The keynote demonstration also papered over the WAP issue. A transaction needed authorization, and the spotlight was put on Cliff Reeves, playing the manager who has the authority, and his WAP phone. He told us he was able to make the necessary authorization over the phone.

It all looked suspiciously like a presentation written up in Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box (at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000917.html) where the manager uses a phone to simply answer, "Yes." But what happens when you need to do something other than hit a Yes button?

The mobile phone is simply not the interface for driving business applications, especially under WAP. End of rant.

See what's on the slab
You're wasting your money coming here as a developer or administrator if you don't drop by for a look at the labs.

After the warm and fuzzy presentation, this is where you come to see the talk translate into something solid--design, code, and configuration. To boot, you have Lotus' experts, in many cases the developers of the software, there to give demonstrations and answer your questions. For example, I ran into Mary Peterson, Domino Product Manager, Enterprise Integration and Gary Devendorf, Senior Product Manager at Lotus. They're pictured in Figure A.

FIGURE A


I ran into Mary Peterson and Gary Devendorf at a lab station. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The Lotus people are the real stars of the conference. They're very friendly, very helpful, and very approachable. After seven hours on their feet, they still manage to patiently and carefully answer even the most trying of questions.

I walked away from the lab with seven real-life development issues addressed and solved. The conference was worth it just for that.

Other treats could be found in the lab area. You can take that exam you have been putting off (a two-for-one offer was too hard to pass up). You can also pick up plenty of object charts to stick on the wall and display your professional commitment and possible lack of social life.

Breakout sessions
There were plenty of breakout sessions. I attended the application development sessions on the whole, apart from a few strategy sessions and one administrator session doing a deep, bewildering dive into the world of SOCKS proxies (make a mental note to read the name of the session a bit more carefully next time).

The jumpstart sessions on day one were brilliant and required you to make some pretty hard choices: choose between Java or XML, JavaScript or a peek at Websphere. Great sessions such as John Rosky and Joe Pescatello on Integrating Domino with Relational Databases were really more worthy of a rerun than some of the other sessions that were repeated.

As the days went on, the sessions were either Lotus walking through their products (good), Lotus showing how to get some Domino leverage with other technologies and applications (very, very good) and some third parties showing how clever they are (not so good in some cases).

The XML, Java, and Integration sessions were my favorites. A lot of the product walk-throughs were good, but these three are fast becoming the bread and butter of the developer existence.