We use Lotus Notes for our business email. I started using the new Lotus Notes 8 starting with their public betas. I really like the integrated email, instant messaging, news reader, and activities. I also had a chance to try out a few other Eclipse plug-ins integrated and extending the total experience.I really liked a lot of what I was able to play with.

Like a lot of software I have evaluated over the past few years, I start out trying every bell and whistle and as time goes by, I spend less and less time on the “neat stuff” and just use the parts that make me more productive. Notes 8 has been no exception.

I really like the integrated feed reader. I was a little frustrating that it was forgetting my read-marks and would show me old stuff as unread. I think some of it is how various feeds report being new/old/updated. Eventually, I stopped using the feed reader. The same became true for the integrated Sametime feature. My favorite feature of the integrated version (nearly identical to the Sametime 7.5.1 release) is the “save chats to mail”. This is great for me since it means I can use Notes full text index to find my correspondence – regardless of it being an email thread or a chat. However, I had stability issues and I didn’t like that chat history didn’t show in the chat window when using the “save chats to mail” was enabled.

In the end, I mostly just use the core Notes 8 features.

Good news for old farts like me – “Notes 8 (Basic)”. It’s the Notes client we love – updated and healthy as ever. If you run the “basic” version of the Notes 8 client, you lose support for plug-ins, and the Integrated Sametime functionality is not as rich as with the new Eclipse based Notes client. Also, “basic” is a Windows-only offer.

I’ll miss enough of the extra functionality in the Eclipse based Notes 8 client to switch back eventually but it is great to have the option and can make the choice for myself.