Rob's Blog

12/3: First Impressions of Notes 8 ...

First impressions are favourable.

I haven't had much time yet to do too much.  I upgraded a Notes 7.02 client to 8 and left the server at 7.02 to start with.

I subscribed to the Notes/Domino 8 forum using the in-built RSS reader and read through what was there.  The default window that the RSS content goes into was quite small and I found that I needed to view everything in a browser.  It would have been nice to be able to resize that window and get the same window size the next time you read a feed.  The visible feed was also truncated which might technically be right but meant that every feed needed to be opened in the browser.  When I viewed content in the web page, it created a new window every time (which is what Notes does) but I quickly found that I had an unmanageable number of windows open.  Closing these windows was time consuming too.

I'm now using the feed reader without the preview window which can be turned off in preferences / feed.



This seems better but will be using more bandwidth which will be important in a big company.

That all sounds a bit negative but RSS feed readers need to be ultra efficient.  The number of feeds I'm reading is going up all the time and - just like e-mail - it can easily get in the way of my development activities.  I need to be able to get through it as quickly as possible.  At the moment, most people still haven't heard of RSS but fast forward a year and the number of people using RSS will have mushroomed.

The feed reader doesn't support OPML imports and exports either.  That's a shame because by the time Notes 8 goes gold, I won't need one.  I will have painstakingly had to subscribe to all my feeds manually.  In a corporate environment, it will be essential that administrators can also add feeds using policies.  I was hoping for subscriptions and feeds at a server level (a bit like shared mail).

The Productivity Editors look quite good and I think were undersold a bit during the recent "Lotusphere Comes to You" sessions.  They are little slow on my current test laptop but this is running with only 500MB of RAM so I expected that.  I opened a few Office documents with no problems and think that existing Notes shops could certainly save a few bob by ditching Office for 80% of their staff.

The mail template looked fine although it wasn't my mail file so I haven't used it in anger.  The same Notes 8 mail database also opened fine and looked good when viewed from a Notes 7.02 client.

I've not done anything in the Designer or Admin clients yet other than check that they start up OK.

I'm not going to report any bugs here (certainly not now anyway).  I'm more interested at the moment in the overall picture which looks fairly rosey.

I plan to install Notes and Domino 8 as a new organisation/domain onto new hardware as and when I get time.  I cannot upgrade my main laptop yet until I know more about what problems that might cause me :->

12/3: Notes 8 install gotcha

Actually for once I did RTFM beforehand.  However, I wanted to get this out there because, in the first public beta, you need to be running your Windows or Linux client Operating System in English US locale.  I almost missed this and it might save someone a re-install.

Lotus Notes 8 supports the English US OS locale only. You must install and run Notes in an English locale.

IBM productivity tools and Property Broker Editor support the English US OS locale only. You must run IBM productivity tools and Property Broker Editor in an English locale.

11/3: Public beta download working again ...

I got back Saturday night after twenty four hours without the internet only to discover that the Notes/Domino community were all fighting each other to be the first to get hold of the public beta.  The IBM servers must have been overwhelmed with this unprecedented level of interest.  I have never in my twelve year Lotus Notes/Domino career been so keen to see a new release before it went gold and it seems like I am not alone.

It quickly became apparent that Saturday night was never going to be successful since people were getting download estimates of 19 hours!  So I decided to try it Sunday morning "when all the Americans should be in bed"!

Anyway, it looks like that strategy is working.



I can't wait to get this installed.  It is going to be very interesting over the next few weeks and the blogosphere is going to add hugely to our ability to learn from each other's experiences.

So how are we going to tag our blog posts?  As with Lotusphere, it will help if we have some consensus.  I think that the public beta is going to be all about the client.  Although there are some excellent new features in the server product, they are almost by definition invisible.  We won't really know that the Domino server is more scaleable first hand.  Sure we'll benefit from that in time when we upgrade our production servers but that's for the future.  For now, we all want to know about the Notes 8 client interface and the new admin and development features.

So I'm using the tags "notes 8 beta" and "notes and domino 8".  My download progress has jumped from 22% to 69% whilst I've been writing this post.  Thirty six minutes to go!  Yay!!