When we get back home, clean out the suitcases, and make friends once again with the pets and family members we left behind, it's time to plan out how we're going to cover all the new topics that caught our attention at the show.

This year is no different. This issue, along with many of our future issues, has nice technical meat that'll satisfy even the most serious Notes and Domino administrator. But this year, we also decided to try something else. I took the company's digital camera down to the show and tried to capture the feel of the show itself. That effort resulted in three articles. The first is "DominoPower's Best of Lotusphere 2001 Awards," a survey of the best, most interesting, and most attention grabbing items of the show. The second article is "Lotusphere exhibits and exhibitionists," a tour of many of the most interesting exhibitors and their show announcements.

The last article is this one, "Lotusphere through the digital lens." In this article, I've tried to capture the feel of Lotusphere itself, from the sessions, through the halls, to what it was like to really be there. For those of you who attended, this will be a fond reminder of great times. And for those of you who didn't manage to get to Orlando, let this be motivation for you to make your reservations for Lotusphere 2002.

Dark rooms, bright ideas
One of our favorite PowerBoard hosts, John Roling, was also at the show. Before I kick off my selection of snapshots, John managed to grab a few pictures I missed. Here are a couple of his highlights:

There are two things I always look forward to at Lotusphere. One is Lotus' announcement of its installed base, and the other is the Wednesday night band. Luckily, this year I was able to get photographic evidence of both.

Figure A shows Al Zollar showing off the mighty, impressive numbers Lotus reached this past year. Lotus tells us they grew from 55 million users to 78 million users in 12 months. This included a record fourth quarter in which sales totaled 10 million seats. News like that make the Lotus faithful want to get up and boogie (not to mention shareholders).

FIGURE A

Al Zollar shows off some mighty impressive numbers. Click picture for a larger image.