EUT on Tour

The team will be attending the Microsoft Management Summit 2010



We also have updates from Lotusphere 09, Microsoft Management Summit 08, TechEd Europe 08 and the Lotus Leadership Alliance 08


Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Web-based Email ... and IM, Calendar and everything else!

First it was iNotes, then DWA, and now iNotes again. The web front end to Lotus Notes, iNotes has come a long long way from the version we know and ... tolerate.

iNotes 8.5 is very very slick. There are 3 'modes' - Full, Lite and Ultralite.

The full web client is almost indistinguishable from the standard Notes 8 client - integrated Sametime, Widgets, SideShelf and all. It's fast (or 'snappy' as the devs prefer to call it) and totally useable. It has the integrated Quickr connector that Karoona talked about in the previous post, so the user experience (and the behaviour changes that this drives) are consistent. Give me this web client and I'll uninstall Notes from my machine!

Lite mode looks the same as full mode, but removes the integrated sametime, widgets and sideshelf to optimise bandwidth. Still very usable, but I might still need my Notes client...

Ultralite mode does what it says on the tin. The interface is reminiscent of an iPhone, mostly because it is designed to work on an iPhone! You can also use this mode for very low bandwidth connections on traditional PC browsers which works well if you just need email and calendar.

Of course, to actually remove the Notes client we still have some 7000 notes applications to address. Now I'm sure Greg was wittering on about some Xpage thing that might be handy here...

Not only does the current iNotes product offer a superior user experience than Microsoft's OWA (which I should confess I use at home), it is equally at home on IE, Firefox AND Safari (James, you may now rejoice). The devs wanted to know if we'd also like it on Chrome or Opera...

4 comments:

Karu said...

Slick iNotes on a slick iPod - screams POC to me ;)

Brian said...

As I said in my previous post, for development work there is a perfectly good iPhone emulator here: http://www.testiphone.com/

You can get iNotes on the Lotus Greenhouse here: http://greenhouse.lotus.com

So what are you waiting for? :-)

Karu said...

Gee thanks. I'll get started right away.

Karu said...

Seriously though - about XPages. From what I understand you can indeed web-enable apps with XPages but it's not an overnight job. According to the developers, it takes on average about 3-4 weeks to convert a template the first time round and then about 4-5 days to convert other applications based on the same template.

Definitely an option worth considering in any case.