Lotusphere 2005

Tuesday 25th January 2005

Lotusphere continued the techno-blitz today... from 7am through to 7pm.There is so much to see and hear.

Here are some quick highlights...

• IBM Lotus Notes & Domino 7 is again aiming at delivering more performance improvements over previous releases.
• ND7 will include some initial integration with the new Lotus Workplace collaboration software. This is early days however, and for serious Notes Domino users, i'm not sure where this fits. It seems better to stay on Notes Domino for a much nicer ride.I found out that IBM’s Workplace Client Technology is built on Eclipse and Java. Lotus said that they had previously aimed at having a Notes client plug-in for Notes Domino 8, but they have pulled this forward and expect to include this in ND7.
• Domino users can optionally decide to use IBM's Relational DB2 Database as a database backend. Although performance wont be much that much different to standard Notes Domino NSF database format for standard databases, the main benefit I can see, is the ability to mix content from different databases in a view and also, from your point of view as a user - the ability to do dynamic view selections, using SQL commands. This means that less views may be required, but the ability to view data more effectively.
• Domino Domain Management looks exciting for managing and administering the servers. I need to learn more about this.
• I went to a session on Domino Designer and learnt that we can also evolve our Domino applications and expose elements of these to deliver them as web-services. WOW!

Notes Client Improvements...

• Notes Client Improvements include the ability to sort by subject in your email. I have to admit, this is ok, but I use full text search to find stuff, when I cant find it any other way.
• Those people running Notes Domino 6.5 who use integrated online awareness and chat/instant messaging features, will like the fact that this is now extended to working with the calendar and scheduling applications. There are also multithreaded message views support too.
• The Notes 7 instant messaging features been expanded to allow you to set who can see if your online and I understand that this may run in it's own thread so it's quicker and will run more in parallel with Notes.
• Lotus showed a new calendar cleanup tool which allows users to set when old calendar entries should be deleted. There are also more sorting options in the 'all meetings' view
• "USABILITY": Some of the dialog boxes have the option to 'never show again' set by the user.
• "USABILITY": Notes will prompt/check you when exiting,when pressing the big red cross... I know several people had accidentally shut Notes unintentionally
• "USABILITY": "AUTO-SAVE" - enought said? Lovely, I know several people that will like that!!!
• "USABILITY": Another style of save... the "Save State" facility to save your window state so that Lotus Notes auto opens a number of databases when you start up.

The news of the day is that IBM is posting or has posted Beta 3 of Notes/Domino 7.0. Update: Beta 3 is out now. Update: Yesterday's page as I forgot some of the nice extra's!