A Perspective on Lotus Notes 8.0.1
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With Lotus Notes 8 available on the market for some time now, Eos Solutions' Director & Principal Consultant, Sean Kelly, takes a closer look at some of the features of the latest 8.0.1 release that are beneficial for him. |
From a business perspective, the overall experience of working within the Notes 8 interface is what I am excited about. We could spend quite a bit of time discussing the technical components of Notes 8 and their brilliance, but the simple fact is that Notes 8 allows you to have all of the key information you need on one screen - and you can still interact and collaborate with your team members, projects and clients.
Notes 8 allows you to ‘collaborate in context’ from a single view (see the graphic on the right to see what I mean). For me, removing all of the clutter from my desktop provides a very compelling value proposition for Notes 8. I can access everything I need to do my job in one place – projects, people and processes all linked and ready to collaborate when needed.
With widescreen monitors now becoming the norm, the panel style of the Notes 8 interface provides more flexibility for how you prefer to work.
You can change the position of the mail preview, configure the sidebar, dock/undock panels and so forth. The whole interface is resizable and configurable which provides multiple ways of working and viewing your work.
What is most interesting is the parity between Outlook and Notes 8. Check out the comparison screenshot on the left – it is becoming difficult to pick the two clients, and makes it easier for Outlook users to jump into Notes and vice versa. This is something that we get asked a lot – how do we make the Outlook users happy with Notes? Notes 8 is the only answer.
Within the interface, the sidebar is an important part of Notes 8. Out of the box you get some default sidebars which include Lotus Sametime instant messaging, ‘Day at a Glance’ calendar view, RSS feeds and My Widgets.
I have created a montage of 6 sidebar screen shots in the one graphic below to illustrate how well the sidebar feature works. Each shot shows a different element of the taskbar open, while the other panels are minimised.
With the My Widgets feature, you are able to deploy Google Gadgets (http://desktop.google.com/plugins/) to your sidebar. I have found the world clock convenient – shown in the last panel, but there are literally hundreds to choose from. Some of the consultants at Eos have scientific calculators, weather reports, traffic reports, currency converters and the even odd social networking tool set up in their sidebar.
At Eos, we use an application suite called Embrace to manage our business processes. I have created some side bar elements for the common information that I use. To create the sidebar element, I can click just one button shown here below, and the current view is displayed in my sidebar. This simple process allows me to keep a view accessible at all times for a specific project or use.
The third sidebar shot shows the QuickR Connector. This gives me easy access to all our Lotus Quickr team spaces and project rooms, and I can easily move documents in and out of the Quickr and ensure all versions and changes are tracked. I can also drag and drop email attachments into the Quickr, which is a brilliant feature.
If I don't have local access to Notes and am travelling away from the office, I can still access my full email and calendar through Domino Web Access. The new 'lite' version looks very similar to Notes 8 but is fully accessible through a web browser (see the screenshot below).
The ability to have all of my work interconnected in a single Notes interface makes managing my workload easier and saves a lot of time searching for information.
Where to next for Notes?
The graphic below illustrates the journey Notes has taken over the years. Notes 8.5 is currently in beta (released Q4 2008) and provides a raft of improvements on the Domino server side and also within the Notes client. Best of all, Mac users will be able to use Notes 8.5 with the client now configured to run in Leopard.
Coming Up: Developing on Notes 8
In my next article I’ll cover off on composite applications in Notes 8 and the experience of working within the Eclipse framework.
If you need more information on Lotus Notes 8, please Contact Us to arrange a demonstration.
