Write it on a Rock

I had to do a little work yesterday evening and my girlfriend was over who had never seen the Notes client before, just the Designer one. I'm running the 8.0.2 Standard client and I use the workspace. I have 13 tabs on it with over 400 icons spread out between the tabs. The first thing she says when she looks over and sees the client, "What is that? It looks old and crappy." I'm more then a little confused and asked her why she thought that. "Look at all those icons, they look terrible and aren't pretty at all. It looks cheap." I agreed about the icons and told her that I was pretty sure this was something they were working on to get more up-to-date.

Not wanting her to think Notes was a piece of ugly junk, I showed her my email, calendar and contacts to which she said, "Yeah, that's looks a lot better and really nice." How many others do you think would have this response at seeing a Notes 8 Standard client for the first time? How many users who were on earlier releases of Notes and get upgraded to a Notes 8 Standard client don't really think it's a UI improvement?

I know on IdeaJam that Mika Heinonen has an entry for improving the database icons and I encourage you all to go over there and promote it. I think after all the hard work Lotus has done to improve the UI that there shouldn't be a reason for someone to look at Notes and say that it looks "old" - they should be commenting on how nice it looks instead.

I have some old applications that I inherited and they are set up to send some formatted emails to people based on a few different conditions. Upon save & submit it does a lookup to a view that contains all the Routing documents and emails the people listed in the field it needs to go to. This works just fine except when people are hired and they say stuff like "Jack needs the same Notes access as Jill has" or when someone is removed from the directory because they are still in those routing documents.

I was thinking of using server group names for all the different routing conditions because then it's easier to give someone the same access as someone else and when they are removed the directory they get removed from the group. Downside is there will be A LOT of groups in the server directory.

Is this the best approach or would something else work better? How do you have your applications set up?

With the 8.0.2 client you can now get your selection margin (I think usually referred to as the "gutter", maybe?) back in your mail file.

Just go into your Preferences and under Basic Notes Client Configuration find it at the bottom of the additional options.

It will prompt you to close out of your calendar/email if you have them open and here's what you get on return.


Thank you Lotus!!

Got my first error running the 8.0.2 Beta 2 and thought I'd do the right thing when prompted and send the details in to IBM....

Any idea on where I could send it or if it's even worth sending in?

I hope I'm just missing something. I see Windows, Windows 64 bit, AIX, Solaris and xSeries but nothing for the iSeries (system i). The server release for system i is queued up to download after the clients finish but not having LEI for this release for LEI will stop my planned upgrades. I can't find anything on IBM's website either but I've always had trouble finding anything I'm looking for on there.

I'm depressed.

[edit] It's in the release notes for LEI 8.0.1 that it's available for system i but still nothing on the Passport Advantage site.

For some reason, with the official announcement of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 being released tomorrow, I've decided to start blogging. I'd like to try and keep this focused mainly on Lotus related topics but I'm a big sports fan and an entertainment (books, movies, music, games) fan in general, so who knows what will show up.

No surprise to anyone who might actually read this post but IBM has announced the release of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 for tomorrow, Feb. 20, 2008. I first read about it here at Ed Brill's blog where he has a link back to IBM's site.

Currently I'm "managing" eight Domino servers, four on i5 boxes and four on Windows boxes, and the versions of Domino are scattered. The most up-to-date are two clustered servers on i5 that are running 7.0.3. The oldest release is the other i5 cluster running 6.5.4. Of the Windows servers, they are used as an Archive server, BES server, Sametime server and a Web Server. Our user base is around 600 with 90% using a Notes client - which are also on scattered releases.

I consider myself a designer (Nathan says we should say that instead of "developer" ) rather then an administrator but I'm lucky enough to do both. After Lotusphere this year I decided to try and start doing a better job on the administrative side and I've been waiting for this release to really begin doing that. Since I've been working with Notes and Domino we've never gone to a .0.0 release and have always waiting for a .0.1 release. This has been tough to do with version 8 as I have been dying to get Domino 8 on our servers. I've only played around a little on the Notes 8 client since 8.0.0 was released but I'm dying to start using that client as well.

As I'm sure many will do, I will be scrambling to download this release as fast as possible. Going to set one of the 7.0.3 servers into restricted mode so I can upgrade it as soon as I have the download tomorrow. Hopefully the install will be painless and I can get the other server in that cluster upgrading after some testing. I'll keep you posted.