Shireburn Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of IBM Lotus Notes & Domino 8™, previously known by its code name, Hanover.
IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 bring you a myriad of product improvements, productivity gains, improvements in user interface and breakthrough application-delivery capabilities all with backward compatibility and multi-operating system support and the high levels of security standard with Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes combines
e-mail,
calendaring and scheduling with collaborative and web applications in a secure environment, ideal for supporting mobile users. Only Lotus Notes takes you beyond e-mail.
Many of you have heard from Microsoft that “Notes is dead” and that Hanover will require you to change all your Notes applications, install DB2, migrate etc., etc. Well, we told you this was not correct and here is the proof. In fact, IDC, the globally respected analysts,
issued a report this month that illustrates that Lotus Notes/Domino increased its share of the worldwide integrated collaborative environments market last year to 40 percent, up from 39 percent in 2005 while Microsoft Outlook/Exchange's™ share slipped 2 percent points over that same period.
Significant new points worthy of note regarding Lotus Notes/Domino 8 are:
Improvements in user interface- Integrated RSS feeds
- Integrated support for chat and on-line presence awareness
- In-built IBM Productivity Tools for reading and editing Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and Open Document Format documents for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations
- In-built capability for Blogs and Wikis
- Support for activity-centric computing enabling filing of e-mails, calendar entries, documents etc under a specific activity
- New industry-standard based Eclipse foundation allowing extension of Notes’ capabilities through use of Eclipse Plug-ins directly within Notes applications
- Ability to quickly assemble Eclipse components into customized, integrated applications — also called composite applications — without writing extensive code.
- Backward compatibility with previous versions supporting mixed environments of Notes/Domino versions and mixed operating systems including Windows and Linux. Linux versions available for both Domino server and Lotus Notes clients.
New features that make this the most powerful release of Lotus Notes and Domino ever include:
- Sidebar that displays critical information and alerts including IBM Lotus Sametime® 7.5.1 contacts, day-at-a-glance, RSS, and ATOM Feeds.
- Recall an e-mail sent to other Lotus Notes users in error.
- Conversation mode that lets you gather and review e-mail threads based on subject headers.
- E-mail address lookup from addresses used in your in-box
- Rescheduled calendar invitations appear in grey in your calendar
- In-line spell checking, type ahead addressing, e-mail "conversation threading," and numerous other changes to mail, calendaring, and contact management will result in enhanced user benefits.
- Word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation applications, which support OpenDocument Format (OpenOffice) and Microsoft™ Office file formats.
- Ability to export documents to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) from IBM Productivity Tools.
- Omnipresent search centre for e-mail, calendar, the Web, applications and your desktop, including integration with Google Desktop Search™.
- A thumb-nail view of open windows aides navigation
- New cluster replication technology that helps improve replication performance and can reduce network usage.
- Collaboration history that lets you search and view your collaboration history with specific people.
- Server-managed provisioning
IBM Lotus Domino server software combines reliable, security-rich e-mail, calendar, and scheduling capabilities with a powerful platform for business collaboration. It offers solutions for messaging, customized business applications — or both — on a wide variety of operating systems. Lotus Domino, in combination with the rich Lotus Notes client, helps enhance employee productivity, streamlines business processes, and improve overall business responsiveness.
Composite Applications
Lotus Notes 8 allows you to bring together data and processes from various applications in one composite application or mash-up. The screenshot alongside shows data sourced from both Lotus Notes databases as well as from other sources such as Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP, MySQL etc.
This opens up various possibilities such as displaying a Notes based CRM application like Shireburn’s Business Tracker with financial data about the currently selected client being displayed in one of the windows.
Upgrading
Since 1989, IBM Lotus has delivered product upgrades that enable seamless backward and forward compatibility. The next generation of innovations offered by IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 continues to support the same platforms today. Lotus Notes and Domino software, in previous releases, embraced Web services, improved server performance, created seamless SAP software integration, offered 64-bit OS compatibility, and delivered on a new Linux client. With this latest release, Lotus is embracing Eclipse technology, modernizing the Lotus Notes user interface, and providing the ability to build composite applications for Lotus Notes. We are introducing activity-centric computing, productivity tools, and enhanced portal integration.
Shireburn have been part of the IBM Managed Beta programme for Notes/Domino 8 and have been running 8 different Beta versions of Lotus Notes and Domino 8 internally since May of this year. Upgrading of your Domino servers is very straight forward and should take about 15 minutes.
Upgrades to Lotus Notes 8 on your user workstations can be deployed automatically by means of the Notes built-in Smart Upgrade feature. See more about Smart Upgrade here.
Clients covered by an up to date IBM Passport Advantage maintenance agreement are entitled to this upgrade free of charge and will be able to download their software from the IBM web site as per the normal procedures.
As per standard practice, we always recommend that you test your applications running on Lotus Notes 8 before upgrading them to a live environment. Our own internal tests have uncovered only minor issues with existing applications. As always, Shireburn is pleased to provide you with upgrade assistance.
Did you know?
- IBM Lotus Notes and Domino® has 20 years of leadership in the collaboration space
- Over 130M licenses of Lotus Notes and Domino have been sold worldwide
- Over 46,000 companies around the world use Lotus Notes and Domino
- Lotus Notes and Domino has seen growth rates exceeding the market with eight quarters of year-to-year double-digit growth from 1Q05 through 4Q06
- Lotus Notes and Domino has seen eleven consecutive quarters of year-to-year growth from 4Q04 through 2Q07
- More than half of America’s largest 100 corporations use Lotus Notes and Domino
- More than half of the FORTUNE Global 100 corporations use Lotus Notes and Domino
- 8 of the top 10 banks
- 8 of the top 10 insurance corporations
- 4 of the top 5 consumer products corporations
- 7 of the top 10 electronics corporations
- 8 of the top 12 pharmaceutical corporations
- 9 of the top 12 telecommunications corporations