Lodahl's blog: IBM Lotus Notes 8

21 August 2007

IBM Lotus Notes 8

...or ND8 as we prefer to call it, was released last Friday. I've been trying it out for some time now, and I must say that it looks great. I am looking forward to go deeper into the designer client as soon as I get some time.

I have already looked at two parts:

  1. composite applications
  2. productivity tools
The ability to create composite applications will be a very strong feature some day. The problem is, that Lotus Notes is no longer a so called rapid development environment. To create composite applications, you actually must be a hardcore programmer.

And I am very happy that Lotus Notes now comes with productivity tools and support for ODF (open document format).

Some day I hope to be able to ask IBM a few questions:
  1. When can we expect Lotus Notes rich text to be native stored as ODF ?
  2. Is it possible to import ODF documents into a Notes rich text field ?
  3. Why wont IBM Lotus say, that productivity tools is actually a clone/fork of OpenOffice.org ?
    Please see my blogpost here
  4. When can expect IBM staff to use their own applications at work, e.g. product presentations and text documents ?
    I'm tired of seeing IBM staff do presentations with an application like You-know-who Powerpoint. When are you ready to take your own medicine ?
Any way: congratulations. I believe that Notes 8 will be a success.

4 comments:

jramskov said...

I'm currently employed there so I'm certainly wondering when we'll get upgraded from Notes 7 to Notes 8.

In regards to MS Office, we just have to face it, it is a defacto standard. It is what people know and there is little competition to MS Office. I don't mind people using MS Office, I would just like to be able to actually have a choice. That's why I'm a big supporter of ODF and open standards.

I also see MS Office misused a lot. People use Word all the time for stuff where a simple text file is more appropriate.

Anonymous said...

At Linuxforum 2007 the guy presenting Notes made no secret that it was an OOo "clone", as a matter of fact, from what he said, I got the impression that it _was_ 99.9% OOo code..

Of course he was more of a developer than a marketer..

Leif Lodahl said...

@martin schlander:
True, but you can't find anything about this on print or in other IBM marketing material.

Anonymous said...

I agree with you on IBM'ers using their own software! For my own part I've been using Lotus Spreadsheets, Lotus Documents ans Lotus Presentations (that are their final names) for quite a while now. And they work just fine!