That redesign and re-feature extends into the mail and calendaring in the new single mail8.ntf template. Tasks in the new mail template have had their appearance freshened up, but no new functionality has been added, yet.

But for mail and calendars there are new and better looking forms, with new and much better headers in forwarded email chains. There's mail threading that works -- open up a thread in the inbox, and all the rest of the view goes grey, the thread opens, shows which folder each email in it is located in, copes with deleted emails in the thread, SMTP emails in the thread (subject to the sender's email client supporting MessageID), and even shows the first line of the email text.

All applications benefit from in-line spell-check and multilevel undo in rich text fields. I hope the multilevel undo applies also to Designer.

Address book and calendar
There a new dynamic address book, which keeps track of the 2,000 or so people that you most recently emailed or SameTimed with, and these show up in a dynamic dropdown type-ahead list as you address email. These are synced automatically between the mail file and the personal address book, so that they are always available in the Notes client and in DWA.

The point of sync with the mail file is not just to support DWA, but now, it means that your contacts can be shared with those people who you delegate mail and calendar access to. Now, that is cool! And while we mention cool, there's now a business card view in the personal address book, too.

There's more in the calendar: unaccepted invites appear as grey ghost entries, so that you can see them in context before you accept them, and you can then accept straight from the calendar itself, rather than in the inbox.

There's automated server-based inbox cleanup which means that old inbox content is removed from the inbox -- you'd need to go to the All Documents view to see it. There's Message Recall and a new Out Of Office functions. I'll discuss those with the Domino Server next week.

Eclipse
We're Eclipse here, so you can add Eclipse plugins such as the complete Sametime 7.5.1 client, which will be in the box. No more cutdown Sametime client in the Notes client. Now it's the real thing.

The Productivity Editors I mentioned a moment ago are also Eclipse plugins. Based on OpenOffice, the new versions look so much better than the ones that were made available in the stand-alone Workplace Managed Client 2.6 version that I've been using for a few months.

These will support not just Open Office formats, but current and old Office and SmartSuite formats too. The idea here is that you just don't leave the expanded Notes client, ever -- especially when your own Line of Business apps have been made available as Eclipse plug-ins, too.

I played in the Hands-On session at adding a new search to the supplied global search bar. Adding Ask to go with the supplied Google and IBM search took all of 20 minutes. OK, I had the Eclipse framework set up and source made available but even so, it was pretty neat. You can even alter the appearance of quite a lot of it -- like adding your own company branding, just with CSS files.