IBM Releases Lotus Notes, Domino Version 8
- August 18th, 2007
- 4 Comments
I very rarely use Lotus Notes and Domino because I’ve only ever used MS Outlook in an office, but I’m sure plenty of you do, so you’ll be excited, I think, to know that Version 8 has finally been released. It’s been two years in the making, but the latest version was built on the open source Eclipse platform, which means mashups can link older apps with newer apps. Michael Rhodin, GM, of IBM Lotus Software had this to say about the latest version,
Our customers are calling Lotus Notes 8 the ‘desktop of the future’ because it consolidates all their collaboration tools into one screen. Collaboration is eclipsing email as the killer app we use daily, whether your virtual desktop is on your desk, in your car, your hand, or your ear. Notes and Domino 8 is your personal portal to the Web 2.0 world.
IM is also included in Notes as well as ODF support that allows users to import and export MS Office apps and an RSS reader. Pricing: Lotus Notes 8 software starts at SRP of $101 per client. For a browser-based alternative, IBM Domino Web Access clients are $73 per user. IBM Lotus Domino server software starts at an SRP of $14.75 per value unit. Lotus Domino Express solutions for small and medium businesses, inclusive of client and server, start at an SRP of $99 per user.
yoshi (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Out of everything Microsoft develops - Calendaring/E-Mail is the only thing I can say they get right Microsoft realized that that people just want to e-mail and schedule events. No more no less. Sure it took them 10 years to get synchronization and free/busy info working but they finally did it.
Notes always tried to do too much, Lotus failed to capitalize on their best features (security, replication), the user interface always sucked, and their early attempts at calendaring was a hod podge at best. Just 5 minutes ago I sent an e-mail using v7 of Notes for a client and I still find it a painful experience.
(for the record - I beta tested notes in the late eighties and my first “real” job was LAN and Lotus Notes administrator for 120 users - god I feel old)
Craig (Who am I?)
1 year ago
As an IBM employee I’ve been using Notes 8 internally for some time now, and I can say that it’s MUCH better than Notes 7. They’ve done a lot of work on cleaning up the user interface, and it’s cross-platform as well… I’ve been running the various betas and pre-release milestones on both Fedora Core 6 and Windows XP.
There are still some big flaws though - only certain parts of the application are built on the Eclipse platform; a platform-specific runtime is still required. The good outweighs the bad for the most part though, and the integrated Sametime is great!
Wildcard
6 months ago
I use Lotus Notes 8 at work. We just upgraded from 6.5. I had expected big things with the upgrade because I had always been disappointed with 6.5 after using Outlook. Lotus Notes 8 was a big disappointment. They added a few things, new icons, in-line spelling correction (hello 1990’s!), etc, but the application is still very cumbersome. Adding contacts is a huge pain. Syncing on my PDA phone is another major pain! Come on IBM, where is the Windows Mobile client for Notes?! Jeez. I can’t wait till we move back to Outlook. Simple, easy, much better. “Collaboration” might seem nice and it’s a cool buzz word, but in reality it doesn’t work if you’re not a fortune 100 company (or fortune 50).
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Mikko (Who am I?)
2 months ago
Looks a lot better than earlier version.
I can only agree that the application is still cumbersome. It takes quite long to startup and keeping it running in the background takes resources I need for other applications.