I had the chance and pleasure to attend LCTY 2011, Rheinland Nachlese last thursday. LCTY 2011, Rheinland Nachlese is the small brother / sister of the edcom LS review in Munic earlier this week.

Small only regarding the timeframe. LCTY Rheinland attempts to put all the great content into one single day while edcom is a two day event. This might give you a bit of the feeling you have at Lotusphere, because you have to decide which session you attend and depending on your decision, you maybe missing some other great content that is is presented at the same time.

Every year, timetoact has an impressive lineup of speakers.

Ed Brill, Ron Sebastian, Angela Blasberg, Daniel Nashed, Stephan Wissel just to name a few.

After a short introduction by Otto Förg and Felix Binsack where they showed some tweets that popped up on Twitter during LS 11 OGS shouting for “DEMO, DEMO, DEMO!!! “, Ron Sebastian took the stage for the keynote. His presentation skills are tremendous. I love to listen to him and watch him doing demoes of all the new stuff. Everything works smoothly from my point of view. If this had been the OGS at LS, it would have been less boring.

After the keynote, the audience had the choice to attend sessions in different tracks ( administration, development, vendors … ).

I decided to spend most of my time in the development track. Stephan Wisssel, who came all the way from Singapore, presented an excellent session on how to enhance XPages to deal with CSV files and to get content out of a RDBMS and display the data on an XPage.

Another session, also by Stephan Wisssel, was about how to combine the best of two worlds, Domino and Sharepoint.

Both session were at an advanced level regarding your skills as a developer. Again, as an advice. If you have not started to look into XPages ( and Java ), do it NOW!!

Angela Blasberg presented on Extensibility API and the Extension Library ( available on OpenNTF ).

I missed the “Hacking the Designer” session while hanging around in the vendors area talking to Daniel Nashed and Stephan Wissel.

After a long day and a view on IBM’s future Software strategy, all attendees were invited for a dinner.

The Maritim Hotel at Duesseldorf International Airport was a great place for this conference. Last year the Swissotel in Neuss was the venue. I cannot see any big difference between these locations, so it is not easy to answer the question in the final evaluation, which venue was better.

During the final speech, Felix Binsack asked the audience if LCTY should be a two days event the next year. There were only a few handsigns for this option.

If you not have the chance to attend Lotusphere, you should attend the LCTY 2012 either in Munic or in Duesseldorf depending on your location.Expect a great line-up of speakers presenting excellent content in an appropriate location.