Mick
Well, to start with, Notes and Domino are clearly completely back on the agenda. Rocky Oliver, shown in Figure C, spoke for many when he said at the Gurupalooza session, "IBM really gets Notes."

FIGURE C


Rocky Oliver addressing the crowd. Roll over picture for a larger image.

ND7 went to beta 3, a feature complete version, during Lotusphere--so, of course, your hardworking editors downloaded it there and then to try it out. Ship date for ND7 was variously stated as mid-year '05 and Q3 '05. Backing this up were a number of sessions describing the major new features; Web services in Domino with Designer 7 and Domino 7, Domino Domain Monitoring and DB2 back-end support in Domino, and extra Sametime/IM functionality in the client, to name but four.

Another new component is the Notes plug-in for the Workplace Rich Client--that's in beta 3 and will ship in Notes 7, but of course is only of interest to those who have Workplace Client. The extended family will ship at the same time--one major update will be full cluster/failover support in LEI (Lotus Enterprise Integrator) 7. Indeed, according to Scott Morris, who manages the LEI development effort, LEI 7 is already done. And apart from a few small SPRs, is ready to go. ND7 betas are already in use as production systems inside IBM, with around 25,000 mailboxes on ND7 at the time of Lotusphere, which are expected to rise to 50,000 or more before ND7 ships.

Richard
Since we're talking about technical details, there are three things I think will be important for our readers with the Notes 7.x releases. First, there was a lot of discussion from the Lotus folks about the improved performance of the Domino server. A very frequently discussed number was an 80% improvement in the number of users that can be on a Domino server, as measured by NotesBench. This was for the Win32 platform.

Mike Rhodin, VP of Development and Technical Support, briefly mentioned that Linux server performance had been increased by 300%. This could really be helpful for environments that need to deal with larger applications, larger mail files, and more complex integration needs. That level of increase, without any hardware upgrades, would be extremely welcome at most of my client's environments.

The second thing I thought looked very impressive was the way IBM/Lotus has integrated Web services into Domino Designer 7. Web services are now hosted directly from Domino and accessed thru the Designer client, like forms, views and agents. Web services can be written in LotusScript or Java, and WSDL can be exported directly from the Designer client as shown in Figure D of the beta shown below.

FIGURE D


Domino Designer 7 now features the ability to surface Domino functionality as Web Services. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The last thing I'm looking forward to being delivered with Notes 7 is DDM (Domino Domain Monitoring). IBM is continuing to chip away at the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of owning and operating Domino environments, and DDM is one of the important ways they'll be addressing it from an administration perspective.