Appendix B. IBM® Lotus® Notes® and Domino®Whats Next?

Appendix B IBM® Lotus® Notes® and Domino®What s Next?

Every release of Lotus Notes and Domino has included improvements that enable IBM customers to increase their organizational productivity while preserving forward compatibility. This long-standing tradition of product enhancement and commitment to customers continues in the next major release of Lotus Notes and Domino.

Slated for early 2007, the next major release of Lotus Notes and Domino continues the tradition of added value and incremental improvementa tradition that helps you get the most out of this release while preserving your significant investment in your Lotus Notes and Domino enterprise resources.

This appendix describes many of the features you can expect to see in this next release and provides Lotus developers with a look at the expanded developmental potential provided in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.^[1] Version 8 extends Lotus Notes capabilities with its support of new programming options and techniques. It enables developers and organizations to innovate by building powerful composite applications and cross-platform solutions. Best of all, developers can continue to use their Lotus Notes and Domino skills and organizational assets while enjoying the option of extending those skills and assets to the realm of composite applications.

Composite applications can surface in the Lotus Notes client (also referred to as the rich client), as Lotus Notes 8 supports both the Lotus Domino and Eclipse platforms. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 also contains major improvements to mail, calendar, and contact management functions. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 also introduces activity-centric computing.

Major themes of the Lotus Notes and Domino 8 release include:

• Improved user experience A major goal of Lotus Notes and Domino 8 is a simplified and more intuitive user model. For example, the redesigned mail UI supports increased use of topic threading to simplify mail management and combat the flood of incoming mail. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 also includes major improvements in contact management that make finding and managing personal contacts easier.
• Activity-centric computing Based on an idea developed in IBM Research laboratories, activity-centric computing is based on the premise of moving artifacts out of email, file systems, and other repositories, and associating them with an "activity." An activity is thus a heterogeneous collection of project artifacts that might include Lotus Notes documents, word processing files, spreadsheets, chat transcripts, screenshots, purchase orders, and so on. These artifacts are collected hierarchically into a thread with access control.

  You can create an Activity that represents an ad hoc process. For example, people involved in a project such as a product rollout, an RFP, or other collaborative effort can manage the varied information related to the project by viewing the project as an activity. Email threads, chat logs, documents, meeting minutes, Web content, and voice messages can be collected, managed, and accessed in one place: the activity. By placing the focus on completing a task or process, activity-centric computing provides a logical and more natural way for a group to collaborate.

• Composite application support by Lotus Notes A composite application is a collection of business-process-targeted components that are loosely coupled and aggregated into a unified application. Individual components can be Lotus Notes applications, Java^™-based Eclipse components, HTML Web page components, IBM WebSphere^® Portal portlets, as well as other types. The ability to concisely display information derived from a variety of such sources is a hallmark of a composite application.
• Open Document Format (ODF) support Lotus Notes and Domino 8 users can create, manage, edit, and import documents in ODF. Supporting ODF provides the ability to access, use, and maintain documents over the long term, without concern about end-of-life uncertainties or perpetual licensing and royalty fees. IBM productivity tools can also import and edit Microsoft^® Office documents and export those documents to ODF for sharing with other ODF-compliant applications and solutions.
• Server-managed client This technology allows an administrator to lock down the Lotus Notes 8 client so that only plug-ins (code) pushed from the server can be run on the client, promoting a highly controlled and security-rich environment. This level of manageability allows the administrator to control what is on the desktop and not worry about client configuration inconsistencies, Java Virtual Machine (JVM) versioning issues, DLLs availability, and so forth. Additionally, this fine-grained control enables the administrator to apply bug fixes and patches without physically accessing the desktop. The administrator can now roll out changes to clients in an efficient, low-cost, and speedy manner.