What's new in the Notes 8.5 client

Many of the new features in the Notes 8.5 client were presented as upcoming in last year's LoLA conference and we had already blogged about them but in a nutshell the most memorable ones are :

- The inbox has been re-designed to contain fewer icons - for example, unread emails still have the sender's presence icon on the left but unread emails don't have any presence icons next to them. The assumption, and I agree, is that if it's been read, it's been dealt with.

- The calendar has been redesigned and can now import even more public cals & icals can be imported. For example, you can now choose to have your Google Cal - or other favourite personal cal - overlying your Work Cal and available offline once imported too. You can toggle this additional Calendar on and off as you please. Replication conflicts between the technologies have been addressed and we're assured now works like a dream.

- You can now put Tasks in an email and these tasks can be assigned to your favourite people from the address book directly in the email. Perfect for taking minutes and even better, when the email goes out, the recipient opens the email and if a Task was assigned to him, the Task gets added to his Task List automatically (previously known as the To-Do list).

- Drag and drop an email from your inbox into a slot in your calendar and this creates a calendar entry automatically with the recipients/senders of the email in the To field.

There were a few other useful features which would be good to show you and the best way to do this is probably to add it to Mat's showcase list ... Also worthy of mention is that the Notes 8.5 client's UI is also, like all its counterparts in the Lotus suite, uber slick!