Tom Dobrucky October 27 2008 11:40:14 AM
Resources:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes-designer7-features/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes8-new/ http://www.notes.net
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/5f27803bba85d8e285256bf10054620d/ebd3ffdba65b5693852574c2006c91ee?OpenDocument
These are new in R8.
1) Display unprocessed (new) meetings. Shows meetings that have neither been accepted nor declined in your calendar. A type of Calendar Ghosting allows overlays showing how possible meetings may conflict with existing ones.
2) Real time spell check.
3) New compression, gain 7-20% decrease in NSF sizes Free's up more disk space!
4) Improved Out of Office functionality. Now OoO's can be sent immediately.
5) Message Recall done within NRPC, i.e. Local Notes environment.
6) The ability to Load a client either in the Standard mode or Basic mode depending on hardware.
7) Webmail can load in Full, Lite or Ultralite for people with poor bandwidth issues.
8) Maintaining the Inbox all documents over 2000 are automatically moved to the All Documents View to improve performance.
9 The names.nsf locally is now called contacts.nsf which dispels confusion between the Local and Server NAB.
Lotus iNotes (webmail) R7 vs. R8 features comparison.
Preferences R7 
Preferences R8 
R8 webmail Menu 
R7 Webmail Menu 
The client interface GUI in the web client is similar to Outlook which could ease transition from Outlook / Exchange environments.
Outlook Web Access (OWA) 
Domino Web Access (DWA) R8 
Notice the look and feel difference of R8 above to R7 below.
Domino Web Access (DWA) R7 
Lotus Notes 7.0 new features client side. Lotus Notes 7.0 offers a number of new Calendar and Scheduling features as well as tighter integration with Lotus Sametime. Other functional areas that have been enhanced include mail, desktop, and interoperability. For details on these and all other new client features, see the
Lotus Notes/Domino 7.0 release notes.
Calendar and Scheduling Lotus Notes 7.0 Calendar and Scheduling (C&S) includes a new Calendar Cleanup action that helps you quickly and easily maintain your calendar. To access this feature, open the Tools menu and choose the new Cleanup Calendar option. This displays the Calendar Cleanup dialog box.
Figure 1. Calendar Cleanup dialog box
As you can see, Calendar Cleanup lets you delete entries based on their creation or last modified dates. It also lets you select the type of entries (calendar or To Do) to be deleted.
When conducting a meeting, you can set up the on-line portion of the meeting to restrict attendees to only those on the invite list and to provide a password for the on-line meeting. And the Meetings view has been renamed to All Calendar Entries and offers new views and usability improvements.
We've also enhanced support for managing rooms and resources. For example, you can specify a preferred site and a preferred list of rooms and/or resources to use when scheduling meetings. You can see which rooms/resources are restricted when scheduling meetings. We've upgraded the rooms and resources workflow to eliminate double bookings -- rooms or resources booked directly through the Rooms and Resources database are now processed the same way as those booked through Calendar and Scheduling. (We talk more about rooms and resources improvements later in this article.)
On the server, a new Domino task called RnRMgr now handles rooms/resources event processing. This single point of decision regarding rooms and resources requests prevents overbookings. (For more information, see the developerWorks: Lotus article, "Rooms and Resources design in Lotus Notes/Domino 7."
You can now instruct your calendar to accept a meeting even if it conflicts with an earlier meeting. You can also cancel C&S workflow when responding to a meeting invitation with comments and expand/collapse the Calendar Mini-view. Calendar managers can now mark messages for follow up in mail files that they manage and are prompted to specify where forwarded mail is saved. Administrators can limit how far into the future users can make reservations. Administrators can also set automatic reminder notices to be sent to the Chairperson who books a particular room/resource so that if a meeting is cancelled, the room/resource can be released. In addition, embedded graphics in the Description field now appear when you send an invitation through iCalendar.
Lotus Sametime integration
Lotus Notes 7.0 offers enhanced presence awareness based upon Lotus Sametime. With presence awareness, you can see a person's name in a document or view and tell whether or not that person is online (indicated by a globe icon), and if so, you can click the name to initiate a chat session. Presence awareness has been added to C&S views, Team Rooms, Discussions, To Do documents, the Personal Name and Address Book, the Rooms and Resources template, and the Domino Directory.
To further support Sametime integration, Notes instant messaging chat windows are now in a separate thread. (They are no longer blocked when the Notes client is blocked.) Notes instant messaging contact lists now include three new options: show online people only, show short names, and sort list. You can also minimize lists to the Windows task bar.
Instant messaging preferences support three new options for when a new instant message or invitation arrives: bring message window to front, blink window, and play sound. Notes instant messaging meetings offer features such as screen sharing, whiteboard, audio, and video. In addition, you can now paste Notes URLs into chat windows. And the Toolbar displays icons for screen sharing, whiteboard, and audio and video instant meetings. Also, you can now save a Sametime chat session to your Notes mail database.
Mail
We've added a number of new features to Notes 7.0 mail. For example, Notes now offers a Quick Follow Up feature. This allows you to select one or more mail messages and to mark them for follow up without displaying the Follow Up dialog box. You can set default Follow Up values through a tab in the Mail Preferences dialog box. Follow Up actions are also now available via the right-click mouse menu. You can display the Follow Up dialog box by dragging and dropping to the Follow Up view. Plus, the Follow Up action drop-down dialog box includes a new option called New Follow Up Memo. This lets you quickly create a Follow Up item. In addition, Follow Up functionality is available for those with Editor access to the mail file. (In Lotus Notes 6, the Follow Up interface was hidden from non-owners of a mail file.)
In Lotus Notes 7.0, the Mail Rules feature offers support for Stop Processing Action and blacklist/whitelist spam. Other mail enhancements include a warning if you don't enter a Subject in an email.
Figure 2. "No Subject" warning
There is also a new status bar icon that indicates whether email you receive is digitally signed, encrypted, or both.
Figure 3. Mail security status bar icon
Mail threads are easier to manage in Lotus Notes 7.0. For example, you can view them from the Mail Threads view. You can also display them while reading mail in the bottom pane through a new option in the Mail Preferences dialog box. Mail Preferences can also be set via policies, allowing administrators to distribute the same set of preferences to all users. These preferences may be locked down by the administrator, so end users cannot modify them.
You can also sort by subject in your Inbox and other mail views. And mail archiving has been enhanced. In addition, you can now display a view-level icon within your Inbox that shows whether you are the only recipient or one of several listed in the To and/or CC fields.
Desktop
The Notes 7.0 File menu offers a new option called Close All Window Tabs. This option lets you quickly close all open windows. This feature affects only the window tabs opened in the current window. For example, suppose you have one Notes window open and one Domino Designer window open with multiple forms open. Selecting Close All Window Tabs in Domino Designer closes all open forms, but keeps the Domino Designer window open. Also none of the open tabs in Lotus Notes is affected.
In the Welcome Page Wizard, you can create a welcome page with frames, a Personal Page, or a Workplace.
Figure 4. Welcome Page Wizard
Workplace has been incorporated into the Welcome Page Wizard to enable you to create multiple Workplaces.
Microsoft Office interoperability
You can now access Notes mail through the Smart Tags feature in Microsoft Office XP. (Smart Tags recognize certain types of text -- for example, person names -- and offer related functions and commands.) For more information about Smart Tags, see the tip, "Using Smart Tags in Lotus Notes/Domino 7.0."
Templates
As mentioned earlier, presence awareness has been integrated into the Mail, Team Room, and Discussion templates; Domino Directory; the Rooms and Resources template; and the Personal Name and Address Book. Also, the Team Room and Discussion templates, Rooms and Resources, and Document Library now support the Mozilla browser.
Other Notes enhancements
In addition to the features listed in the preceding sections, the Notes 7.0 client includes:
- Improved rooms and resources usability, including a simple form to create a reservation and the ability to transfer a reservation
- Better archiving
- Enhanced Meetings view
- Less wait while a view that needs updating is being opened
- Accessibility enhancement (You can designate row and column headers in tables so that screen-reader applications can detect them.)
- The Notes application plug-in (This plug-in works with the IBM Workplace Managed Client. For details, consult the Lotus Notes/Domino 7.0 release notes.)
- Ability to save your open window state on shutdown (For example, if you have three windows open when you shut down Notes, those three windows will open when you restart Notes.)
- AutoSave option for selected documents (see the developerWorks: Lotus article, "All about Autosave in Lotus Notes/Domino 7")
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What's new in the Lotus Notes V8 client Many of the enhancements and improvements in Lotus Notes V8 are the result of the move to the Eclipse/Lotus Expeditor environment. Lotus Notes V8 can be extended in the same way that Eclipse itself can be extended. Using the Eclipse platform automatically creates access to other resources IBM has developed for the platform, such as the document, spreadsheet, and presentation editors that come with Lotus Notes V8.
The flexibility of the Eclipse user interface has contributed to a detailed makeover of the Notes user interface, too: The sidebar displays "always on" applications such as the Activity Manager, a day-at-a-glance calendar, instant messaging, and the new RSS feed reader. Developers can build their own custom Eclipse plug-ins for the sidebar. Refer to the three developerWorks articles, "
Extending the IBM Lotus Notes V8 sidebar and toolbar," "
Integrating IBM Lotus Notes data into the Lotus Notes V8 sidebar and toolbar," and "
Leveraging user context in the IBM Lotus Notes V8 sidebar and toolbar."
General improvements include improved MIME rendering, inline spellchecking, multi-level undo, calendar free-time lookup, and selection improvements: SHIFT-click and CTRL-click now work when highlighting and selecting entries in views or text in documents.
A new Java-based client option includes an Open button that lets you access your bookmarks.
The three PIM applications -- Mail, Calendar, and Contacts -- have all been given user interface facelifts and major functional enhancements, and many of the changes take advantage of Eclipse functionality to work as NSF-based composite applications. The Business Card view in Contacts, for example, uses an Eclipse viewpart structure that reads data from the underlying Notes view and displays it in a more graphical format, complete with thumbnail images of contacts when photos are available.
The Mail inbox's user interface has been extensively redesigned with a navigator, and a new vertical view layout has been added that splits message information across two lines and reorients the preview pane vertically; see figure 5.
The look and feel is very similar to Outlook this would help a transition from Outlook to Notes.
Figure 5. The Mail Inbox with vertical preview
Figure 5. The Mail Inbox with vertical preview
Several changes to the user interface offer even more improvements:
1. The Welcome Page is now called the Home Page.
2. Mail and Calendar preferences are unified.
3. Action bar items have hover help/tool tips.
4. Undo operations are multi-level and expand the number of operations that can be undone.
5. An enhanced Attachments dialog box allows access to Windows-based places, for example, My Documents, Desktop, or My Computer (Windows only).
6. Viewer support is available for Open Office-formatted documents.
The Mail application incorporates a conversations feature that groups message threads based on the contents of the Internet message header fields for Message-ID and In-Reply-To, which Lotus Domino translates to parent and child entries in a Lotus Notes response hierarchy.
In the example of a mail thread shown in figure 6, the conversation labeled Re: THREAD 1, containing four messages, is expanded by turning the twistie to show the messages. The feature uses the Notes response hierarchy and offers two different options: one that collapses all messages under the most recent response and another that provides the mail thread on-demand from the Inbox. In addition, you now can perform operations for an entire mail thread, such as deleting a thread or moving a thread to a folder.
Figure 6. Lotus Notes V8 mail threads
A new message recall feature in Lotus Notes V8 allows users to recall sent messages, deleting them from recipients' inboxes, subject to administration settings. Learn more about this feature in the developerWorks article, "Using the Message Recall feature in IBM Lotus Notes and Domino V8." The Out-of-Office notification has been upgraded as well; see the section, "What's new with the Lotus Domino V8 server."
The Recent Collaborations feature tracks the user's 2000 most recent contacts as he sends email or uses instant messaging; the new feature uses matches from that list to type-ahead in fields in Mail, Calendar, and Contacts forms.
Access to Contacts can be delegated in Lotus Notes V8 just as you can delegate access to a Calendar, so it's easier to share contacts. Shared Contacts appears as a choice on the new Contacts navigator. Contacts are replicated with the Mail application in Lotus Notes V8, so IBM Lotus Domino Web Access users have true replication instead of agent-based synch for their mobile devices. Lotus Domino Web Access also has added support and integration of LanguageWare libraries and dictionaries and greater feature parity with the Lotus Notes mail client. Feature interoperability enhancements include support for Preview Pane, Calendar View filters, Preferred Rooms and Resources, and Managed Mail and Calendar.
The Calendar application has also been redesigned. The visual design is improved, the Calendar form is cleaner, and a navigator has been added for the Calendar views, including group calendars and delegated calendars. See the week view in figure 7.
Figure 7. The Lotus Notes V8 Calendar week view
The user interface for the Scheduler has been improved, and a new Event Announcement feature makes it easy to use the standard meeting-creation features to invite a large group to an event without creating a flood of responses to manage.
Free-time look-up presents a clean user interface for finding the optimum time for a meeting. It allows you to select a list of attendees, and then it returns a table with a green column indicating the first available meeting time. It also lets you do "what if" planning by deselecting and reselecting attendees to move the time of the meeting. Read more about this new feature in the developerWorks tip, "Finding available time in IBM Lotus Notes V8 using the Scheduler UI."
Ghosted calendar entries can be created automatically in the Calendar for unprocessed notices in your Inbox. This feature replaces notices in the Calendar for unaccepted invitations, rescheduled events, and delegation notices. Read more about calendar ghosting in the developerWorks tip, "Enabling calendar ghosting in IBM Lotus Notes V8."
Productivity editors
The productivity editors are applications for creating and editing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. They were implemented in Eclipse as part of IBM's support for the Open Document project and were first distributed with the IBM Workplace Managed Client. They are included in the standard Lotus Notes V8 license.
The editors are an attractive alternative to Microsoft Office and similar products because they are closely integrated with Lotus Notes. The editors can be opened in Lotus Notes either from the Open menu or programmatically within an application. They also appear on the computer desktop as icons and in the Start menu so they can be used independently of Lotus Notes.
The three editors work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as shown in figures 8-10. They present the clean interface typical of Eclipse-based applications, and they support several file formats. Their default is the same ODF format used by OpenOffice 2.0 and other products based on that open-source code. They read and write DOC, XLS, and PPT file formats from Microsoft Office 97/XP/2000, Microsoft Office 2003 XML, and Microsoft Rich Text Format. They also support migration from IBM Lotus SmartSuite by importing IBM Lotus Word Pro, IBM Lotus 1-2-3, and IBM Lotus Freelance Graphics files. The editors can also export documents to Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. In addition, Lotus SmartSuite formats can be imported to the IBM Productivity Tools through an included filter.
Figure 8. The IBM Lotus Documents
Figure 9. The IBM Lotus Presentations
Figure 10. The IBM Lotus Spreadsheets
Because the productivity editors are Eclipse plug-ins they can be deployed and upgraded through the Lotus Domino V8 provisioning process automatically. (They can also be installed from CD.)
Support is also available for the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF), an international standard for sharing and editing documents. ODF applications give users and organizations a choice of file formats and free them from proprietary vendor formats.
