IBM just released lotus notes 8.5.3, available from IBM Passport Advantage website.
This is the new features of lotus notes 8.5.3
Lotus Notes 8.5.3 delivers significant enhancements to support social businesses and help users get their work done fast, for example:
- Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.3 includes entitlement to the IBM Connections files and profiles components adding significant capabilities to help clients become a social business
- Enhanced new mail notification which optionally provides a pop up preview (containing both sender and subject) of new mail messages as they arrive.
- Improved sorting on email subject content that ignores the “Re:” and “Fw:” prefix, from reply & forward respectively, providing a more accurate sorting of your data.
- A new option to search by sender or subject available when you right click an email.
- Optionally leave countered meetings on your calendar. Allow countered meetings to show up in a unique color, with the time the meeting was originally scheduled for as well as maintaining the ability to act on the original calendar invite and with hover text indicating the new proposed time.
- Optionally notify existing invitees when adding or removing attendees from an existing meeting, informing them of the change and updating the invitee list on their calendar invitation, as well as other options which negate the need for a user to process any meeting updates for anything other than a change in time, eg. a reschedule.
- Significant improvements to recent contacts, allowing end users more control over who gets added to recent contacts and improved data integrity.
- Geographic and time zone information is be displayed in the business card.
- Apple Mac usability improvements for e-mail gestures include the ability to drag one or grouped files to the Lotus Notes icon on your dock, and a new mail message will be created with those files attached.
- Embedded IBM Sametime is upgraded to V8.5.1 with an incremental installer to IBM Sametime 8.5.2, and embedded IBM Lotus Symphony is upgraded to V3.0.
- Additional platform support includes RHEL 6.0 Desktop, Citrix XenApp 6.0, and enhanced 64-bit toleration for Microsoft Windows.
- Added ability to remove signature file from a thread
What is interesting is that is now lotus notes can sort the subject easily, without problem.
Prior this version, user have difficulties to sort emails based on their subject, because the “Re: ” and the “Fw: ” are treated differently. Outlook users do not have this kind of problem, but now lotus notes client too 
. Better late than never.
Hope that IBM much more open mind to user inputs than before.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Recent Contacts, the goods and the bads
Personally, I like the new feature of lotus notes 8, Recent Contacts. Where as default, it will automatically added any names (or email addresses) to Recent Contacts, where than user can use it to look up email address. Later, names in the Recent Contacts can be moved to Contacts if you like.
For me, it saves time. I do not have to add manually the sender to my contacts, and it only able to add sender, not all people in the To or CC. Now, with Recent Contacts, all the To and CC names (or email addresses) will automatically added to my Recent Contacts list, and saves a lot of time.
But, there are users who do not like this feature, specially users who like to have their contacts clean and manage able, they only want to add names to their contacts only if it important, while Recent Contacts will automatically add all of them.
Luckily, Recent Contacts have many options, you can choose it in Contacts preferences.
You can choose that Recent Contacts DO NOT automatically added:
- Any names to Recent Contacts, for short to disable the Recent Contacts feature.
- CC and BCC names to Recent Contacts, so it only add names in the TO field.
- Names from emails that I receive (Only add names from email that I send), that already explain it.
So, for users who really hate this feature, they can simply disable it.
One of the annoying thing about this feature, it will add invalid or junk names (or email addresses) to Recent Contacts, specially when users received spam emails with a lot of email addresses in the TO and CC fields.
Do you want to go with this features or not, is your choice. I personally like this feature, and once in a while clean up the Recent Contacts for junk names.
Popularity: 3% [?]
New features in Lotus Notes 8.5 (A very quick review)
I just got my copy of Lotus Notes 8.5, and this is just a quick look on what new and interesting features in the new lotus notes 8.5 client.
This is just a quick look, so don’t expect a full review of lotus notes 8.5 client.
New signature
Now users can create a more beautiful signature rather than text only signature or user have to create a html file. Users can create a colorful signature or even attach a picture.
Export Contact
Now users can export their contact into csv or vcf file. It will be easier for users to copy their contacts to others email clients.
Default email, calendar and contact
After we finished install and configure lotus notes 8.5 client, it will ask if we want to setup lotus notes as our default email, calendar and contact program. Before it will only ask for default email program.
New Right Click
Lotus Notes 8.5 have a new right click menu, and much more cleaner and nicer than the lotus notes 8.02.
Those three new features that I quickly recognize after I setup the lotus notes 8.5 client. I will added more in this post, if I have found more features.
Have fun with the new Lotus Notes 8.5 client.
Popularity: 26% [?]
Why we need to upgrade to Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5?
IBM already released the new Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5. Now we have the question, should we or should we not upgrade our lotus notes and domino (specially domino) to version8.5?
What are the benefits if we upgrade our lotus notes and domino?
Are there any new feature(s) that we can use?
You can learn all the features in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 in here, and these are the features that I really like.
Lotus Domino Attachment and Object Services (DAOS)
For me, as lotus domino administrator, where I have many GB’s mailboxes tha full of attachments, are really a life saving. If only lotus domino 8.5 only have DAOS as the only new feature, I still like to upgrade.
“In databases that use DAOS, Lotus Domino no longer stores an attachment within the document itself. Instead, the DAOS-enabled server saves a single copy of the attachment in the DAOS repository and replaces the attachment with a reference to that DAOS object. If an attachment exists in multiple databases, the attachment is stored only once per server partition, and the reference counts are increased. Therefore, when an attached file is sent to multiple users on the same server, disk space usage is substantially reduced. As impressive as the reduction in disk space can be, there is an even greater potential cost savings associated with DAOS. DAOS can store attachments on a different device than the Lotus Notes databases themselves. In our internal email performance benchmark, DAOS accounts for less than 2 percent of the overall I/O (see the real-world examples that follow). Because of this separation, DAOS can use lower-cost disks without affecting overall response times.”
so, if someone send an email with 2 MB of attachment to 10 people, without DAOS it will cost you 20 MB space in the server. With DAOS, it will only cost you 2 MB space in the server.
For short, DAOS will reduce the need of bigger disks and less time to backup.
You can learn more about DAOS in here.
Notes ID Vault
I’m using Escrow Agent to mail all notes id to an mail-in database. So I always have the backup of notes id file for my users. Also I also save a physical file of notes id in safe places. Therefore if users forget their notes id password, or simply loose it, I always have the copy available.
With Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5, they have the new feature called Notes ID Vault. Where not only administrator able to recover lost notes id file, but the users also able to reset their own passwords.
The benefits of using an ID vault include:
- The ability for authorized personnel to change (reset) passwords on IDs stored in a vault when users forget them, without access to the ID files or the vault
- Support for the use of a custom application to reset passwords
- Easy recovery of lost or damaged user IDs
- Automatic synchronization of multiple ID copies
- No user involvement during ID renames
- No user involvement during ID key rollover
Notes Shared Login
Before Lotus Notes 8.5, we have what we called Notes Single Login, but this new feature should be more secure than Notes Single Login.
But, I still like the simple enter your password dialog box, rather than trusting my password for automatic login.
There are many interesting new features in lotus notes and domino 8.5 like lotus domino designer now run on top of eclipse, XPages etc. But what I like the most is the DAOS, it really a break through on how lotus domino stores they attachments.
And I think, upgrade to Lotus notes and Domino 8.5 is worthed.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Quick Notes about Lotus Notes/Domino 8
After read the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Deployment Guide’s RedBook, I found many interesting facts.
Drop support for old Operating System
IBM/Lotus decided to drop support for old operating system, that included MS Windows 2000 server and RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.
That really surprise me because as my knowledge that there are still many small and medium size company that use those operating system. Do they need to upgrade the OS so they can upgrade to the Lotus Domino 8?
These is the list of unsupported Operating System
- Windows 2000
- AIX 5.2
- Solaris 9
- SLES 8,9
- RHEL 4
- iSeries 800-2463
- eServer i5 520-0900
- i5/OS V5R3
- z/OS version 1 release 5
If you still run Lotus Domino 6.xx or 7.xx in those OS, prepare to upgrade.
Lotus Notes standard and basic edition
For Lotus Notes client, IBM/Lotus release two version of Lotus Notes client.
- Lotus Notes standard that use Eclipse
- Lotus Notes basic edition, without Eclipse
The Lotus Notes standard require more resources, for Windows XP it require minimum of 512 MB Ram with 1 GB recommended.
In Vista it require more memory, 1 GB at minimum and 1,5 GB recommended.
For those user who doesn’t have enough memory, they can run the lotus notes basic editio because it will run on less memory, but with less feature.
No Designer and Administrator in Linux
Lotus Domino Designer and Lotus Domino Administrator only run in windows XP or Microsoft Vista, no linux OS supported.
With Eclipse powered, my first thought that all lotus notes client – including administrator and client can run in Linux, but I guess I’m wrong.
So many features, so little time
The are so many new features included in Lotus Notes/Domino 8, including
- RSS reader
- Productivity tools (Lotus Spreadsheets, Lotus Documents and Lotus Presentations)
- New Contacts (I like now that we can add picture in it), and will display in preview pane
- Message Recall, this is the new feature that I don’t like. I believe that people must think twice before they sent any emails, no Message Recall. First think I do after I upgrade to Lotus Notes/Domino 8 is to disable Message Recall.
That is my first quick notes about the new Lotus Notes/Domino 8.
I believe that upgrade to Lotus Notes/Domino 8 is an important upgrade, there are just so many good new features, it’s worth it.
If you already upgrade your lotus notes/domino into version 8, please share your opinions with me. I’m not yet upgrade it, but very soon.
Popularity: 2% [?]