A couple of months ago, Lotus released the second beta of their upcoming Lotus Notes 8 software. I've been using it exclusively as my email client since then, and after nearly two months (and a refresh to Beta 3) the software is approaching the finish line. I'll take you inside the features and design you can expect to see released later this summer.

A New Look

Notes used to be your smart, albeit ugly, date. Microsoft Outlook always looked better on your arm while hitting the club, and while Outlook was pretty, she wasn't relatively deep (not to mention her penchant for viruses.) On the other hand, Notes was the smart, reliable girl you could marry, but were embarrassed to tell your friends about.

The Notes 8 client.

For years, critics of Notes pointed to the interface as stale, clunky, and unintuitive. This is a perception that Lotus has set out to destroy. The first thing you'll notice about the new Notes client is that it's undergone an extreme makeover: Pastel colors, rounded edges, new icons and an overall cleaner feel. It has a very Web 2.0 vibe to it, and is now on par with the user interface of Microsoft Outlook.

Simplicity and Standards

The Notes design team really set out to make Notes easier to use and more intuitive. They've reduced clicks whenever possible, combined preferences, removed redundancies, and made finding items pretty easy.

An Open button sits in the top left of Notes at all times. Clicking the button sprouts a menu with choices for creating new documents or opening up your most used features. Right next to the open button is a Show Thumbnails button which shows all of your open tabs in a window for quick switching. It's very reminiscent of Expose in Mac OSX and a great way to find something at a glance.

A ubiquitous search button rests in the top right of the screen. You can use it to search Mail, Contacts, your Calendar or even for particular applications. It can also search Yahoo and Google.

Lotus has also done some things to conform to the way people use standard applications. For example, you can now Control or Shift-click on items in views to choose them. In the past, those keyboard shortcuts didn't work in Notes, but that has now been remedied.

For brand new users and Outlook converts, all of the above changes will make it much easier for those users to get familiar with Notes. For the old pros that have used Notes for years, certain conventions will take some getting used to. Make sure to have some training ready before you get ready to upgrade.

Integration

One of the biggest selling points, aside from the new look, is the integration possibilities of the new client. The new Notes client is built on an Eclipse framework, and that means that additional applications can be plugged in rather easily. For example, the full Sametime 7.5.1 client can be used within the Notes client itself (in an area called the Sidebar) instead of running as a separate instance. Also, developers can create Composite Applications that work within the Notes client and can talk to each other via internal wiring.

The nice thing about the composite applications is that they can interact with each other. For example, you could have an SAP application that listed sales people in one window, and clicking on a salesperson's name could pull up information on that user from the Notes address book in another window.

In a sense it's kind of like a portal inside of a client rather than a browser. It allows you to stay within Notes to do pretty much everything your job entails, including creating documents.

Who needs Word?

Quite literally, you can stay inside of Notes to create documents as Lotus has included their "Productivity Tools" with Notes 8. With a Notes 8 license, you are entitled to Lotus Documents (word processing) Lotus Presentations (slideshow presentations) and Lotus Spreadsheets. These three applications are customized versions based on the open-source Open Office suite. They can work on documents from Microsoft Office, IBM Smart Suite, or the new Open Document standard.

This is obviously something IBM is going to push heavily in its battle against Outlook and Exchange. Having these tools included free can significantly reduce what a company has to pay in licensing costs to Microsoft. Granted, these editors aren't nearly as full-featured as their Microsoft counterparts, but they have enough features to probably satisfy 80-90 percent of your users. Imagine being able to save Office licensing fees for that much of your work force. It's a pretty powerful return on investment message.

In fact, this article is being written entirely inside of Notes using the Documents editor. For most tasks that I've had in the last couple months, the set of tools from Lotus have been enough.

Lotus Documents.

It's the Little Things

In addition to the major facelift and the integration points, Lotus has a done a lot of little things that really make the Notes experience easier and more useful.

# Address Auto-Completion -- In the past, Notes had address auto-complete but it was really clunky and always wanted to use the first match it found. So if you had 100 people with the last name of Smith in your address book, and you wanted to send email to Zeke Smith, the name was far down the list. Now, after sending and receiving email from users, their email addresses bubble to the top of the list.

# In-Place Spell Checking -- The spell checker has been improved to work real-time while you are typing in any Notes application. If an item is misspelled, it will get a squiggly red line underneath it. Right-clicking on the word will then give you a list of spelling alternatives.

# The Sidebar -- I made mention of it earlier when talking about Sametime, but Lotus now includes a collapsable section at the right side of Notes that houses Sametime, a Day at a Glance of your calendar, An RSS Reader and a space to connect to the new products coming from Lotus: Connections and Quickr.

# Out Of Office -- In the past, Notes handled Out of Office email by running an agent every few hours and responding to mail then. This wasn't optimal as time-sensitive material took too long to respond to. Out of Office is now a service on the Domino server that responds to email immediately, a huge improvement.

# HTML Rendering -- In the past, HTML rendering in email has been less than great. Layouts tended to get frequently out of whack, sometimes making pages fairly unreadable. Now Lotus has included a rendering engine that does a great job serving up HTML email and works great as an embedded web browser within Notes.

# Better Contacts -- The contacts in Notes now look better and can synchronize with the server through your replicator. You can set them up to replicate at set intervals, and having them on the server now allows an easy way to delegate control of your contacts to an assistant. Something that wasn't easy or recommended in the past.

Performance

When I first started using Beta 2, I had a lot of issues. The client was fairly sluggish, crashed frequently and had quite a few annoying bugs. But that is the very definition of beta software, and with the recent update to Beta 3, most of my complaints have gone away.

The software is much more snappy, I've only stumbled upon a couple minor bugs, and I haven't had a single crash. The Lotus client still seems to use a lot of RAM due to it's Eclipse underpinnings, so hopefully the final release will have a smaller memory footprint.

Just in case it doesn't, Lotus will also release Notes 8 Basic, which loses the Eclipse architecture and some of the features. Notes 8 Basic is primarily designed for older machines with less memory. This allows you to still upgrade to Notes 8, instead of having to upgrade all of your hardware.

Lotus has said that this will be the final beta release (no word on whether we'll see a release candidate) so Notes 8 should hit it's summer target. Before the end of June we will see the release of both Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. As such, I still think we are a month or two away from seeing the final release of Notes and Domino 8.

Conclusion

As a long-time Notes user, I'm really pleased with the direction Lotus is taking with the new client. It's no longer ugly, it works a lot more the way you think it should, and the move to the Eclipse-based framework really has the potential to increase the amount you can do with the product.

The only downside I see is that the design changes will require you to invest a bit more in training than previous Notes upgrades. That said, the improvements are definitely worth the effort. Notes is changing, make sure you're part of the evolution.

About this Series

This series of articles on intranet solutions with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino is intended to help readers understand the fundamental methodology and capabilities of the product and how to utilize it to deliver a feature-rich, secure, and functional corporate intranet solution. It will include implementation strategies, case studies, industry-tested tips and tricks, and, with your input, true value to the administrator or developer who wants to utilize IBM Lotus Notes/Domino technologies to deliver winning intranet solutions.

If you have any questions on the series, Lotus Notes/Domino, or if there's something you'd like to see addressed, visit the Intranet Journal Discussion Forum.

John Roling is the Senior Groupware Administrator for a North American trade-show exhibit company and a certified Lotus Notes Administrator, Developer and all-around geek. You can keep up with him at his blog or drop him an e-mail at jroling@gmail.com.