IBM launches Lotus Notes, Domino 8 beta

IBM on Thursday launched a public beta of its Lotus Notes and Domino 8 e-mail and collaboration software. The public beta is designed to offer such features as a choice in office productivity tools and the ability to group related e-mail messages together based on conversation threads, under Lotus Notes 8.

IBM expects its Lotus Notes and Domino 8 program to be available in the middle of this year.

[smilin:)]

Isn't that cute!

Outlook 2003 you better look out! Oh wait...

[Commander_Spock]

Should This App. be Named Lotus Notes...

... or should it not be called "the MICROSOFT OFFICE and GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS KILLER"! Keep telling ya all that "ELEPHANTS" can really dance and the amazing thing is that this particular ELEPHANT already dances to the ISO's approved Open Document Format Standards (ODF) music!

[frankwick]

Notes was waaaaay ahead of its time.

The concept of Notes was AMAZING. The problem is that not many people understood Notes. Most just saw it as an email system and there were MANY email systems available. Too bad that it was those small minded customers who made many of the business decisions which ultimately forged the way many IT systems look today. After all, software vendors make software to sell to these people.

It's interesting to look back at MS and how many times they released Notes/Domino competitors and failed to deliver. Don't get me wrong, I think Exchange (2003 and newer) is a superb email system, but in terms of functionality, MS is just now (with the help of Sharepoint) catching up with Domino.

[alegr]

Concept - maybe. Implementation - dung

Users to LN developers:
"Your Lotus Notes e-mail client is ugly, user interface is crap, it's confusing"
LN developers to users:
"You don't understand, it's NOT e-mail, it's a database, very cool, powerful, bla bla bla".

I wonder, did they FINALLY get "delete message" concept done right in this release? For anyone wanting to know:

1. Usual way to delete a message in most e-mail programs is just press Del key (or select a corresponding menu command). The message gets moved to "Deleted" folder. If you delete a message in "Deleted" folder, it's deleted permanently. You can also drag messages from other folders to "Deleted", to the same effect as Del key.
2. See how Lotus Notes does it: Del key marks a message as deleted. IT IS STILL IN AN ORIGINAL FOLDER. Pressing Del second time UNMARKS THE MESSAGE FOR DELETION. You can also move messages to "Deleted" folder. This is NOT THE SAME as marking messages for deletion. The is no way to partially permanently delete messages from "Deleted" folder. You can only empty it completely.

[barker4271]

Great Product - Bad Marketing

The domino platform is simply awesome...the only downside is that it does too many things so it is tough to nail down...the only thing that seemed to stick was its "EMAIL" client capability. Combine that with IBM's lousy marketing (take the lousy reference here to mean "SPECTACULARLY INCOMPETENT"), and presto! One crummy reputation, served fresh daily.

[Commander_Spock]

The "Eye Catching Features" aside....

... this version of Lotus Notes will sell itself - particularly, given the integration of the productivity applications like that of the standardized ODF SpreadSheet, Word Processor...!