The way information is exchanged is shifting rapidly, requiring companies to change how they manage their most important asset - knowledge. Increasingly, professionals are turning to online venues to communicate what they know and to create communities of collaboration. They are developing ad-hoc methods to collaborate and get work done. They are relying on e-mail, instant messaging, and online, team-based, electronic user environments.
The latest release of IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino reflects these developments - not only to support the way people work today, but to establish a foundation for a future of increasing collaboration. Lotus Notes 8.5 is the premier integrated messaging and collaboration client option for the Lotus Domino server. Lotus Notes can help businesses enhance the productivity of their employees, streamline business processes, and improve overall organizational responsiveness.
IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 supports previous Lotus Notes applications, while offering new and improved capabilities and delivering Web 2.0-like innovations in collaboration. The software will provide entirely new capabilities, including composite applications and office productivity tools that can help improve the way people work. In addition, Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 software can play a key role as organizations adopt service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategies.
For the end user, "at the glass" interactions are critical aspects of their daily lives. An interface that can improve the user's experience is critical to software adoption. However, learning new technologies must be intuitive. With the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 client, IBM has delivered on these expectations. From the initial look and feel of the Notes client, to the full integration with the IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM Lotus Quickr platforms, IBM has accelerated the business value of the end user experience with more than just e-mail!
Here are just a few of the enhancements that you'll see in the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 release. These are designed to help your organization collaborate better and promote productivity and responsiveness.
IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 software continues IBM's commitment to helping you better manage information received via e-mail, while also allowing you to work from within your inboxes. New mail features include:
- Threaded e-mails are gathered together and presented at the view level. You can easily expand a thread and see all messages related to specific topics grouped together. In preview mode, you can quickly find the information you are seeking, which is often hidden in long conversation threads.
- The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed reader plugin is accessible from the sidebar. You can scan information from your favorite news feeds and use it to answer questions and complete tasks. As with all the sidebar plugins, the RSS feed reader can be detached from the sidebar with the "float plugin" option, allowing you to work in the way that you are most comfortable.
- Common keyboard and mouse-click shortcuts and commands are now supported. For example, you can use the Ctrl> key to select multiple, non-contiguous items in the Lotus Notes database view, which allows you to interact with multiple pieces of information simultaneously.
- Message recall capability allows you to retrieve e-mail messages that have already been sent.
- Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)—a new Notes 8.5 Domino server feature that saves disk space by storing attachments in the filesystem on a server—resulting in significant disk space savings.
New calendar improvements enable you to manage your time and meeting invitations, and make decisions from your calendar, while reserving your inbox exclusively for e-mail message management. Calendar enhancements include:
- Dates of important meetings or appointments are highlighted in the monthly calendar view. Highlighted dates on the monthly calendar give you a visual cue about days with scheduled meetings and unprocessed invitations. You can respond to unprocessed invitations by simply double-clicking on highlighted entries to accept, decline, or counter-propose an invitation.
- When scheduling conflicts arise, Lotus Notes 8.5 now allows the meeting chairperson to simply select or deselect attendees to find times that best meet the needs for that meeting.
Contact functionality (previously called the personal address book) now offers a new user interface that helps boost productivity by enabling you to navigate contacts more quickly. Other new features include:
- Business-card-like views with embedded photographs help you find contact information more quickly.
- You can leverage the extensibility of Lotus Notes 8.5 software to initiate contextual collaboration from the Contact view.
- You can open individual contact information in a new window. If you prefer, you can easily change the view to traditional Lotus Notes tabbed views.
In addition to providing a world-class solution for messaging and collaboration, Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 8.5 is an industry-leading, robust platform for developing people-centric applications. It helps you and the designers in your organization build applications that assist your people to be more productive and to meet your business requirements. The continued evolution of the Lotus Notes/Domino platform allows it to participate openly within diverse IT environments, create new value from existing applications, and contribute to your service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5, through its support of user-facing composite applications and web services, provides new opportunities to evolve toward an SOA, while preserving your existing application and infrastructure investments. Your IT team can seamlessly introduce new application capabilities that help increase user efficiencies, through a familiar UI. The open, extensible Lotus Notes 8.5 model allows you to use development tools and component technologies that best align with your IT strategy, skills, and assets.