I’m amazed that none of the other bloggers here at Lotusphere didn’t mention this so I’d better let everybody know…
At the start of the opening session speak by Ambuj Goyal he welcomed everybody to ‘Lotusphere number 11 AND COUNTING’. A clear indication that this won’t be the last time 5000+ Lotus Geeks gather in Disney World.
Finally got to the OpenNTF BOF about 10 minutes late. The walk from the Dolphin is about 8 – 10 minutes and the heat and humidity over here is really high, even at night. Walked in the door to have Bruce introduce me to the whole crowd.
The BOF was quite interesting, Bruce taked about the OpenNTF mail template, Domino Developer Network talked about what they were doing to help the Domino blogging community, Peerwire got a plug as another tool that can help the community and then Bruce made me get up and talk about what’s comming in the next version of Blogsphere ( which I really should package up and upload to OpenNTF this week ).
All in all it was an interesting session with a few people in the audience who had never heard about OpenNTF before. Hopefully they went away with a better understanding of what OpenNTF is all about and we will see them on the site soon.
Well the good news is that the Notes version 7 client is due out next year so I’m sure that there will be a beta available within the next 6 months. The sneak preview today showed a number of working features in the new client and I have to say it’s looking nice. As usual these features are not 100% finished and as we know from the past may even disappear but I’d say that there is some great stuff in the pipeline.
For the developers out there they I’ve already mentioned how you can write web services directly in Lotus Script in the designer client. Well another cool feature, long sought after by a lot of people is the ability to ‘PROGRAM THE RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON’. Yep, you can add your own actions to the right click menu as easily as creating a new action in a view and choosing the approporiate option. I can already think of a load of uses for this.
There is also a lot of increased presence awareness updates in this new version. With added ability the most apperant UI update is that fact that the sametime icons have all been changed to look exactly like the ones in MSN Messenger. Must be a new universal standard.
So there are some nice new features to look forward to. I’m heading for the labs to talk to the developers to see what else I can find out.
One question at the end asked if there would be some method to allow users to see their mailfile quotas. This is a great feature in the OpenNTF mail template. The speaker has just said that there are no current plans for this in the official template.
UPDATE : They just announced that the V7 Beta is ‘Just around the corner’.
Well we have all heard that ND6.5.1 is due out real soon now and not just for Notes Domino but also 6.5.1 versions for Sametime, Quickplace and Domino.doc. All future version releases will also have the same version numbers and will always be released at the same time so no more having to keep that one server on R5 because your running Sametime.
One feature currently in ND6.5 that a lot of users haven’t really seen yet is the new Workspace style today page. This workspace makes it easy to get to the information that you need on a daily basis quickly. New to me is the ‘Mail Threads’ view. This page is displayed with a large inbox window on the top and a smaller one on the bottom. As you select a mail in the top window it automatically shows the entire mail thread for that message so you can quickly go back to any message in the thread for reference.
Another nice feature in ND6.5 is the integrated sametime contact list. When you open the list ( CTRL-SHIFT-C ) it displays your current sametime contact list but as you work in the notes client and you enter a document with sametime enabled fields it will dynamically update the contact list with the names of the fields and their contents. A quick reference to ND7 mentions that a lot more default databases will be sametime enabled.
Dec's Dom Blog 
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