Vendor showcase
Some people come to Lotusphere just to walk the vendor showcase and learn about the breadth and depth of the Notes and Domino aftermarket. For those people, this year was not disappointing. With well over 150 vendor pedestals, the Notes add-on community is obviously alive and well. [At a minimum of $6,000 a pop, that also means well over a million dollars to Lotus in revenue from business partners interested in marketing their products. -- DG]

While I did hear people complain that the giveaways weren't as good as in years past (Puh-leaseeee! You spend $1400 to get in and you're worried about a T-shirt? Get a life!), there were some innovative products being demonstrated.

Globalware Computing (at http://www.gc.com) demonstrated a server-based version of it Notes to Palm computer synchronization software and TeamStudio (at http://www.teamstudio.com) was showing their new product designed to increase the re-use of standardized LotusScript library source code. Along with the major vendors like Sun, IBM and Compaq showing the latest in chest-thumping server hardware, there was enough to keep everyone busy and thinking about new ways of using Lotus Notes.

Notes certification issues
I was able to spend a few hours with the hard working folks from Lotus Education. The certification labs were extremely busy -- wait times of two or more hours to take a test were not unusual. There was also a lab for learning how to use JavaScript in R5 that was very popular. Most of the people who took the time to do the 45-minute tutorial mentioned that it had definitely inspired them to learn more about JavaScript when they got back home.

There was plenty of material available on upgrading R4 certifications to R5 and some of R5 exams had gone to a status of gold. In the words of one Loti involved in the certification process, "The product hasn't been finalized or shipped and the course materials aren't available but we've got the exams done -- not too bad." Not too bad indeed, methinks.

This is not your father's Notes Client.
As mentioned earlier, DominoPower magazine received an exclusive briefing from Iris on the new Notes client. This briefing discussed some of the goals for the new client as well as some of the other considerations that went into its design.

Overall the new Notes client is designed to be your universal information application. The new Notes client should allow you to quickly and easily find, share, and go back to the information that you need for your job whether its on the Web, in a Notes database, in a coworker's calendar, in an email message or hiding in an NNTP newsgroup.

If you're a current Notes user, the most striking aspect of the new client that you'll notice right away is the lack of a Notes desktop to access the your data with. It's still there but you may not ever need to work with it again. The Notes client has been extensively redesigned to be more "browser-like". This is accomplished with familiar UI elements like Forward, Back, Reload and Stop. The client alsouses Bookmark', shown in Figure A, to return to commonly used locations. Any time information is of interest to you, you can drag a marker to the left side of the screen where bookmarks are stored.