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GCN Home > 05/01/06 issue

Take Notes

Latest version of Lotus Notes and Domino has enough features, upgrades to keep Microsoft Exchange at bay

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

With IBM’s Lotus Notes client on the front end and a Domino server on the back, agencies can have a robust enterprise collaboration platform that handles most office tasks—despite what Microsoft says. The Redmond giant has made converting holdouts from Notes to Exchange its mission in life. That won’t be easy for organizations with investments in custom Notes apps.

The GCN Lab installed Notes and Domino 7 on our test network for a month-long test. We’d been running Version 6.5.1 of both programs over the network and wanted to see if Version 7 improved an already vastly improved interface.

The answer is, it does. Both end users and administrators will appreciate a better Notes/Domino 7. Although two of the most significant changes—DB2 support and the ability to fix performance issues on the fly—are features of Domino, most users will likely notice improvements to the Notes client. So that’s where we’ll start.

Common ground

The last version of Notes took a page from Microsoft Corp. in giving the suite a homogeneous look and feel. A user trained to use the calendar function of Notes could probably manipulate the e-mail module as well. That was a big step. In Version 7, the steps are a bit smaller, but they’re still aimed at a better overall user experience.

The biggest improvement is in the way Notes manages e-mail. Everyone knows that e-mail floods into users’ mailboxes.

Even with good spam filtering, there is a wide range of valid e-mail that needs sorting and action. Notes 7 tries to figure out how important a message is and classify it for you.

E-mail is rated based on what’s called an Attention Indicator, a small button that sits in a field on the Notes mail client.

A solid button means the e-mail is probably important. One that’s half-filled indicates either lower priority or an item the program can’t classify. A clear button means you can probably put the e-mail aside until later. You can sort your e-mail based on these attention levels, putting important documents higher in the list.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Software Applications



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