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Many other blogs and news sources are covering this today, so I’ll be brief. As you’d expect you can get more detailed coverage at edbrill.com and if you’re feeling really brave you can wade through the full announcement letter. For those of you with less time to spare, here’s an overview…

• Oodles of new features in the Lotus Notes client
• Lotus Traveler now supports the Apple iPhone
• Many improvements to Domino Designer, including new LotusScript and Java editors
• Significant improvements to the process of building composite applications
• Simplification of the licensing model, down to two Client Access Licenses (Messaging and Enterprise)
• Domino Designer is now a FREE DOWNLOAD
• Some bandwidth-reducing improvements to DAOS

Notes / Domino 8.5.1 is scheduled to be available for electronic general availability on Monday 12th October 2009. My general advice to anyone is ‘upgrade’.

And here it is… Exchange now has a roadmap… well, okay, they’ve announced the number of the next version (14) and also said that it’s already been in use at some educational establishments who have signed up for the hosted version. So, it’s a version number, with no release date (not even for a beta) and scant details about what it will actually include. Call that a roadmap? 14 is a strange number given that it’s gone from 5.5 to 2000 to 2003 and then 2007. But look at it this way… Exchange 2007 was originally dubbed Exchange ’12′. So what would come next? I think Exchange customers already feel nervous enough about the next ‘upgrade’ without the version number being 13.

Remember this big Exchange news comes two weeks after we shipped a major new version with many improvements and new capabilities, and a focus on delivering a reduction in cost of ownership. I’m inclined to think this is more of a coincidence than a spoiler. Quite honestly, who’s going to say “oh wow, they’ve announced the version number”? Unless it’s in a sarcastic tone, and then it’ll work.

My favourite comment from the blogs today was “What’s the difference between Microsoft alpha and gold software? – the invoice”.

However, rather than just sit back and laugh at Microsoft’s feeble attempt to upstage Lotusphere (assuming it was), we’ve gone on the attack. Speaking as someone who is admittedly a follower of the divine Lotus religion, even I would have to admit I’ve seldom seen such a strong and gung-ho press release. Just look at all those companies who have moved from Exchange to Domino… and bear in mind that list doesn’t include some 2008 wins which have yet to become reference-able.

Anyway, here’s the article on CNN Money and here’s the IBM press release. Oh, and here’s another article on USA Today. It would seem we are no longer dancing round the opponent, we’re moving in and landing some punches. Next stop… Lotusphere.

From the interviews I’ve done in the past week you can now read the results at vnunet.com, Computer Business Review and CIO.

Due to the Mac-centric nature of the announcement (at Macworld), the conversations started around the Mac client, but by far the two most interesting topics of conversation for the journalists were the storage-saving capabilities of the Domino Attachment & Object Service and the integrated Symphony productivity suite.

What I love about the 8.5 release is that we at IBM Lotus have delivered another substantial version which delivers new capabilities which will benefit customers and help them to reduce costs… provided as part of a consistent upgrade strategy and as part of an ongoing publicly-stated roadmap.

Addendum… my frolleague Chris Reckling (we’ve known each other since 1-2-3 days) has published an overview of ten great 8.5 features. Of course, anyone who’s seen Spinal Tap should know that top ten lists should contain eleven items.

I would argue their statement about “Notes / Domino may have fallen way behind Microsoft’s Exchange / Outlook communications and collaboration platform in the market share race” – fallen behind, yes – way behind, no. Not according to the analysts. And Exchange is a collaboration platform now? Oh, of course, e-mail is a form of collaboration. And it has public folders. Aren’t they removing public folders from Exchange?

Furthermore, 2007 saw an increase of about 10% in Notes / Domino customers on active maintenance, and we’re tracking the same sort of increase for 2008. I would speculate that this is a result of customers seeing a solid roadmap and the fact that Notes 8 puts to bed the old ‘Notes is ugly’ argument. Not to mention the fact that integrated Lotus Symphony provides a viable low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office.

Add to that the fact that we are still taking customers off competitive products, and 2008 saw some major brand names switch to Notes / Domino. Needless to say, I can’t wait for these to turn into public references in 2009.

One last thing to say about this… Domino dead? Domino has a roadmap, one which we’ve talked about publicly. While the fine details of the features may be not public knowledge, many of our customers know about them. We know that the next version of Domino will be delivered in 2010, it will be based on the consistent architecture and will be an evolution, not a rip-and-replace overhaul. Ask yourself this… if you use a solution from another company, and that product doesn’t have a publicly-announced roadmap, shouldn’t we being questioning whether that’s dead instead?

IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 is very close to shipping, and one of the many new goodies is Traveler support for various Nokia devices running the Symbian operating system. A contact from a very well-known and valued Lotus customer (hi Richard) recently asked me “which devices does that cover?” – you can find the answer here, and the answer is “lots of devices”.

So why is this so important? Well, choice is important and at Lotus we like giving you choices. IBM Lotus Notes on Windows, Mac or Linux. Domino on a whole range of server platforms. It costs more to develop, but we think you’re worth it.

The other reason it’s important is that, if you look at that range of Nokia devices, people in many organisations will already have those devices in their hands. So the cost of enabling mobile e-mail and calendars may turn out to be lower than you think.

And the other other reason is market share. This surprised me when I saw it yesterday. According to Gartner (December 2008) Symbian devices accounted for 49.8% of smartphone devices shipped worldwide in the 3rd quarter of 2008. RIM (i.e. BlackBerry) were next with 15.9% followed by “Mac OS X” with 12.9%. Does that mean iPhone? Probably. Windows Mobile took 11.1% of the market, Linux devices took 7.2%, and the one-time giant of PDAs, Palm, took just 2.1%. So, Symbian was the clear market leader, and thus my title is vindicated.

Firstly, Andrea Waugh-Metzger of the Domino blog team discusses Domino 8.5′s ID vault. As Paul Mooney is fond of saying, users never forget their Notes ID password (tongue in cheek, maybe) but just in case they do the ID vault allows them to recover their ID. It also provides a mechanism to support people who have multiple workstations – like me for example, not because I want to, but because my main laptop has a fault with the RGB port meaning that I have to use an old laptop for presentations. This is a pain when my Notes ID password changes and I have to remember to copy it from one laptop to another. That will change for the better in the future.

Meanwhile, over at the Sametime blog, my long-time frolleague Rob Ingram discusses Sametime 8.0.2′s integration with Microsoft Sharepoint Services. This allows you to make Sharepoint author names live with Sametime awareness. Another example of IBM Lotus striving to deliver business value regardless of the collaborative solution – Sametime already supports Outlook and Office. So if you have gone down that route, at least you can console yourself with a superior real-time collaboration solution.

And finally, nothing to do with Sametime or Domino but vaguely connected to Internet technlogy, NewsBiscuit has reported that a fourteen year old English boy has been praised for his persistance after two-year search of Google Earth for a topless lady sunbather. Hey, I don’t control what turns up in my news reader, I just report the facts.

iNotes Ultralite is basically Domino-based e-mail, calendar and contacts accessed through the iPhone’s Safari browser, and the user interface and functionality has been specifically designed for the iPhone. The other very important aspect of iNotes Ultralite is that it’s based on IBM Lotus Domino, and therefore has all the advantages of scalability, security, manageability and robustness… not to mention a consistent architecture which will be upgrade-able in the future. That means you won’t have to rip it out, migrate the data and replace it with a completely new architecture to get to the next version (unlike another solution I could mention).

There’ll be some updates to iNotes Ultralite when we ship Domino 8.5 later this year… and we’ll have more Apple / Lotus symbiosis as IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 for the Mac will be released at the same time.

As we’re having some success against Microsoft Exchange at the moment, I thought I’d post some of the slides I’m using. The basic premise is that Lotus Notes / Domino have been subject to a consistent upgrade-able architecture (with continuous improvements) throughout their history, whereas with Microsoft Exchange… well, it’s not my place to tell you about the Exchange roadmap, so go and ask Microsoft.

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