I feel for the poor end-users not living in the U.S. Like me, you may write email in different languages, and then the nightmare starts. Maybe I missed the trick, but I couldn't find an easy way of marking text in a language for spell check.

This operation requires several steps, so after getting bored by email always half red, I just disabled automated spell check. A single button directly accessible in the GUI or even better, the possibility to merge several dictionaries would help quite a lot. Moreover, the Notes and Symphony dictionaries are not common, which is another symptom of where Notes and Symphony could be integrated better.

On that subject, he integration of Symphony is not complete yet. Symphony displays in the same workspace as Notes, which isn't a good idea, in my opinion. In addition, some Notes shortcuts are replaced by Symphony's ones, the menus are not consistent, switching ID closes documents, and so on.

Search is quite user unfriendly and the Tips button is just opening the general Help when one would expect a short contextual explanation.

I also experienced a few delays, missing sandboxes and frozen menus when using the GUI.

Icons changed, including the small ones in applications views. This impacts all Notes applications and requires a design review.

Globally, the new interface is neat and the selection of colors, icons, and shades is just fine.

As I'll discuss below, the program is working as expected. The problem is really the high-level architecture of the product. Most of the new interface has been designed as a copy of past features, translated into a new language (Java, using Eclipse development environment). However, the Notes client still remains based on the concepts imagined 15+ years ago. As brilliant as those concepts were (and they really were), it's about time to move forward and to create the new Notes GUI that matches today's end-user requirements.

There are discussions inside IBM about going this way but this is not yet for 8.5. The results of the evolution of the Notes client during these years is a patchwork of icons, menus, wizards and links that, in places, make it quite user-unfriendly. I find it understandable that some Outlook and Web mail users don't like to use the Notes client.

This trend progressed due to new features added to Notes (Sametime integration, Feeds, Widgets, Symphony, etc...) and the new Eclipse architecture, allowing more modularity and flexibility of components. You can now do much more...but it's a bit of a mess.

Some programs overwrite Notes' default shortcuts. The same function can sometimes be activated from up to four different locations (top menu, right click, icon, side menu for example). Databases -- sorry Applications -- can be accessed from the Open button, the Workspace or Bookmarks, and there are so many options and hotlinks on this GUI that finding the way of doing what you want is a challenge.

It's not only the Microsoft fanatics that criticize the Notes client. There really is a major design issue here and a complete re-thinking of the Notes client's "architecture" is a must in my opinion.

But that doesn't mean the Notes 8.5 client is bad. To the contrary, there's a lot to like and love...