Each entry's combined score could then range up to a maximum of 125 points. What proved most astounding was that the final scores of the top 10 entries were separated by only 10 points!! This speaks, yet again, to the closeness of the competition and the caliber of the entries.

Our top three then presented formal 45 minute online demonstrations of their applications to our panel, walking us judges through the application and explaining the details of the application's architecture, how the application worked, and just what made it special. I think I speak for the entire panel when I say that we were all completely wowed by what we saw (when you can make this panel of judges speechless, that says a lot!).

So without further ado, we bring you the honorable mentions and winners of the 2009 Teamstudio Spotlight Awards -- all of whom deserve a tremendous amount of recognition for their hard work and creativity!

The honorable mentions
Honorable mentions are awarded for those projects which have distinguished themselves, but which weren't quite up to the levels of excellence awarded by our top three winners. The honorable mentions are:

Honorable Mention: UN Workflow Engine
Submitted by Thomas Mayerl and his project team at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime

The way an organization does or doesn't do workflow effectively has a dramatic impact on its development efficiency and the quality of its applications. This workflow engine has been used to dramatically reduce development time and successfully deploy several dozen applications.

As contest judge Joe Litton said, "The UN's workflow engine automated the generation of workflow applications like no other native Notes application we have seen. One of the most impressive features is that the developer does not actually need to write ANY code to generate a complete workflow application. A variety of actions can be automated at each step (validations, running agents, manipulating data) -- far more than just forwarding a document to the next person."

This extremely well-designed and executed application is an example of Notes' and Domino's most powerful and core advantage: Rapid Application Development.

Honorable Mention: eProductivity for IBM Lotus Notes
Submitted by Eric Mack and Ian Armstrong of ICA.COM, Inc.

This application takes David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology for improving time management and productivity and applies it to Lotus Notes. eProductivity is a replacement template for the Notes Mail and journal databases and this integration provides the Notes user with everything needed to help them capture and organize commitments thus achieve enhanced results.

Adopting any sort of new methodology is extremely difficult because it forces you to change. The application's well designed and intuitive UI makes it easy to adopt the GTD methodology without having to think about it or force yourself to do things differently. It just happens. In fact, most judges thought this should be a built-in feature in Notes. As Bill Buchan said: "As a recent GTD convert, I loved this. This should be bundled with Notes. No. Seriously. Lotus: Buy this and bundle this!"