues.

Bruce Elgort (Elguji)

Bruce Elgort is the president of Elguji Software, the creators of the hugely popular IdeaJam collaboration site for the Lotus Community. His other megahits include co-founding the Lotus Notes open source community OpenNTF.org and hosting the Taking Notes Podcast with the famed Julian Robichaux. He has been working with Lotus Notes and Domino since 1993 and has consulted to some of the worlds largest Notes and Domino customers. Bruce is an exceptionally engaging and energetic speaker who has spoken at Lotusphere, Advisor Devcons, Lotusphere Comes to You and is also a frequent guest at Notes user groups across the USA. He even has a dog named Domino Designer and also loves to play and teach percussion in his spare time.

Chris Miller (Connectria)

Chris is certified in administration across the Lotus brands to the latest versions, with also being a Certified Lotus Instructor in them. He runs the IdoNotes blog, podcast and brand and speaks at technology conferences and seminars all over including The View's Admin conferences, Upgrade Seminars, Lotusphere, ILUG and more.

Chris also runs: { Link } - the largest catalog of Twitter tools and podcast
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David Leedy (LotusNotebook.com)

David Leedy has been developing Notes Applications for the past 15 years. Over the years, he's written several articles for the magazine, Lotus Advisor, and now maintains a blog at www.lotusnotebook.com. He also produces the "Notes In 9" ScreenCast, the only video show dedicated to Lotus Notes with a particular focus on XPage tutorials.

John Head (PSC)

John is a Chicago-based consultant and rainmaker. He currently works full-time with PSC Group LLC, where he has served in positions of increasing authority, and currently as Director of Enterprise Collaboration, since 2000. Throughout his career he has focused on the development and implementation of enterprise collaboration solutions. At PSC he served as the architect and team leader for many of the enTouch Frameworks which are PSC-proprietary, ready-to-use business templates. For this, and other work he has been recognized with IBM Lotus and IBM Beacon awards and is a regularly-featured speaker at Lotusphere and other IBM and Microsoft technology conferences and user groups.

John focuses on technology solutions that include integration of Notes/Domino with Microsoft technology, Document Generation using OOXML and ODF, Lotus Symphony development, and enterprise social networking. He also has a tendency to twitter about games, music, food, and his love of college (american) football.

Kathleen McGivney (Sakura Consulting)

Kathleen is the owner of Sakura Consulting, a software services consultancy based in New York City. She has over 12 years of experience with Lotus messaging and collaboration products. Her areas of expertise include Lotus Notes and Domino architecture and development, Sametime deployment, and Domino and Portal integration, with a strong focus on Domino clustering, AdminP, and other advanced Domino administration topics. She also has extensive experience with Sametime administration, Quickplace and Quickr, WebSphere Portal Server, and Lotus Connections. She is a Principal CLP in both System Administration and Application Development. She is a regular speaker at Lotusphere, Lotus Premium Support Seminars and the View's Admin conferences and also has spoken at several Lotus user group meetings worldwide. Kathleen has co-authored two IBM Redbooks, Domino R5 Clustering with IBM eSeries and Netfinity Servers and Deploying QuickPlace.

Luis Benitez (IBM)

Luis Benitez is a Consulting Social Software Specialist. Luis loves the whole concept of learning through socializing. Luis helps companies understand and implement a social software solution, specifically Lotus Connections, all over the world. Luis enjoys evangelizing the business value of social software and also works with enterprises by sharing best practices on social software adoption. Luis has been with IBM for 7 years and has been working with social software since early 2007 and has spoken at various conferences such as Software University, Lotusphere Comes to You, and the 2009 Portal Conference in San Diego.

Mitch Cohen (Colgate-Palmolive)

Mitch Cohen is Manager Messaging & Collaboration for Colgate-Palmolive. He has 10+ years experience with global implementations of Notes/Domino, Sametime, Quickr and Lotus Connections. Mitch holds the record for most slides ever presented at a Lotusphere session with a 400 slide presentation delivered at LS09.

Paul Mooney (Bluewave)

When not slaying users or developers, this wee Irish lad likes to be a geek, learn American English pronunciation and crochet. He also works with Domino administration. A lot.

Rob Ingram (IBM)

Rob Ingram is a Senior Product Manager for Lotus Sametime based in Westford, MA. In this role, he works with customers, business partners and IBM teams to define the product strategy and drive the product requirements for the Sametime product family. He spends an equal amount of his day presenting to customers and listening to and prioritizing and translating their product needs to the Sametime development team. Rob has spent the majority of his career dedicated to messaging and collaboration software, most recently in the Lotus Domino team. He is originally from Scotland and holds both engineering and MBA degree.

Rob Novak (SNAPPS)

President of SNAPPS, collaboration strategist and architect. Rob Novak, or LotusRockStar as he is known in the wild, has a tendency to go on and on about cool things his team does with Lotus software. So much so that a few years ago, he got the hint and started serving alcohol with his sessions. It seems to keep your attention and keep you in the room, at least it works on Bill Buchan. Anyway, Rob brings to bear lots of boring business degrees and 16 years experience as a developer, administrator, consultant, and bartender to his sessions with the objective of delighting and educating his audience. He'll generally give away a mint's worth of free software. All he asks in return is, please be kind to your servers! Find him on Facebook as /RobNovak, Twitter and his blog as LotusRockStar, and by email (does anyone use that anymore?) at rnovak@snapps.com.