More thoughts
Anything else? For sure. Here's a few last snippets:

NSFDB2 is dead
NSFDB2 is dead, or at least, it won't be further enhanced. Lotus came to the reluctant conclusion that the performance goals they had (and I believe iSeries was a particular issue) could not be achieved. It makes more sense to invest in the core NSF database code, and further enhance it as the leading platform for unstructured data.

Those who are using NSFDB2 can, of course, continue to use it, but you need to know that it may well not be supported at all on future versions of Domino.

Domino.Doc is also dead
Domino.Doc is also dead. You're being advised to use Quickr at the low end, or you can trade across to a restricted setup of either IBM's Filenet or Enterprise Content management systems. If you use Domino.doc, talk to IBM about what you need to plan for and do.

IdeaJam
Elguji's ever popular IdeaJam (http://ideajam.net) is not just watched closely by the Lotus development teams, but also won both the Best Breakout and CTO awards, and was runner-up in the Best in Showcase Award. If you have ideas for Lotus products, get them onto Ideajam so that the rest of the community can see and vote.

Lotusphere Idol
Lotusphere Idol was won by two students from Nebraska. They gave a session on Agile development with Lotus Symphony, and also appeared on the Gurupalooza stage. Well done, Nate and Matt.

Lotus challenges
I talked, in a one-to-one session, with Doug Hientzmann, Director of Strategy, about the challenges that Lotus sees in the future and how Lotus plan to react. He discussed how current top-down corporate structures are starting to break down. Organizations have pressures to optimize how they work, but there's actually less and less cost-cutting that can be done. That generates completely different pressures, which many organizations are ill-equipped to face.

Lotus sees that they have a job to do in understanding how organizations are going to change, and build tools that will help them meet these new challenges. There's the whole issue of what it takes in large companies of just being an employee, and the fact that so much time is taken up being an employee rather then doing the actual job that's there to be done.

All good things...
And all things, Lotusphere and this article, come to an end. Bob Picciano and Kristen Lauria led off the closing ceremony, with Bob explaining how much he had enjoyed his first Lotusphere. He even apologised for the poor performance of the wireless network showing a utilization graph that explained that we were consuming 45Gbits/sec for quite a lot of Tuesday - even for Lotusphere, that's a lot of bandwidth.

Kristen spoke briefly about the contributions made to the Working Smarter campaign during the show, and showed some of the story bites recorded during the week.

Finally, the last 45 minutes of Lotusphere 2009 were taken up by Ben Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, closing Lotusphere with a song. Or rather, we all closed Lotusphere 2009 with a song, or more accurately, two songs. As part of an amazing 45 minute motivational speech on vision and opportunity, he first picked Eric March from the crowd, and had the rest of us sing Happy Birthday to him.

Ben told Eric, and the rest of us, that none of us would ever forget that moment (indeed; later on Thursday evening as the stragglers relaxed in Kimonos, Eric wandered in, and immediately got another round of Happy Birthday).

Then Ben went on to close Lotusphere by getting us all on our feet and singing Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and in German. We've had some entertaining, strange and challenging closing speakers before, but he was particularly good, and certainly different.

See you all at the 17th Lotusphere, January 17-21, 2010.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.