The long awaited next version of Lotus Notes previously dubbed “Hannover” now Notes 8 went into public beta in the middle of March. This is an important milestone for IBM as there has been a continued buildup of excitement and high expectations in the market for this new release. Besides the technology bells and whistles of eclipse and the composite application framework, the redesign of the user interface is what makes this release truly significant.

Notes has been struggling for years with the perception of being an aging platform mainly due to its outdated and somewhat peculiar user interface. In fact, I strongly believe that in many cases it was not sound business reason, but c-level desire for Outlook that drove many migration discussions.

I’ve been using Notes and Outlook side-by-side for years and installed the Notes Beta soon after its release on my laptop. My first impression is wow! The Beta is stable (even though I’m running on ‘unsupported’ Vista). The user interface looks clean and I can find things intuitively where I would expect them to be.

Of course there are still kinks to be worked out, but that’s what the Beta is for. If download volume is any indication, this Beta already looks like a success.

Here is a screenshot of the new UI:

notes8.jpg

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