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The new baby has arrived - Lotus Notes Domino 8

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September 2007

August saw the birth of Lotus’s new messaging and collaboration baby – Lotus Notes and Domino version 8.  The long awaited release has been delivered to the world after a number of months beta-testing and fine tuning for the final gold public release.  We’ve started to get a lot of excited requests from our clients and we’re currently demonstrating the new version to a number of companies planning to upgrade.

As the only IBM Business Partner in Australia to be part of the exclusive non-public testing, we’ve been given some real insights into how to get that Notes 8 engine purring for your organisation.  For a full demonstration of Notes 8, contact us and we’ll arrange a detailed look under the hood. 

Below we’ve listed some FAQ’s on the new Lotus baby. 

What are some of the best features in the new version?

Where's the value in upgrading?

Do you have any tips for installation and configuration?

Has the software licensing situation changed with Notes 8?

Where can I learn more about Lotus Notes Domino version 8?


What are some of the best features in the new version?
Click on the link for a screenshot.

Overall the biggest improvement is the user interface, which has become a whole lot nicer to look at and very intuitive.  Notes now features a much cleaner and less cluttered look, more logical layout of menu’s and customisable layouts.  You can setup a dockable sidebar within the client with much easier access to a rich sametime client, Notes calendar, activities and live RSS feeds from the web.

Designed to simplify the look of Notes, a large "Open" button at the top-left of the screen hides away all of your general application shortcuts in a fully searchable drop-down list.  The best part is if you don’t like this new navigation feature, you can always go back to the original Notes shortcut style on the sidebar. 

For those of us who like to have every possible tab open within Notes at one time (you know who you are), there is now a very simple Thumbnail Viewer for a tabbed preview view of everything you have open (similar to IE7 or Firefox tabbed views) within Notes. 

Thankfully, for those of us who like lots of tabs open but also get lost in their mailbox, the search features in Notes have been upgraded to include a new engine for IBM Lotus files, email and other local Notes databases.  The search is now integrated with Google Desktop Search (if installed), allowing a single search query to display results from the web, your desktop and Notes simulataneously.

There are also some other improvements in the Notes client that are worth mentioning.  As many Notes users would know, the ‘type-ahead’ feature of the email address bar is useful, but Notes 8 makes it a lot more functional by giving the user the ability to do a search through all open databases at once.  This makes the process of finding a contact much easier, with a drop-down selection list opening as soon as Notes recognises a matching contact within your database(s).

Notes now features a 'Collaboration History' button, which allows you to simply right click on a contact and search your entire history with that person, covering email threads, meetings, sametime chats and other collaborative functions.  This is an impressive feature, saving a lot of time searching for the right information. 

In addition to the Collaboration History, all of the new collaborative features in Notes are excellent, including the new capability to arrange a 'conversation thread' which allows you to highlight one message, with all relating messages, conversations and documents automatically becoming a part of this thread.  You can move the entire thread to a new folder, easing the clutter from your mail box and keeping a true record of your project communications and conversations.

Where’s the value in upgrading?

For many clients who are running a range of Domino applications, Notes 8 doesn’t have any trouble connecting directly to them during the install process.  This means that there is no major modifications required to make your applications work with the new version. 

For organisations running multiple desktop programs, Notes 8 may provide the answer with the addition of the Open Document Format (ODF) editors for presentations, spreadsheets and word processing – all accessible without leaving Notes 8.  ODF format benefits multiple platform use, with the ability for Linux and Mac users to work together on the same documents without any document conversion software or messy formatting issues.  However, for true compatibility, we recommend that you check and verify your existing Word documents in .ODF format before standardising them across your organisation. 

From a development perspective, the ability to create plug-ins is an excellent addition.  Using the Lotus Domino Designer 8 or the new Eclipse-based (open source) tools, a developer can pull together ‘mashups’ of data from your internal CRM or HR systems with outside web services and functionality.    Helping to speed these developments along is the Composite Application Editor, which 'wires' together components through a simple drag and drop process into a compound application, which aims to speed development in Notes.  Check out a very basic composite application we put together using our Embrace Lotus applications.

One of the most important breakthroughs for this version of Notes is that you will finally be able to break those “But Outlook looks nicer” comments from your users.  This new “Outlook-friendly” design should start to break the comments about the look and feel of Notes vs. the ‘home user’ design of Outlook.

While many will wait for the 8.0.1 release before considering an upgrade, we recommend you begin looking at your upgrade path now.  Discuss your plans with our Site Services team for more information on what we recommend.

Do you have any tips for installation and configuration?

Overall, we found the installation and configuration process to be very similar to previous versions.  Notes 8 was a relatively straightforward install and works particularly well on the Linux platform.  It integrates well with the previous ND7 mail template and the sametime integration is much more intuitive to setup and features a fully rich sametime client within Notes.

However as the specs have changed slightly between version 7 and the new version 8 we recommend you contact our Site Services team for advice on ensuring a clean installation.

Has the software licensing situation changed with Notes 8?

One of the biggest benefits of the new version of Notes is the additional software entitlements which were not included in previous versions.  There is now provisions for Tivoli, Information Management (DB2) and Websphere Portal Server functionality.  To best understand how you can use these licences in your organisation, contact our Software Licensing team to understand the full entitlements that you are allowed as part of the upgrade. 

Thankfully the software licensing agreements for version 8 operate in the same was as previous versions of Lotus Notes.  To assist you with the ordering process, the Certus Software Licensing Team is available to provide you with a quote or pricing information on all types of upgrades and installs.  Contact us for a quote on your Notes 8 project.  As one of the few fully certified Lotus partners in the country, we can give you a competitive licensing quote.

For more information on Lotus Notes Domino software licensing, please refer to the following links for more information:


Where can I lean more about Lotus Notes Domino version 8?

We’ve listed some more links for you below which include official IBM forums, blogs and opinions on Lotus Notes Domino 8 from around the world:

IBM Notes Domino 8 Forum
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf

Lotus Notes 8 Tips RSS Feed
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/rss

Domino 8
http://www.dominoblog.com/dominoblog/dblog.nsf/dx/domin0-8-is-avaiable-now?opendocument&comments

Road to Notes 8 – Jeff Esien
http://www.jeffeisen.com/jeisen/jeisenblog.nsf/

Notes 8 User Experience – Mary Beth Raven
http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/marybeth

Ed Brill’s IBM Blog
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf

For more information on the Lotus Notes Domino services available from Certus Solutions, visit  Collaboration Services or contact us for more information.