Ok, so now, let's look at the product announcements.

Lotus Notes 8 is the big one and is what I'm discussing this week. Notes 8 is now IBM's premier, or rather, only, mail platform, Domino DWA (Domino Web Access, aka iNotes) excepted. Since the wobbles of a few years ago, Notes has certainly come back into its own. There's just so much that's new here -- starting with the whole UI -- that I can't do much more than summarise.

The basics
Starting with the basics, yes, there will be a traditional Workspace, but this time, I think that people may start to stray away from it.

The default Home page of Notes has large buttons to access mail, calendars, the productivity editors and more. An Open button at the top left starts a vertical menu that mimics the bookmark tab of Notes 7, and can be docked at the left if need be. Notes apps open to the right of that with the familiar two-pane approach, and then there is a right sidebar with more small apps in it: activities, a day at a glance calendar, an RSS reader and more.

Being Eclipse, of course this sidebar is fully customiseable and apps in it can co-operate with each other and with the main pane. The preview pane can now be displayed vertically to the right of the view instead of underneath it -- and when used like that, the view cleverly reformats itself to cope with the smaller horizontal space. Preferences from Notes and from Mail are consolidated into a dynamic but non unfamiliar preferences menu. What I don't know is whether that can be extended by your own app's profile stuff.

I have to say I played with the Notes 8 client in one of the Hands-On sessions, and it is very cool. It's neat, and does so much more, yet is really very familiar in a fresh kind of way and things are easy to find. It really does look good; Mary Beth Raven and her team have done a first class job of the redesign.