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The 8.5 release of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino is now code-ready and should be released sometime in the next few weeks. This release brings a lot of updates to both the front and back ends, and adds programming elements called X-Pages that will have a huge impact on your web-facing applications.

Traditionally, the .5 releases of Notes and Domino have focused mainly on Domino and all of the server components, and while Domino does see the most improvement in this release, the Notes client gets several significant upgrades as well.

The Lotus Notes Client

One of the biggest improvements is the availability of an 8.5 Lotus Notes client for the Mac. This is the first official release of the Notes client for the Apple platform in the Notes 8 codestream. Your Mac users will now have the same Lotus Notes experience that your Windows and Linux users have experienced since version 8 of Notes hit over a year ago.

Speaking of the Mac, one new feature borrows a page from Apple's iCal, Lotus Notes now supports subscribing to public calendars via the iCal standard. Notes users can now subscribe to any public calendar (including Google Calendars) and have the information incorporated into their work Lotus Notes calendar.

On the contacts side, you can now quickly export, forward and import your contacts using the standard vcard format. You could do this to a point in the past, but Lotus has really streamlined the process and made it easier for your end users.

This release also includes an updated version of the old Personal Journal database, now called the Notebook. The Notebook is a place for users to keep track of information and “notes” and the upgrade to 8.5 finally brings the application into the modern age. It fits much better now and no longer seems out of place.

Drag and Drop has also been enhanced in the client and you can now move things around easier than before. One example of this is being able to drag an email from your inbox onto the Sametime client to add the sender as a contact. In short, more things should be easier for your users to accomplish.

The Domino Server

The Domino server is really what gets the bulk of the improvements in the 8.5 release. One that may have some of the biggest impact is DAOS or Domino Attachment Object Storage.

Simply put, DAOS is a way for your Domino server to store attachments to your file system instead of inside a Notes database itself. When DAOS is enabled, attachments are removed from the database and placed in a folder on the server. The server creates internal pointers so a user still sees the attachment but doesn't realize it's not really in the database.

The way this saves space is that only one copy of each attachment is stored on the system. So for example, if a designer sends a 20MB attachment to a sales person, and that sales person sends it to 20 people, that would normally result in 22 copies of that 20MB file living in databases all over your server. With DAOS, only one copy of the attachment sits on the server while each database has the pointers. It's completely transparent to the end user. Their email looks like it has the attachment as always.

If you extrapolate this over your entire user base, the space savings on your server could be huge. And it doesn't stop there, you can enable document compression on the server, and IBM says you can see up to 30% disk space savings as well. So it seems with these two features alone, you'll get immediate return on your upgrade investment.

In addition to space savings, Lotus will help your administrators configure servers to best practices via a new tool called the Domino Configuration Tuner or DCT. DCT will analyze your servers and flag any problems where your environment isn't set up to optimal best practices.

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