Getting into IBM Notes 9

I installed the release version of IBM Notes 9 yesterday and I'm happy to say that it works a bit smoother than the beta did. In fact, it's generally quite a nice experience. I've had no crashes so far (unlike my Notes 8 experience where I discovered three different ways to kill the client in less than 3 keystrokes on the first day).

The new blue icon is nice and the black panel on the mail looks slick too. As usual, all of our applications work (notes compatibility is generally pretty good).

We have had a few niggles around Notes interpretation of CDate but those started with 8.5.3 Fix Pack 3, so they don't count.

Single sign-on is working well too and the embedded sametime experience is somehow better. I can't say much about the social experience though. So far the only hint of "Social" that I've seen is the word on the logo.

Taking Away Features
My biggest gripe at this point is the removal of Symphony. Hey IBM. I was using that!!!

I know that I could just install OpenOffice or the Symphony 3.1 build from IBM. I've got Office 2010 and Google ~~Docs~~ (sorry; Drive) anyway. So why was I using Symphony? Mainly because it can read old office documents which the current office can't (not without some registry tweaks anyway).

John Head has an article on this here but I'm yet to see any "free download" in the Solutions Catalog. In any case, IBM shouldn't provide something that works with the Symphony 3.1 Fork. It should work with OpenOffice (and possibly Microsoft Office too).

This is a nice new release from IBM but I can't help but be concerned. There's too much backtracking going on here. Too much "giving then taking away" of features. I'm not sure that IBM have a clear idea of where the Notes client is going - and that worries me.

Workplace?
DB2 Databases?
Symphony?

Comments

Lars Berntrop-Bos said…

LibreOffice integration woulod also be a very nice feature!

6:22 pm

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