First thing we saw, and heard, at the opening session was an invigorating opener by the Blue Man Band. They were followed by new Lotus General Manager, Bob Picciano, at his first Lotusphere welcoming everyone, and telling us a little about Lotus's success over the last couple of years or so.

He claimed 12,036 new customers since the launch of Notes 8, and 16 consecutive quarters of growth, but he did point out that IBM's 4th quarter figures weren't yet out. I think we'll see that when they are out, they'll show some downturn, just as everything else in the economy has taken a bit of a dip, too.

There was some evidence of that dip at Lotusphere too. While the number of customer organisations was apparently up 2%, I think the number of attendees was down a little. There were less people down the Product Showcase, and often I'd see booths with their staff just talking among themselves.

However, most of the business partners I spoke with, while confirming that they'd been quieter than normal, indicated that the people they did speak to were serious, and good leads were taken. Plus, there was the whole American President inauguration thing going on at the same time and Editor Dave was probably right about that affecting attendance.

But what you really want to hear about is what new and cool things to expect over the coming months. So, let's review the announcements that were made by Lotus. While there were few really Earth-shattering ones, there were a lot, and some pretty interesting ones, too.

Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5
As you probably already know, Notes and Domino 8.5 shipped just before Lotusphere opened, so there was a lot of talk and a lot of sessions about the cool new features and functions.

Given that the feature set of 8.5 is well known and there have been pretty extensive public betas out during 2008, all I'm going to do here is take a moment to recap the major ones.

Domino 8.5 features the ID Vault, which stores client ID files on the server, and can pass them back up to the client when passwords are forgotten, or the ID file on the client is missing or damaged. No longer does the master copy of the ID file sit on the users workspace, vulnerable to loss, damage or misuse.

DAOS - Domino Attachment Object Store - provides a server attachment management tool that's not just for mail. It enables duplicate attachments to be stored singly and not in their source databases, making for significant reductions in disk requirement and also reductions in backups size and run time, as the attachments don't need to get backed up over and over again.