TimsterC

This morning I had chance to get 10 minutes of Bob Picciano’s time at the UKLUG event in Edinburgh.
Bob is the General Manager for Lotus Software and just after he delivered his keynote speech at the Opening General Session I got to talk to him about why he was here, what is important right now to Lotus Software and what he’s going to do while he’s here in Edinburgh.

Here is what he had to say.

p.s. During Ron Sebastian’s demo during the keynote he asked for a show of hands as to who still uses the workspace in Lotus Notes. Bob raised his hand too. ;o)

So there are a bunch of things happening right now with Notes and Domino 8.5.

We have committed to a 2008 H2 release for this and we are now in Q4 of 2008. So as you might guess we are getting close to where we want to be with 8.5. If you were at the UKLUG sessions you may have heard Ed Brill talk of a target date for release. I’m glad to see that everyone has stayed true to the promise they made Ed and have not blogged it.

We have a whole bunch of companies and business partners that belong to a group called “Design Partners”. They help us make sure that the products are going in the right direction and not off on some tangent that no one will ever care about. So they keep us honest, or try to. ;o)

The great bit about being a DP is that you also get access to some of the builds in between the public beta releases that you all will have seen. We have just done such a “drop” to these DPs and we are currently watching to see what comes out of their feedback.

Me, I’m just about to try and install Notes 8.5 (design partner edition) on Ubuntu. Just to see what will happen. That will mean using the new .deb files and see how they work and also overwriting the 8.5 beta 2 code that it there. I’ll aslo have to apply a bunch of patches to already know issues. I just hope that double right clicking in a document will not result in 4 error messages on my screen this time round.

The joys of beta code. ;o)