My favorite thing was the posters with scrambled letters that keep coming together in different configurations.  There was one about sexy witches and another about ill regarded lizards.  Andrew swears it was all in my head.  Did anybody else notice these?

Anyway, beyond the swirling letters, we had Patrick Stewart (think: Captain Picard) doing some really wonderful Shakespeare, and Ambuj Goyal and crew talking about and demonstrating Lotus Workplace stuff.  Some of this was very underwhelming, such as the way you could surface a Domino app, if it had been developed for the web, into Websphere Portal.  It was a bit hard to see how this was different than using an IFRAME, although the automated ability to take related data and feed to another portlet was worth something.  

The best  news, which I had already heard, but which was still very good news, was that from 6.5.1 on,  all the different Lotus products (Notes/Domino/SameTime/QuickPlace) are being released simultaneously, and QA will test them together.  This is a huge improvement over the existing situation, where new releases of Domino won't necessarily support QuickPlace, or you need different versions to run QuickPlace and SameTime, so they can't run on the same server.  Very good news, indeed.

The most impressive demo came in the last two minutes, when they show the new rich client surfacing a Domino app with tabbed tables and sections and all the other standard Notes stuff.  Very cool!  Of course, we now have to wait and see how complete it is, and what happens with extensions or LotusScript, etc.

Overall, I am very optimistic about the Notes/Domino future within the Lotus Workplace strategy, but I am less confident that IBM is really on board.  They still seem to think that people have been clamoring for J2EE, and I wish they could differentiate between the cart and the horse.

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