A few days old, but noteworthy: In an interesting twist, IBM announced the availability of the latest version of Notes/Domino at Macworld, only two weeks ahead of Lotusphere – IBM’s own product showcase held annually in Orlando.

I think, this signals two things:

  1. IBM acknowledges the growing popularity of the Mac, and its increasing usage worldwide. Macworld in particular is a great venue to connect with real end-users, many of which may not even know that Notes still exists. The success of MS-Exchange has been largely driven by the ubiquitous nature of Outlook, and IBM must rebuild end-user awareness and street-cred to regain market share.
  2. Lotus is hoping to leverage years of heavy investment in Eclipse, which gives Notes instant cross-platform capabilities and feature parity on non-Wintel systems, including the Mac and of course Linux.

While there has been much focus on the long-overdue client-side improvements, since the release of version 8, Notes/Domino 8.5 is now bringing significant enhancements to the server.  Domino Attached Object Storage (DAOS) is a welcome feature that helps enterprises cope with rapidly growing storage demands and the rising costs for email storage. DAOS stores only one attachment per server, regardless of how many recipients received a copy of the message.

The chart below shows the projected storage savings with DAOS deployed. The report was produced on actual email traffic data and is representative of the savings that one can expect to see in large environments.

DAOS Storage Savings

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