But there will be more. In the future, they expect that IM clients -- Notes clients to come, Sametimes to come -- will work with Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration servers as well as the old Sametime server. Or the other way 'round.

Future Notes clients will be able to get their mail from Workplace Messaging servers. Ok, they can now, as a POP3 client, but that's not quite the same. There are plans to make the Notes client do more than just work on Notes applications; Ambuj Goyal mentioned that the Singapore Government use the Notes client now to access PeopleSoft data, and that an unnamed UK company uses Notes as their SAP client. Expect more capability in this area. Notes 7 will enable access to Workplace content.

There's also the DB2 in Domino 7 that we talked about last Lotusphere, and which I expect will be much more than a sneakpeek this time round. The ability that we have now to inter-operate Domino applications with Websphere Portal will be improved, with more portlets and better application development tools. And Workplace Assembler will be an application builder tool -- Domino Designer for Workplace?

I guess the big news for us Notes diehards is the talk of the new "Rich Client." There wasn't a lot of detail, but what it seems to boil down to is this: There will be a Rich Client, to be based on Eclipse, and which will do much more than a browser ever will. Whether this new Rich Client will be Notes 8, or run alongside Notes 8, wasn't clear to me, but what was is that it most definitely won't be Windows only. It will do Macs, and Linux. Will it also be the holy grail (see http://www.dominopower.com/tocs/issue200306.html) of a Linux Notes client? Well, maybe! And delivery starts with Workplace 2.0 in 2004.

Then there is the idea of the Notes client as a client-side portal mechanism. Workplace is a server-side portal -- the server collects it all together and squirts it up the line to the browser client, which "only" displays it. Everything you want to get to needs to be available to the servers. The idea of a client-side portal is that the client assembles the pieces for display from different sources, different servers, even local content, much as the Notes client does now.

Look at the Notes 6.5 Workplace welcome screen as an example of a client-side portal. Then think of the possibilities here, especially the ability for a user to create an ad-hoc setup with resources that just aren't available for a server to create. Think of Notes as the ultimate client. And Lotus hasn't forgotten the mobile story that is so much a part of the Notes client.

There's a lot of promise here, and there'd probably be more if only I could read the notes I was hurriedly taking during the session. A lot of new capability coming over the next 18 months or so, so little detail and so many questions.

The way to find out more has to be to go to Lotusphere 2004. It's a certainty that a goodly chunk of Lotusphere next year will be Workplace and coexistence between it and Notes and Domino. Registration's still open. If you went to the Workplace launch, they gave you a discount too, but then if you'd gone to the launch, you might not need to be reading this, huh? See you all there.

Kathy Evans-Davis is a senior technical writer in the information technology industry in the greater metropolitan Washington, DC-Baltimore, MD area and owner of QuantumScribe Freelance Writing at http://www.quantumscribe.com. Reach Kathy by email at kathy@quantumscribe.com.