First Impressions of Lotus Notes 8
I am one of the poor souls that need to use Lotus Notes as its corporate email solution. Although I learned to appreciate the integration capabilities that the IBM product has developed throughout the years, it still looks for me as one of the most over-engineered pieces of software that was ever written.
I was positively surprised, however, with the update of the Notes client to version 8.0. After years of using the tried-and-failed client interface that they insisted in maintaining, IBM decided to move to a new client based on Eclipse.
Eclipse to the rescue
Eclipse, if you are a developer working in Java, is already your old friend. Not perfect, but has lots of good extensibility features. For example, there are thousands of plug-ins available for Eclipse, ranging from productivity tools to programming widgets.
With the support for plug-ins provided by the Eclipse core, Lotus Notes can now add a lot of cool features practically for free. For example, the new Notes client can easily embed most (but not all) Google gadgets.
Look-and-feel
The look and feel of the application was also streamlined. The email window received a long-overdue overhaul. It looks now much more like a modern email app (such as Microsoft Outlook, if that is what you’re looking for).
To me, it looks like the Lotus team spend a lot of time replicating features from the old client. To my knowledge, the toolkit used in Lotus Notes 7 was written in multi-platform C++ (probably with a lot of biddings to Java code). Now, everything is in Java, using the Eclipse toolkit, which is definitely very different from the original C++. It must have taken IBM *years* to replicate the same functionality. It is not a surprise that Lotus Notes 8 appeared only now…
Even though the transition was mostly positive, on the negative side I noticed that the application size increased. Well, in fact the new program required 1GB to install! It is crazy to imagine an application (that is not a compiler, I have to say) that may need 1GB to be installed. Of course, these days where a 1TB hard disk is not a surprise anymore, things have certainly changed. I hope I am not the only person that still remembers applications being distributed on 1.2MB disks :-)
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About the Author
Carlos Oliveira holds a PhD in Systems Engineering and Optimization from University of Florida. He works as a software engineer, with more than 10 years of experience in developing high performance, commercial and scientific applications in C++, Java, and Objective-C. His most Recent Book is Practical C++ Financial Programming.
