Richard
I also think X1 looks pretty interesting. When Ray Ozzie calls something cool, it's worth a look. It's tough to compete with the likes of Google and their free desktop search tool. Having access to quick searches of Lotus Notes data would definitely make a difference for some organizations.

I noticed two big changes on the showcase floor. The first is the number of products related to Notes email. It seemed like every other booth was an email virus scanner, spam filter, compliance utility, archive manager, or wireless access tool. Don't let anyone tell you that Notes mail is a niche product anymore.

The other difference from years past is that there's starting to be more tools to integrate Notes and Domino data with Microsoft .Net applications. Proposion seems to have an interesting set of tools that can work in a variety of ways, exposing the data via a native .NET data connector, running ASP.NET pages on a Domino server or exposing Domino data to the Microsoft SQL Reporting Services. And unless I'm mistaken, Microsoft had a formal presence for the second year in a row. Their booth was staffed by Gary Devendorf and Charlie Kaufman, two names that are probably well known to most of you.

Finally, from a "bring something home to the kids" perspective, most of the usual showcase vendors were there with the usual amounts of swag. Percussion software gave away blinking lights and bilious yellow-green t-shirts that were everywhere. HP had the obnoxious flashing/wailing bouncing balls, and many vendors allowed you to sign up for spam with the promise of an Apple IPod. I spent quite a bit of time down in the showcase, and it seemed to me the steadiness of traffic was down just a little from years past, probably due to the changes in the conference session schedule.

Mick
I think the schedule changes worked well. Shorter sessions, and more of them. In previous years, all the sessions have been 75 minutes, with quite a long gap between them. And as most speakers were usually all done at 50 minutes or so, it could mean there was more than an hour to spend before the next session. Ok, you could spend that time in the Showcase. But this year all sessions were 60 minutes flat.

Space was made for Q&A to be taken off-line to another room. And in many of the sessions I went to, that did indeed happen. I myself didn't go to a single session where the speaker was going less than about 50 minutes, and there were one or two that ran some minutes over.

The prize for the most inspired piece of scheduling was Wild Bill Buchan's session on Object Oriented programming in LotusScript. Bill is well known for rarely turning down a party. So 8:30 am on Thursday for a heavy session, after the Universal Island of Adventure evening, was a touch cruel.

Actually, the resulting session was the best I went to this year. It was entertaining from a performance point of view, but also extremely informative. The kind of informative you can use in your first week back at the office afterwards. Bill also offered a prize in form of a bottle of Highland Park Malt Whisky for the best question asked, but failed to actually give it away.