Rob's Blog

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!!