The General Session was pretty much full. They did not have the overflow into the Swan that they did last year, mostly because IBMers were encouraged not to attend.  

The Blue Man Group did a musical number with ABS plumbing pipe that was pretty impressive.  Lots of cell phones captured the action in poor quality and posted it to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cKJOoVSFvk" title="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cKJOoVSFvk">Youtube. Dan Akroyd was the keynote.  Not so impressive as he was obviously reading from the teleprompters.

The focus really seems to be back on Domino.  Websphere portal was hardly mentioned, and you do not see it listed as much in the session index as in previous years.  Mike Rodin's replacement, Bob Picciano, is married to a Notes developer, and he kidded that has had an impact.

They announced that attendance was up this year by 2%.  Considering last year was a sellout, I cannot see how that could be the case.  The traffic in the showcase seems down a bit from last year, but it is hard to tell.

They announced a lot.  Some I covered in the last post from Business Development days.  Here are some additional points from the general session.

Domino 8.5 is getting a lot of air play.  It has the new Eclypse based Domino Designer, and there is a lot of talk about X Pages.  This is a design element that allows you to quickly deploy Domino web apps.  It gets around many of the issues with Domino Web development, giving you a toolkit filled with ajax lookups, controls, dialog and prompt boxes, RT Editor, cloud tags...etc.  I did NOT see a multi file upload control in the mix.  Everyone seemed pretty impressed, but the Geeks in the crowd were pretty quick to point out that this ability to separate the design and presentation layers is something Microsoft and other development environments have had for years.  

The new designer has support for Blackberry development. That was covered off by Jim Balsillie himself.  He showed how you can easily deploy an application on the Blackberry using the same skills that you use to develop other applications in the new Domino Designer.  

More functionality is coming for Quickr, what they are calling Quickr next.  In my opinion it still fails in the UI department, being built on the old Quickplace. There was some talk about X Pages for Quickr but it was unclear.

We had a draw for a debit card loaded with $ 4K that Scott put together with Ardexus, Metalogics, Integra and FIRM.  Good job Scott.

Monday is the longest day for the Showcase.  As John would said so well last year, "you cannot talk and are walking on stumps by the end of it."