Interesting bits from Notes/Domino 8.5 and 8.5.1 Redbooks

The other night I spent a bit of time reading a couple of IBM Redbooks on the Domino Wiki, the Upgrade Cookbook:  Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 and the Lotus Notes and Domino version 8.5 Deployment Guide.

To some people that probably doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, but I ended up coming across quite a few useful bits of information that I was surprised to not have already read about elsewhere.

A few of the larger examples were:

• Windows® single sign-on for Web clients You can set up an IBM® Lotus® Domino® Web server to honor Windows users' Active Directory logon credentials. Users who are logged on to the Active Directory domain can open applications on the server from a browser without being prompted for a Domino HTTP password.
• Notes shared log-in allows users to start Lotus Notes and use their Notes ID, without having to provide Notes passwords. Instead, users only need to log into Microsoft Windows using their Windows password. Unlike the Lotus Notes Single Log-in feature in earlier releases, Domino 8.5 does not use the Windows password for the Notes ID file.
• Interoperability for non-Notes calendar users -- You can now configure compatibility mode and MIME simplification on the server to improve the experience for users of Microsoft® Exchange, Microsoft Outlook, and other non-Notes calendars.
• Auto-populated groups -- The auto-populated groups feature uses predefined criteria to automatically determine and update group membership. Use the auto-populated groups feature to apply policies to users and groups based on their home servers.

The SSO for Web Clients and Notes shared log-in features were especially relevant as I’m about to do some work in that space for a client. The auto-populated groups feature isn’t something which any of my current clients need however some of the larger sites I’ve worked at in the past  have spent a LOT of time implementing custom solutions for this sort of thing, so I know it’ll help a lot of people.

On top of the larger points above I also read about a whole load of small improvements to the iNotes webmail functionality, as well as a nice summary of screenshots showing a good summary of Ultralite’s functionality.

What I really want to know is whether people aren’t talking about these things much, or whether I’m simply not keeping an eye on the right Notes/Domino sites these days? I thought the same thing a few months back when I took a look at 8.5’s webmail offering – I was pretty impressed at what I saw, but at the same time surprised that I hadn’t heard more/any hype.

I’ve since headed over to Planetlotus and added a whole load more sites to my RSS reader, but additional suggestions are most welcome.

 Print | Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 12:23 PM | Filed Under [ Notes/Domino ]