Category
lotusphere2008
Okay, cards on the table immediately: the upcoming 8.0.1 release of Lotus Notes is a REALLY big deal. There's some amazing stuff in there, and it seems mad to me to give it a 'point oh one' release number. That, however, is pretty much the only criticism you're going to hear from me in this posting.
Now, I have to admit that I've only had very limited hands-on use of Notes 8.0.1, so this is opinions-based rather than deep technical content.
First opinion: 'Notes Traveler' is a Very Good Thing. Okay, it's not up there with the Blackberry Enterprise Server stuff yet, in terms of remote management of devices, etc etc. And it may well never be: IBM has relationships with RIM and CommonTime (amongst others) to look after. But ... it plays to a great market need, gives Domino a bundled functional equivalent to the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync stuff, and from what I've seen integrates very well on the Windows Mobile device. It sounds as though Symbian support won't be too long coming either, which is stonkingly good news. In the US both Win Mobile and Blackberry have heavy market share, but in the rest of the world Symbian is very prevalent. We heard an anecdote today of somebody walking into a mobile phone store in the US to get a new business device, and being asked "Do you want Outlook or Lotus Notes integration?". Wow. Two years ago would you have said that was possible?!
Second opinion: the 'MyWidgets' capability in 8.0.1 is huge. Way back in the early '90s, the vision of Lotus Notes was that it was something you could basically 'live in' all day. Apart from spreadsheets, it had pretty everything you needed. But that was then, and along came Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and the internet. They didn't kill Notes, despite the protestations of the naysayers, but they did break that live-in-it proposition. With the bundling in 8 of the Symphony tools, and the new widget capability in 8.0.1, we're rapidly moving back towards that proposition. Which means you can give the boss a Mac running Notes, and homeworkers a Linux box running Notes, and have complete interoperability across all of it. No more complex MS-Office installation and management issues. Money in your bank account instead of Microsoft's.
"So, what is this widgets thing" I hear you cry. Well, it's basically the ability to put lightweight components into the sidebar in Notes. Out of the box, it will have integration with Google Gadgets, so you can do things like embedding stock-price tickers etc into the Notes client with no programmatic heavy lifting (no Java, no Applets, no ActiveX). Very nice stuff. Of course, a lot of the Google Gadgets are just toys: the real power of this will come from exposing parts of existing/new applications (e.g. Notes ones) as gadgets, and then integrating that with ...
LiveText. LiveText allows a widget to scan Notes content as it's being presented on the screen (I'm assured it runs in a background thread so won't hit performance) and then dynamically and automatically to add clickable links to small pieces of text. For example, I could write a widget which LiveText-recognises customer code formats, and then adds a right-click menu to that customer code (even it it's buried in an email body somewhere) to allow the user to access other information about that customer: newsfeeds, order history, CRM records, etc. Immensely powerful. It gives a good percentage of the 'Composite Applications' capability for only a tiny fraction of the effort. For Notes developers, this - along with MyWidgets - opens up a world of possibilities of stuff that can be done EASILY, without having to learn Eclipse etc.
New webmail 'lite'. This is a really nice-looking UI for a simple webmail interface to the Notes mail. The 'full' old-style 'Domino Web Access' mode is still available - I'm guessing that one or two large corporate customers 'encouraged' Lotus to leave that alone - but for new users the 'Lite' version is going to be a better bet in most circumstances. It's very slick, full of sexy Web 2.0 ajax froodiness, very pretty, is styled similar to the Notes 8 client itself, and does everything a normal webmail user would ever need. It will also be optimised for the iPhone, although there are no announced plans for a full iphone client - the blogosphere rumour-mongers got a little carried away with that idea last week 
Trust me, I will be playing with all this new stuff (well, maybe not Traveler - I'm a Blackberry person) as soon as humanly possible.
There's loads of other good stuff in 8.0.1 too, like massive CPU improvements on the server (30%), and 'note compression' which will reduce data sizes and take a lot of pressure off infrastructure and backups.
And ... it's out any time now! Just six months after version 8 - pretty impressive given the amount of new functionality (I still think it should be called 8.1 though).
Notes/Domino 8.5 will be out later this year, and plans are already underway for the following release. After a few years in enforced hibernation, Lotus is wide awake and producing really good products at an amazing pace.
