Teamstudio believes that, while all those things are great and better than anything else available, the thing that really makes Notes valuable and makes it stand out against everything else is the world-class development platform that comes bundled with all those other features.

The Domino development environment is no less functional than competing environments but, unfortunately, it is often an under-appreciated and misunderstood part of the whole Domino investment. Too often, Notes is only compared against the competition in terms of its Mail and C&S functionality.

When migration projects are undertaken, it isn't until later that users find that most of the company relies entirely on Notes applications to provide the basic functions like vacation requests and internal discussion databases -- or even running the company's invoicing and ERP functions. By the time the top management realizes this, it's probably already spent thousands -- if not millions -- on other platforms and systems only to have to stop the project and go back to using Notes.

After seeing this happen too many times, we decided to do something. Teamstudio wanted to raise the awareness level of what Notes is capable of by showcasing some of the most remarkable Notes apps we could find. By doing this, we hoped to start getting people to think differently about what Notes is doing for them and maybe even be inspired to do more with their Notes infrastructure than they thought possible.

The Teamstudio "Spotlight" Awards
With that lofty goal in mind we went about creating a contest called the Teamstudio "Spotlight" Awards, with the goal of attracting attention to some of the most remarkable apps the community could produce. The rules of the contest directed the entrant to submit a 500-word essay describing the application and why it was remarkable. Using that, we judged the application on five key points: