The first thing you will notice when logging into Lotus Notes 8.5 is that the start up sequence has changed. The new splash screen is seen in the following screenshot:

Next you will see the new login and progress bar. As you are typing your password, the client is starting to load. As you can see in the next screenshot, this has helped to speed up the startup sequence for the client.

Another change that was made to launch the client faster was to load soffice.exe when Symphony is launched, rather than when the Notes client is launched. soffice.exe is the the Symphony productivity editor's executable.

Context menus have been updated in Lotus Notes 8.5. They are now streamlined for all views such as mail, contacts, and to do's. To see these new context menus right-click the document from the view. You can also now mark e-mails read and unread from this menu as well.

The previous screenshots show context menus when right clicking on an e-mail. The screenshot on left is 8.0, on the right is 8.5.

This is the context menu when you right-click on a calendar entry.

Now there is the ability to drag-and-drop between rich-text fields. This feature is only available in the Microsoft Windows platform.

You can even drag text from external applications to Lotus Notes names fields. If you have Sametime, you can drag contacts and groups into names and rich-text fields.

The live text functionality has been improved and changed from 8.0. Now when you hover over live text, the cursor will change to a blue drop-down arrow.

After the cursor has changed, you can left-click the live text to start an action. If there is a default action set, then this will run. Lotus Notes 8.5 also introduces Widgets and Live Text to the Macintosh and Linux platforms.

Following the green computing theme of 8.5, Lotus Notes 8.5 can now automatically compress images that are pasted into documents. This reduces the space needed to store the images as well as send them. To enable this new feature go to File | Preferences | Basic Note Client Configuration and then check Compress images pasted into documents. This setting is enabled by default.

If you often have contacts with multiple e-mail addresses, the 8.5 release now has this functionality. When you start to type the contact's name, type ahead will now bring up all e-mail addresses for that contact. The most frequently used addresses will be at the top, as they are sorted by frequency as shown in Figure 6.

Open your Inbox in 8.5, and you will notice a few changes to the icons. The icons for read and unread mail have changed. A star icon now appears next to unread mail.

Now in the All Documents view there is a new column that displays the folder that the message is in.

One of the new calendar features introduced in this release is calendar federation. This feature allows you to federate calendars from external sources, such as Google. You can federate calendars from web-based sources, other Notes users, or from files. It will overlay the calendar into your Lotus Notes 8.5 calendar. Starting in 8.5, the choice Other People's Calendars in the navigator of Notes 8.0 has changed. It is now called Show Calendars. The benefit of the overlay feature in Notes 8.5 is that you now have the option of adding another Notes user's calendar directly onto your calendar. Some customers (calendar managers, administrative assistants, and so on) may prefer to use this feature, but they can still open the other user's calendar in another tab, in the same way as they have always been able to do in previous releases.

This is the Add a Calendar window. If you want your calendar entries to synch with your mobile device, check this option.

When you select the option to synch with a mobile device, you will see 45 days before and 45 days after the current date.

Here are some examples of federated calendars.

There is also a new feature called the repair calendar feature. This feature in Notes 8.5 fixes issues where duplicate repeating calendar entries exist in the mail file. A Notes 8.5 client and template are both required for this feature to work. If you have duplicates due to replication conflicts, this will correct and repair the calendar.

Interoperability of calendar invites between other systems, especially Outlook/Exchange, has been enhanced with the use of two new configuration settings. These settings are Compatibility Mode and MIME Simplification. By default these are not enabled.

When Compatibility Mode is off, the user will need to manually enable the option Some invitees use other mail programs. When you enable this option, it disables the ability to create custom repeating meetings. Here is a new ini parameter that can be used to hide this option, change the default value, or lock the option on for all meetings. When displayed, the Some invitees use other mail programs option appears above the attendee list in a meeting entry. The ini parameter is $CSCompatibilityMode. For a table of the values and recommended settings, see the Domino 8.5 Administrator Guide.

MIME Simplification is enabled with the notes.ini parameter DisallowRelatedIcalendarMime. Enabling this controls when the iCal conversion code generates plain text versus rich text when sending an invitation to an internet e-mail address. For a table of the values and recommended settings, see the Domino 8.5 Administrator Guide.

There are three changes to contacts - importing, exporting, and forwarding. Contacts can now be imported, and field mapping can be done before or after the contacts are imported. When exporting contacts, you can filter the fields and you now have the option to export only basic fields.

You can now forward the contact directly from the contacts.

New to Lotus Notes 8.5 is Notes shared log-in. Notes shared log-in allows users, without having to provide Notes passwords, to start Lotus Notes and use their Notes ID. Instead, users only need to log into Microsoft Windows using their Windows password.

Unlike the Notes Single Log-in feature in earlier releases, Lotus Notes 8.5 does not use the Windows password for the Notes ID file. Instead, it stores a secure token used to unlock the Notes ID file in a secure way, provided by an external mechanism. Lotus Notes 8.5 uses a Windows mechanism, so the secure token will only be accessible by users who have logged into Windows.

In Lotus Notes 8.5, the Personal Journal has been given the new name of Notebook. The Notebook template (Notebook8.ntf) includes some of the same elements as the Journal template in earlier releases, such as categorized folders, views, and the ability to create a blank sheet without a heading. The Notebook template also includes some new features. You can now show or hide heading fields (Subject, Entry date, or Category) in Notebook entries. Printing is now allowed without a header. Soft deletions are now also enabled.