Apologies for being quiet this last week, but we've been busy working on today's story.

Many of you have been pressing our other Lotus bloggers to deliver more information on the next release of Domino. First, let's get the name clear. We have been referring to this release as Domino Next but can confirm that Domino 8 is the official name. It is the companion server release to  Lotus Notes 8 client (codenamed Hannover) and will be available at the same time. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 have just entered beta 1 with the first wave of customers and partners, and that number will grow in the coming months.

Today, we start a series of reports on some of the new features of Domino 8 to whet your appetite to learn more (plug - to get you all to come to Lotusphere). We'll begin with an overview of what's new in Domino 8.

As you may have heard us discuss in the past, we plan our major Lotus Notes and Domino development investments to alternate between client and server. Domino was the major focus in the 7.0 release and Lotus Notes client (Hannover) is where much of our effort has gone in 8.0. However, there are still some fairly significant improvements in Domino 8 to complement Lotus Notes 8. (As an aside, if you follow our cycles of investment you could easily imagine that we have already started planning the next major Domino release beyond Domino 8!!)

Domino 8 is 100% Domino - no 'ifs' or 'buts'. It will run all your existing Domino applications and email.  It is a regular  in-line upgrade from earlier releases - no rip-and-replace of servers is required. Domino 8  has no hidden prerequisites or new requirements for you  to install (IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM WebSphere Portal Server, and IBM DB2 are all optional extras you can chose to deploy). Nor does it require that you deploy any of our collaboration products such as Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickplace, or Activities. We will continue to integrate well with these products to add value to your complete collaborative application environment.

In summary, Domino 8 will provide a rich feature upgrade that you have come to expect from Lotus and IBM. There are dozens of changes big and small. Here are some feature highlights grouped around the major goals for Domino 8:

Support for Notes 8 innovations - Domino 8 delivers server support for several new and improved Notes 8 features, including:

  • Message recall (to retrieve that embarrassing email!) - this will  be a optional feature that can be controlled by administrators
  • Improved out-of-office service to reduce delivery delays (it's now part of the mail router instead of the agent process)
  • Notes 8 managed client provisioning via a Domino 8 server, which adds the ability to manage the download of composite applications and new components to the Notes 8 client, and complements the Smart  Upgrade feature which continues to be the Notes version upgrade mechanism
  • Policy management of new Notes 8 features, such as Productivity Editors and Activities
  • Enhanced threaded view capabilities to better support the new threading feature in Notes 8

Open applications infrastructure - Domino 8 will enable customers to deploy composite applications in Notes 8 and extend web services support including:
  • Domino support for composite applications, including the ability to provision composite applications
  • Web services consumer support, which allows Domino applications to 'call' other web services
  • General availability for DB2 as an alternative Domino data store, allowing direct relational database support and SQL based Query View integration

Improved manageability and security - Domino 8 builds on its position as the most flexible, secure, and integrated messaging and collaboration server. A few highlights here include:
  • Numerous improvements in Domino Domain Monitoring, including additional event probes and corrective actions
  • Integration with Tivoli Enterprise Console
  • Improved AdminP performance and management to increase rename speed
  • Policy management of Inbox cleanup to help manage Inbox sizes
  • Ability to prevent access to Internet password fields in the Domino Directory
  • Internet account lockout due to password entry failure
  • Support added for Red Hat Linux 5

Improved performance and scalability
  • Brand new cluster replication implementation that significantly improves performance and reduces I/O requirements and latency
  • "Build on first use" sort order feature to significantly improve server performance, reduce storage costs and reduce I/O requirements
  • Numerous additional performance and I/O reduction improvements

Stay tuned to this blog for follow-on articles. We will provide more details on Domino 8 capabilities and will also be covering much of this in more depth at Lotusphere 2007 in January.