With the imminent release of the Notes/Domino R8 public beta early next week, the Notes/Domino community is sounding a little bit like eager kids at Christmas. The difference being that instead of a fat man in a red suit as Santa, we have a fat corporation with a blue logo. Oh, and this Santa doesn't tend to read his letters too often either.
However sticking with the theme, I was thinking about what I'd like for Christmas from the Big Blue Santa.
The largest gift is one that I'm pretty sure he's delivered - an attractive looking client. If they sort the mail and calendaring functionality so it works well and looks nice then there will be a lot of happy evangelists out there, because their jobs will have instantly got a lot easier. The one concern is the Workspace - after that horrible looking screenshot which was posted a couple of weeks back that has to be an area of concern for some, but I'm sure that it was just an early screenshot.. right? Tell me it's true Santa.
My next wish is somewhat of a niche request. Santa, please give me a client with proper support for multiple monitors. Please? With the current clients, everything works well until you try and use Notes (and when I say Notes I'm including the Domino Designer and Administrator clients in this category as well) on anything other than your primary monitor. The main client moves, but any modal or non modal dialog boxes are presented to you on the primary monitor. It's very distracting, and very unproductive. There are so many 'IT Professionals' (I really don't like that term, but it seems to be one that the industry has adopted) who insist on multiple monitors in order to work more efficiently now, fixing this would make them all a lot happy this Christmas time.
Finally, a developer centric request: sortable totals columns. This functionality seems to be included, because screenshots of the R8 mail template appear to use it. I just hope that it's something we can leverage in our day to day applications as well, and it's not just a 'mail template only' feature. While this might seem like a pretty obscure request, it's something which I've been requested to do in views destined for Notes clients many times over the past few years. It's easily achieved in a web view using some Ajax or other JavaScript, but to add this functionality into the main client would go quite a way towards helping bridge the gap between the reporting functionality that is achievable in the standard Notes client VS needing a third party reporting tool.
Every Christmas list has a pie in the sky request thrown in at the end. My pie in the sky request is a skinnable Workspace. There, I said it. Don't worry, I won't be disappointed when it doesn't come, but it'd be pretty nice to be able to modify our Workspaces to include different backdrops (I'm kind of over the generic 'textured workspace' look now), tab colours, tab sizes, and so on. I'm often surprised by how fickle I can be in this regard - the mood of my Windows install can be largely influenced by my selection of backdrops (I use Ultramon on my boxes that use multiple monitors, so there's often more than one image), and I'd like to be able to do the same with my Notes client rather than resort to my current method, which is to try and create amusing images out of database icons.
I'm looking forward to this Christmas and I'm not alone. IBM/Lotus has an excellent track record with the stability of their beta releases, so I know that next week's release will be something that can be used straight off as a day to day client. That's pretty nice to know. I suspect there's going to be a lot of blogging from under the blue Christmas tree next week. Ho Ho Ho, and Merry Beta to all of you out there.
Link: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8
Link: edbrill.com: public beta -- early next week