Notes and Domino v8 were launched for general release on August 17, 2007.

The main new features are:

• The user interface is substantially changed and improved. It offers a rich set of collaborative technologies, including email, presence information instant messaging, teamspaces, telephony (through third parties), and on-the-fly conferences (through Sametime). The applications are increasingly integrated in a natural way.
• Many messages are easily gathered together into clutches of related emails, making it easier to process a given corpus of messages.
• Various tools make it much easier to browse through information. For example, you start off with a search, then right click to find associated people or documents. One has the experience of surfing through your Notes information.
• Has built-in viewers and editors for many MS Office documents.
• Working with Google Desktop, search encompasses desktop files and the Web.
• Rather than email a document to people, it’s easy to save it to a Quikr space for later retrieval.
• Existing Notes applications can be integrated with other applications, using the new composite application editor. Such mashups/plugins are integrated through the Expeditor environment.
• There’s now an activity server, which supports ad hoc workflows.

Overall thoughts:

• Notes/Domino has a rich set of non-email methods of collaboration. The tools are gradually being integrated. Lotus users have a substantial technology edge over Exchange users in this regard.
• There’s plenty of good innovation, designed to help deal with information overload.
• The product architecture should provide for strong integration with mobile devices in the future--we look forward to seeing this vision unfold.

… David Ferris and Nick Shelness