I finally loaded up the new Domino 8.5 client.  Not that I have been avoiding it. Perhaps age has dampened my enthusiasm for being on the bleeding edge.   Although primarily focused on the sales side of things, I do often get involved in support issues and find myself touching applications with Domino Designer from time to time.  I prefer not to do that with a version that is different than what the application was created with, and most of these right now are R7.  

But as I do more and more trial implementations of Docova (http://www.docova.com) (anyone know why pass through HTML no longer  works in my Blog RTF with 8.5??) especially for the more progressive folks overseas, I am running into R8.5 more and more.  Recently we had one of clients questioning the wisdom of being on Lotus Notes (a common theme resulting from IBM's complete lack of marketing for the Lotus brand).  They wanted to have a look at the new 8.5 client to see how it compared to Outlook, a UI that the new guard at the C level and the new IT Manager were familiar with.  Good excuse to go back to school.

Initially I was pretty excited.  I like the Day at a Glance calendar in the sidebar. It allowed me to see what I had scheduled while I processed emails from my inbox.  Very handy.  I also liked the type ahead directory lookup feature when composing and email.  You get to pick names that are similar as you type.  The in-line spell check for rich text fields is nice too.  You can group tabs as well. If you are like me, and you open documents and forget to close them, the tabs become unmanageable, and closing them one at a time is a pain.  Similar documents are now grouped under a tab, and you can close them all at once if you like.  I could go on and one, as there are many improvements that are most welcome.

On the flip side, and I hate to say this, it is slower.  I attribute this to the Eclipse framework.  A cup of Java usually perks things up, but in this case the opposite is true. I find myself often waiting for the interface to build.  I also find it annoying as hell that all of the accelerator keys have changed.  Combinations like File>Database>Open were part of my finger's muscle memory, and it is annoying to watch the screen not follow the familiar.

At first I thought the ability to open web pages within the Notes interface was a great feature. I am not talking having to set the location doc to use Notes with Internet Explorer, which would force embedded links to open in the Notes interface. Now you can use the OPEN>Web Browser option to open a web page within a grouped tab.  I was running our document mgt system within Notes 8.5, and you would swear it was part of the Notes interface.  After using it this way for about a week, I found that text fields had a nasty habit of not being able to keep up with data entry. Type fast, and you end up dropping characters.  It was so annoying I ended up running my web apps directly from the browser.  Rats!

It crashes!  With R7 I had not witnessed the NSD screen for quite some time.  At least four times this week R8.5 blew up on me.  I am going to go searching to make sure I have the latest release. This one says R8.5.  As I always tell customers, the more places after the decimal point the better.

At this point, for customers more familiar with Outlook I think Notes 8 is an improvement. For existing customers, especially those that have not updated their hardware in awhile, the performance is not going to be a welcome change.   Regardless...when it comes to 8.5, I would be holding off till a couple of maintenance releases go by.