Rob's Blog

27/9: UKLUG was a great success

Spent the day at Hatfield just north of London yesterday for a UK Lotus User Group day which was a great success.  Thanks to Warren and Kitty and a big band of helpers - Matt, Julian, Bill, Paul and Frank for making it so.  Also thanks to all the sponsors for making it possible.

Despite leaving home before 6:30am, I didn't make the 9:00am start but by all accounts the keynote speech by Kevin Cavanaugh went down well and was packed out.  I also had to miss the drinks reception since I had 150 miles to drive and an early start the next day.  Next time I'll have to plan it better!

In the labs, I took a quick look at a Composite App that Matt and Julian had cooked up.  The environment is going to improve fast and once Notes 8.01 starts going into the Enterprises, this technology is going to get very important.  As Volker says, Lotus Expeditor plugins for Notes and Composite Apps generally could well be a sought after skill in six months time.

I also took a look for the first time at Lotus Quickr.  I need to install this and have a better look because I have clients crying out for this type of technology.

I enjoyed getting an insight into customer experiences of Lotus Notes/Domino and related third party products.  In general very large companies like HSBC and The Salvation Army are doing things with Lotus Notes/Domino that can't be done for the same budget using anyone else's products.

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!!