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Posts tagged Lotus Notes
The public beta of Office 2010 is finally here
1I have had access to Microsoft Office 2010 through my TechNet subscription for 2-3 days now, and yesterday the technical preview of Office 2010 got released in a public beta. Anyone interested can now download it and take it for a spin. It’s available in seven languages – English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, French and German. The Office 2010 Mobile beta got released at more or less the same time, and can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.
Office 2010 contains lots of improvements and new functionality, and Microsoft seems to have managed to redefine the game of office computing! Office 2010 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud services and is on it’s way to be connected to other cloud services. It’s funny to look back to pre-Internet times, when Microsoft Office was just four applications, with little integration between them and no use of the web for document authoring, collaboration and management. But when Microsoft bought Groove, perhaps the most important buy up Microsoft has done, things started changing.
Let us start with OneNote. In typical Microsoft style, they don’t succeed with their first and second attempt on creating new applications. So also with OneNote. In Office 2010 OneNote has finally gotten the attention it deserves. It is now part of the full Office suite, and not a separate purchase, and undergone many improvements. The biggest improvement is without doubt that OneNote has now become a collaboration platform with its new coauthoring feature. Have you ever liked doing project work on a wiki? Thought so, I’ve basically hated it myself. With coauthoring, a project team can share and collaborate on OneNote pages and notebooks. I started using OneNote frequently when I got introduced to Office 2007, and with Office 2010 I can definitely see myself making use of the coauthoring and collaboration tools for the research projects that I support.
A few words about Powerpoint 2010. I haven’t been able to play with it to much yet, but I see several news sites pointing out that the biggest news is that it enables you to edit video directly in the application, without the need for a third-party tool. I’m not a video person, even though I once in a while use iMovie on my Mac, but I can see that this will give videocasts of lectures a boost. I’m not sure that I would publish presentations online via SkyDrive, but I guess that SlideShare will come up with something here!
The first application that I tried after having installed the new office suite, was Outlook. Outlook has through the years gone from an email client to a conversation management tool. But to start with the e-mail first, Outlook 2010 comes with improved IMAP support. You can now also have your Trash folder on the IMAP server, but Drafts are still stored locally on the computer. I hope Microsoft improves the IMAP support even more before the finale release of 2010.
I mentioned Outlook as a conversation management tool. First of all, you can now see if the person you are about to write an e-mail to is online or not, and then rather then sending an e-mail start an IM conversation with the person. I started using Outlook, when I saw the great Xobni plugin (link to my blog entries about Xobni). And the biggest news in Outlook is the introduction of Outlook Social Connector (OSC), which appears to be a tool that ties into SharePoint 2010 and aggregates information on any user’s emails, phone conversations, and IM sessions with you. OSC will be your bridge in to into major social networks. Appearently LinkedIn is gonna be the first social network to be connected. This is a functionality that Lotus Notes has had for almost a year now.
Word seems to be feature complete these days, and no big news to report from this application. But I should mention the possibility to upload your documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive. SkyDrive is 25 GB with free online storage, and something you should really consider using. Do you have a good enough backup solution in place for your personal files?
Excel 2010. I rarly use spreadsheets in my work, but my guess is that Excel, as Word, is more or less feature complete and no bigger new functionality is introduced in 2010.
Notes Traveler on the iPhone
5At work we have updated our Domino servers to v.8.5.1, and gone is the need for Lotus iNotes Ultralite and Notes Pro for the iPhone. With the new version of Domino, Lotus now supports Microsoft’s ActiveSync. You can now have the same push functionality as with Exchange, and use your native iPhone applications. ActiveSync has become a de facto standard for pushing out information to mobile devices.
I have been writing lots of positive things about Lotus Notes, and I should continue a little bit more. Setting up Lotus Traveler on the iPhone is both elegant and easy,and done in about a minute. But seeing that the data of Lotus Notes desktop client, iNotes and the data on the iPhone not being in sync by default, can’t be said to be anything else then a sad story. I thought this was the whole purpose with Roaming User profiles. But ok, it could be fixed. I only had to go in to the Contacts preferences on the desktop and enable “Syncronize Contacts on the Replicator”. Just that this option didn’t make any sence to me. Syncronize my contacts with a replicator? What replicator? Why treat iNotes and the iPhone (or mobile phones) as something else then the destop client?
After having solved the replication problem, the solution has worked flowlessly. But sadly leaves me with a choice I have to make, Lotus Notes or Google Sync? The iPhone can only have one Exchange account, and I must admit that I liked Google’s Exchange service for Contacts, Calendar and Gmail better. It has to be said that we don’t use Lotus Notes for mail. But since this is a work phone, I guess I should stick with Lotus Notes. Not a bad choice if the amount of meetings increase, and if I was more on the move. But for now, I could have been just as happy with Google’s solution, pushing contacts and calendar entries.
I also found Google Contacts to have an easier accessable user interface, and it handles pictures of your contacts far better then Lotus Notes. I have not found what pixel size Lotus Notes use. So most faces look draged. It’s just a small thing, but it is nice to see when somebody has thought design all the way through their product. Google has!
But if it is Lotus Notes you have decided to use, Paul Mooney has put together a brilliant manual for how to set up the Lotus Notes Travel service on your iPhone / iPod Touch (this is only the client setup).
Notes Pro for iPhone
1Please have a look at my article Notes Traveler on the iPhone.
I’ve always been in favor of group calendar solutions, and therefor often written about Notes products. Recently the annual Lotussphere took place, and a lot of new stuff got announced. LinkedIn and IBM announced a partnership, in the future we will be able to use a LinkedIn add-on very similar to Xobni in Lotus Notes. Another partnership was with Skype. And Lotus Live is on the way. Yepp, this is the year of cloud computing. I can’t wait.
At the same time as Lotussphere I started upgrading my department’s computers with the latest Lotus Notes, version 8.5. I chose to install the standard version of the client and not the basic one. And ta-ta, users were quite impressed with the upgrade. I also bought a license of Notes Pro for my iPhone, and this is what the article is all about. This is my review. Notes Pro is an alternative for iNotes Ultralite.
Notes Pro costed me about 85 NOK on iTunes Music Store. From the application’s web page you can read that Notes Pro is an all-in-one Lotus Notes solution for the iPhone, that lets you access your Notes mail, calendar, group contacts and todos directly from Notes Pro. Before you can run Notes Pro on your iPhone, some basic Lotus Notes account configuration is required. So before purchasing the application, please read the Lotus Notes Server Setup Instructions and ensure your Lotus Notes server is compatible with Notes Pro.
You need to be able to to drop a simple script into your Agents folder in the Lotus Notes Application. Four versions of the script are available, among the things the script sets is where to look for your contacts. I tried both versions of the International version, Global and Local. I guess Local would only give you the Contacts you have in your local address book, but I did not get Local working. Global on the other hand was working, but I must say poorly with a global address book including all our 3.000 users. But as you can see from my screenshots, I also ran in to other problems. The appointments that appeared on Notes Pro, were the ones first taking place in December this year (screenshots were taken in the end of January!).
So with a not really working global address book and calendar, I was left with Mail and ToDo. I was able to send new mails access my list of todos, but not add new todos. The graphical user interface on the application is rather poor and not what we expect from an iPhone application, and with the limited of functionality included you are better of using the free Lotus iNotes Ultralite.
But …, I saved the very best news from Lotussphere to the very end. Notes Pro for the iPhone will in the future not be needed, as IBM plans to add support for ActiveSync (please have a look at my Google Sync article). What will this mean for us endusers? We will use the synchronization application EasySync less and sync wirelessly on-the-fly. The ActiveSync protocol is becoming a de facto standard for wireless synchronization. Another thing is that in the future we will not need iNotes Ultralite and Notes Pro.
I will test future versions of Notes Pro. Hopefully my problems will be solved.
Lotus Notes 8.5 beta 2
0Today I installed the second beta of Lotus Notes, and installed it on Windows Vista. I kind of like Lotus Notes, but I guess that’s mainly cause we use at it work and that I have never ran Outlook as group calendar. And as mentioned before it works well with my mobile phone, the iPhone.
The download is 506MB big, and when choosing to download the package over http took about two hours. The download speed was stable on as low as 74,5 kbps. Why IBM?
First the critics: Shame on you IBM! Windows has been on the market for long more then a year already, and your Notes dev team has not managed to make an installer that works for Vista users. Double-clicking on the install file or trying to run it as an administrator does not work, when running Vista as normal user. I dare say that IBM have not understood the concepts behind UAC. The installation process for 8.5 beta 1 on the Mac was far simpler. IBM believes that Linux finally is ready for widespread adoption on the enterprise desktop, and prepares to deliver this next version of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for Ubuntu Linux. My question is how is the installation routines? Hopefully it will be made available through Synaptic.
So how did I manage to get it installed? Well, by installing it from the commandline as admin! I only installed the Notes client, and not Symphony and
Once installed by first look the Home window looks very similar to what it looked like in the previous version. But it’s an improved version of the template introduced in the first beta of Lotus Notes 8.0. Finally Lotus Notes looks like an application of today, and not like a blast from the past! It’s great to a modern view on the applications you spend a lot of time in. This cannot be said to often. The template is also very simular to the look of iNotes Ultralite for the iPhone.
I like the sidebar. Sadly we don’t use the Sametime IM solution that comes a long with Lotus Notes at work, so cannot test the client out. But l loved being possible to subscribe to some of the most important RSS feeds that I use at work: Messages from central IT department at the University and latest published Tivoli packages.
I also liked the Day-At-A-Glance.
I wonder why the new template is not included in the basic version of Lotus Notes 8.5?