All in all, it was pretty good. But how about Sametime next year, Lotus?

Ask the Developers
The conference finished with a round of Ask the Develpers, an old favorite somewhere between a friendly Q&A and throwing fruit at people in the stockades.

Remember that afternoon you spent banging your head against the screen over a 64K limit on a DbLookup? Remember weeping at the lack of an Intellisense equivalent in the IDE when coding custom procedures and functions? Remember all those lovely little quirks that turn your five-minute development or administration task into a four-hour struggle?

Well, at Ask the Developers, you walk into a room at the end of this conference, and come face-to-face with the people who built it all. There they are, up on stage, ready to answer the questions and take the bile. Perhaps I exaggerate a tad--the audience was a bunch of kittens, really.

Like most people in the room, I sat back and let other people do the questioning. The questions and complaints varied in quality and relevance. Here are some of the good ones:

• Why the 64K limit on lookups? Come on, guys, we can't wait for the next release for this one! Lift it!;

• Let us use views like spreadsheets by editing fields like cells and copying their contents in the view;

• Fix the appearance of tabbed tables on the Web. Many people aren't using Domino for the client. It's going out onto the browsers, and look and feel is very important;

• What about a table class in LotusScript?

• Allow NSF size limits to replicate over clusters.

Then there were some other very interesting ones. Apparently there was a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) in 4.x that performed the comparison of two documents. It was used by the replication process and someone at Lotus forgot to pack it away out of sight. Well, in R5, someone did just that, and those developers in-the-know complained about its absence.

The Lotus folk said they would consider putting it back out there again. Yes, that would be good.

Apparently, you can also access a document attachment by URL, even if you can't access the document, provided you have the name of the attachment and the document ID. Hmmm, interesting, but I wonder how you would get your hands on the document ID in the first place.

Then there was a question that reflected the asker's desire to hear his own voice over the conference PA. The good-natured Lotus folks smiled, said "We will take that on board," and gave their best Clintonesque I-feel-your-pain look.

Complaints and suggestions
Lotus people: check out Glen Salmon's demonstration on EI (Enterprise Integration) in "LotusScript for Code Junkies." I thought this looked a lot better than the demonstration in the keynote presentation.

This might sound picky, but the keynote is attended by a lot of decision makers, not all of whom are Domino fans. Look and feel is very important to them. I just felt that the keynote demonstration could have looked a bit better.