Live Blog – Corrections coming later ( when I find some time )
This session is all about the future ideals and strategy for the Lotus product line which includes the workplace family also. Great empahise is being given on the fact that there is always going to be backwards compatibility. No mater how many new versions come out in the future you will always be able to run that lotus Notes V1 database on the latest client and server and that also applies for the workplace products, the notes client plugin for the Workplace Collaborative package will also run those V1 applications.
Just announced : Lotus Notes 7 Beta 3 will be released this afternoon. The development team is very happy with the progress of the beta and feel that that stability will not be a problem for the first official release, I personally think that many people will be upgrading direct to this new version when it’s available. In a recent survey from people who ring the Lotus support lines the 4th quarter results for 2004 show that 94% of callers have completed their V6.x upgrades.
The challenges to IBM lotus in the last year are being dealt with, They have more support staff and they now have the lowest backlog of support issues in 2 years. Fault tollerence testing has been increased and root cause analysis is progressed.
Lotus Notes 7.0 has some dramatic scalabbility gains with 80% increase in NotesBench results and up to 300% on the linux platform. There is also 25% less cpu usage. The Domino Domain Admin tool will assist in the admins job and the web services and (optional) Db2 backend will help developers. There are also a lot of Open Standards like SIP/Simple and WSDl being added to the platform to allow better intergration between the family of products and also with other platforms.
As of today 25000 mailboxes in IBm are using Domino 7.0, with a target of 50000 mailboxes by May 2005. This internal usage of the notes client will be the greatest internal testing the notes client for any release of Domino.
For the demo of the Workplace Rich Client in this session it has been pointed out that in this case the user if a Domino mail user and not a Workplace mail user. This was done specifically to show that you do not have to roll out Workplace messaging to make use of the new Workplace client. The demo shows how it’s possible to detach documents from a domino database directly into the workplace document store and vice versa. This is nice as you don’t have to dump it to the local drive and then load up a seperate application. In Notes 7 there is SameTime integration but what if you only have the Workplace Awareness module, well opening the notes database in the workplace client enabled that very same iintegration.
Dec's Dom Blog 