Only just slightly cooler than RSS-enabled templates, enabling users to point RSS readers at Notes applications and be kept up to date from them, all in one place. That includes the new Blog template, which clearly legitimises blogs as a serious business tool. Last wil be the ability to subscribe to iCal services, and be able to pull public iCal entries into your calendar -- no more forgetting public holidays in the future.

All this builds up to the 2007 release of the next generation of Notes and Domino: the Hannover client, and the "Dnext" server. The idea that Hannover is Notes 8 has gone, it's now officially "not yet been titled". As we reported last year (in http://www.dominopower.com/tocs/issue200502.html), Hannover is to be delivered as a plug-in to the Eclipse-based Workplace-managed Client.

This year the story is so much more complete, and one that we'll come back to a few more times before I'm done with this report. So, first let me say that Hannover is Notes. I've seen it, and it's real. It really is Notes. It has a newer user interface, and because it runs in the WMC, probably a 3.0 version by the time it all ships, it will be more than just Notes. But to a Notes user, it's still clearly Notes, right down to still retaining the Notes workspace, for those people who can't do without it.

Designer and Admin clients won't be Eclipse-based, at least not in the first release (and there will also be a traditional Windows program version of Hannover too, but it won't be the complete deal that the WMC Hannover client will be).

I asked where Admin and Designer were going. The Admin client story seems a little murky, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the current Web-based version (the webadmin.nsf application) does't play a major part of the Admin client's future.

Domino Designer's likely future is clearer. The spirit of the current Domino Designer has been reused in the Workplace Designer, of which more later, and that is Eclipse-based.

At the Ask the Developer session, Maureen Leland, who used to be Designer's "mother" and now leads Workplace Designer, said that some sort of convergence onto the Eclipse platform was on her radar, and of course that then means that Designer will also work on Macs, or Linux. Sounds good to me.

Back to Hannover. There's a number of themes here that all blend into the story, so I'll just call out a few of them.

A refresh of the appearance of the core Notes client
From the screenshots and working code that we saw, it's Notes, but with a new appearance. The UI team are working hard to make sure that it's even easier to use, intuitive for new users yet familiar to existing ones.

A refresh of the appearance of many of the templates will go along with this
I spent some time in the Usability Lab with Mary-Beth Raven from the UI design team. She showed me some design models that explored a number of ideas, ideas around bringing applications and the core client closer together, to reduce the need to think about what is Notes itself and what is the client.