Jeff Eisen

Notes 8 has been a great ride and congratulations to the entire "Hannover" team for the outstanding accomplishment.

To our customers, partners, etc. -- It was built with your input and guidance and the product is better for it.  

There are parts of the product that I think turned out great (such as the embedded Sametime) and parts that still need some work (navigation models).   Of course, more releases to come so you will continue to see improvements in existing functionality as well as cool and valuable new functionality over time.  A lot of pretty interesting stuff already being discussed for Lotusphere 2008.  You won't want to miss it.

There are also parts I really don't like.   Perhaps my least favorite "improvement" in Notes 8 is to switch to the Windows selection model.  Yes, it is a standard, but no, I find it annoying and I don't find it as productive for my model of working through the inbox as the original "Notes" selection model.    So, we are heading to bring back the Notes model as a preference.   Work in the old way; work in the standard way; take your pick.  Over time, I'd like a hybrid approach with the best of both worlds, but we're not there yet.

Overall, IMHO, Notes 8 turned out amazingly well.   It will make it more enyoyable and productive for you to use and will give you much better ammunition within your organization to win the Lotus Notes battles.

I also agree with Ed Brill's statement in his blog today where he says about the decision to move Notes onto Eclipse:  "This single decision about the Notes 8 architecture is more important for that long-term than anything else being delivered in Notes 8."    

Eclipse really opens up a new world of easy to build and powerful applications welcoming a new development community while giving new power to the existing development community  The demos I've seen lately (some of which you'll see at Lotusphere) are really quite impressive and make me quite confident that Eclipse was a wise choice.

While it is an exciting time at Lotus, it is no time to rest on our laurels.  On a customer call this morning, I got the "Congratulations on 8.0 -- when's 8.0.1?" question...

The team is working hard to get to 8.0.1 and beyond.

I, for one, though, am taking a quick break.   Notes 8 is finally in the customers' hands and I'm taking a short vacation, my first this year.  I'm heading to Disney World -- really.