Complexity of the tasks being performed  Degree of automation  Size of the user community  Business value  Creativity and innovation of design

We also wanted this to be as open and independent as possible. The very last thing we wanted to do was make this into a pure marketing event since that would distract from the true goal. And besides, there are bigger and bluer companies that are doing that sort of thing for Lotusphere.

To try and keep this as independent as possible, Teamstudio would fund the contest with big prizes for the winners, but a select group of people from the Lotus community would be the judges. Luckily it's not hard to find those in the blogsphere and we very quickly had a great group ready to go: Joe Litton, Bruce Elgort, Julian Robichaux, Bill Buchan and myself.

We wanted to be able to hold a special event in January at Lotusphere, since that would give us even more opportunity to get the community excited about these cool apps (not that the Lotusphere crowd needs much to get them excited).

Unfortunately, we got the idea in October. The short window between October and January didn't give us much time to pull this off, especially since we were relying completely on the submitters to do all the work -- building great applications and telling us about them.

So with that, Teamstudio President Ian Smith, posted a quick note to our blog, http://www.governancefornotes.com, posing the idea for a contest to test the waters and see what others thought.

The judging
Fast forward to January, when the judges found themselves sifting through an astonishing 41 entries. Each and every one was a great example of the kinds of things you can do with Notes and Domino. We saw everything from CRM applications to corporate Intranet applications to automation for everything from home inspections to sending surveys.

In fact the number and quality of the submissions far surpassed our expectations, which made the judging process extremely challenging. And when I say difficult, this isn't just something that a contest judge is supposed to say, but I can honestly say I was blown away by the quality of both the submission write-ups and the applications that they were describing.

We always say how great Notes is at doing this stuff, but to actually be looking at 41 unique apps is a testament to that and it's really exciting. All that made the judging extremely difficult, to the extent that there were ten applications that came within one point of the eventual five finalists shown in Table A.