The rest of today has been spent in the strategy sessions which seem to dominate the first day.
The improvements in the Notes client for mail, calendar and contacts are striking. This is probably the most well known area of the new versions and I’m really just re-iterating what has already been said but there’ll certianly be no complaints about how Notes looks any more.
In all of the demo’s so far the beta version has been performing relatively slowly. This is always the case with beta software but I certainly hope things speed up a little before release, it would be a nightmare to have all these cool new features and then not be able to run them because user’s PCs aren’t up to the task.
One of the security features in Domino 8 which leapt out at me as a compliance bonus is that you can turn on HTTP password locking due to incorrect passwords. I’ve seen entire applications fail audit because of the lack of this feature, so A Good Thing.
The NSFDB2 feature is finally going to be made fully available in Domino 8. A new feature added will be HTTP parameterised DB2 query views which sound very cool from a reporting perspective.
Web Services support is being greatly expanded, mainly I suspect to support the composite applications behind the scenes but us developers get the bonus of (finally) web service consumption just by importing a WSDL and filling in the blanks.
The planning for Domino Next (i.e. ND9) seems to be pretty well progressed which seems incongruos but when you look at the list of features they’re talking about adding / updating they need all of the time they can get, the roadmap that they showed indicates a 2008/09 release schedule, nice to see that Lotus keeps to their promised dates whereas some other companies we could mention have no concept of meeting promises.
And finally for today, I’ve just finished a sit down in the User Experience Lab doing one of the sessions they’re running there using the latest Notes 8 beta. I’m not sure how much I can or can’t say as they mentioned NDAs and suchlike, suffice to say that it’s looking very impressive. If you’re in Orlando this week I highly recommend booking yourself into one of the sessions down there.
