Notes 8 Beta 2 – First Impressions

Well, I’ve been running the Beta 2 client for two days now and am generally very impressed. It has certainly come on in leaps and bounds to the prior versions which I managed to sneak peaks at over the last few months.

I have raised a few (minor) issues in the beta discussion forum but they are most definitely not of the show stopper variety. There are some problems running a 7.0.2 client and the 8 client at the same time but I’m not even bothering to report those as they are not what you’d call a “real world” issue.

So what do I like…
– The UI is great, as we’ve been saying for a long time. I did worry that the initial mocked up vision wouldn’t translate to working software but my fears are pretty much unfounded. The new tab bar, colour scheme and general look and feel is very “now” but is also neutral enough that it’s not going to age quickly.
– The mail and calendar templates are very impressive, instantly usable and positively comparable to the dreaded Outlook equivalent.
– The calendar and Sametime sidebars will really make a difference for anyone who lives in their Notes client.
– And of course the ODF document editors are the true differentiator. Honestly, in my view they are a masterstroke because they can replace Office for 80% of users meaning a saving of perhaps hundreds of pounds per seat. If there’s one thing which will scare MS it will be these editors.

There are of course some areas that are less positive.
– As Chris has already pointed out the Feed reader is less than perfect, but I suspect the target audience is not me. I currently have about 250 feeds in NetNewsWire and trying to manage them from the little sidebar is not really practical. What may turn out to be good though is if you use RSS to track application faults, it will mean I can separate out my reading from my intranet error tracking.
– In the mail template I haven’t yet found how to enable the twistie which was demo’d at Lotusphere to show an entire mail thread from any document in the thread. I’m guessing / hoping that this is a server feature.
– We’ve lost the right click “Open In Designer” option on the database tabs in the client. A minor annoyance.
– This is just a personal bug-bear but the Eclipse preferences pane is just too cluttered. I can’t see any normal user trolling through all of the options and there are some useful things you would want them to find.
– Talking of which, the “Mark documents as read when opened in preview pane” option is disabled at install but the mail template is set to preview documents by default. I would have expected that to function in the same way as Outlook.

I’m trying to be deliberately picky, if Notes is to survive we have to give it a real pounding of real world usage to iron out the defects before it goes gold. This design upgrade is a one chance deal, any mistakes will be nigh on impossible to recover from, so I am certainly going to spend as much time as I can spare testing this thing to destruction so that my users get the benefit from it.

In the end my livelihood depends on Notes 8 being a resounding success, so far it looks like the mortgage is safe!

March 12, 2007 by 4

Reminder for this Thursday

There’s a group of Notes and Domino people meeting up in London this Thursday evening at the Market Porter near London Bridge. If you’re in town please do come along, we can discuss the Beta 2 release, or just have a few pints whichever seems right at the time!

If you want to get in contact, my mobile is 07767 384970 or you can email me

March 12, 2007 by 0

Domino Dojo Discussion Database

I’ve had quite a few emails from people asking how to get started using Dojo in their Domino applications, so rather than repeating myself a lot I thought I’d bash together a demonstration database.

The refuge for a lack of imagination is the classic Discussion database, we’ve all been there in some for or another so I thought I’d take that old chestnut and bring it up to date a little. And the result can be seen here.

So a little about the database. It is a working demonstration, meaning you can create documents to see how it works but I haven’t done extensive testing, unless there is a lot of feedback I can’t see this becoming a “proper” application. The aim is to show some of the main Dojo features in action in a relatively simple Domino context. The main ones you’re seeing are:
– the layout widgets to control the pseudo frames
– the button widget to make nice looking action buttons
– the tree widget to display the left hand action bar and the thread display
– the combo box widget when creating new documents
– and last but not least the editor widget that allows rich text input.

As a starting point, open the design of the database (download link further down this entry) and open the form called “index.htm”. It controls the main page layout. the other forms are pretty simple to allow the creation of new discussions and replies. Personally I always prefer just to dig around in the source code to find my way, but if you have specific questions or issues please leave a comment here or drop me an email.

Download the NSF

March 11, 2007 by 3

This may take a while

It’s the screenshot a lot of us have been waiting for and with my reduced ADSL speed it may take some time, but I can wait…
woohoo.jpg

March 10, 2007 by 0

Phone Problems

I’ve noticed this evening that my broadband was very slow (like 500k rather than the usual 6mb) so I phoned BT who tell me that apparently there’s a fault on my phone line. It means that apparently if you’ve tried to call me that you may not have got through, so in the meantime please use my mobile to call me.

Update It looks like the line fault has been fixed:

March 9, 2007 by 0

Google Webmaster Tools

If you run any sort of public website (a blog, a corporate site or whatever) I would recommend having a look at Google Webmaster Tools. Basically if you insert a tag in your site’s homepage header as verification that you own it, Google will give you access to a whole bunch of their database stats and information to allow you to see in quite some detail what you are being searched on, which pages are doing well or badly, the pagerank of different pages in your site, errors that Google has encountered while spidering your site and much much more.

Definitely worth a half hour peruse.

March 8, 2007 by 1

WebDAV tip

I spent a little time last night getting WebDAV enabled on a database and server so that I could upload the latest version of Dojo as file resource design elements. Unfortunately it took a little more time than expected. Of course Jake has an article on how to set it up but the one thing which I missed for about half an hour of swearing was that you must check the design locking box in the database properties as well as everything else. The Administration documentation is ambiguous on this point from my view.

So hopefully if people are seeing the message “The HTTP method is not allowed for the specified URL” when trying to copy a file into the Domino database using Windows Explorer (or indeed the OS X Finder although the error message is somewhat less helpful there!) then a quick Google should find this page.

March 8, 2007 by 1