What I liked in 8.5
First of all and this is the most important, Notes 8.5 is a professional product. It installs properly, requires a reasonable amount of resources and does the job, so far without crashing once.

Hey...I surprised myself when I started enjoying Symphony. A lot of work has been done since beta versions. I noticed a few issues in the conversion of Office documents but I'm not sure whether you should blame Microsoft or Lotus for not respecting the ODT format. The mix of Notes and Symphony workspaces is a pain though and is again the result of anarchic development without defining first a product architecture.

The conversation threads and a few productivity improvements are quite good. I liked the sidebar Calendar with the Day-At-A-Glance (although this one doesn't change automatically to the current day, which misled me a few times).

I also liked the Instant Spell Check until I noticed I couldn't use it with several languages.

Since I've been focusing on the client's GUI, I won't list here the improved space saving features, ID Vault, etc. which are more on the Admin side. Possibly a good pick for another series later down the road.

There are many useful "little" new features in this version, which are making 8.5 a great success in my opinion, and a basis for new enhancements. However, I'd strongly recommend Lotus fix ASAP the many little problems that prevent us from fully enjoying the new client and can sometimes be productivity killers.

Next week: what I loved in Notes 8.5.

Philippe Schlier worked on messaging projects for over 17 years, on Notes since V2. In 1995, he founded GSX, publisher of GSX Monitor, the most successful monitoring product for Domino, Exchange, BlackBerry and Sametime. While at GSX, he designed their flagship monitoring product, which is now used by 500+ clients worldwide. This allowed him to dive quite in-depth within the architecture of the various messaging and collaboration platforms, to share ideas and work with developers and designers from biggest software players, like (Iris/Lotus/IBM, RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft). Philippe is based in Switzerland and work now for Avonik, as independent contractor on software architecture, design and quality assurance. You can read his blog at http://avonik.com/blog.nsf and contact him via email at pschlier@avonik.com.