Symetrik Domino Consulting

Yesterday, I went to the “Mobilising the Lotus Notes/Domino System” seminar put on by the Lotus Society of Hong Kong.

This is the 4th IBM/Lotus event that I’ve been to in Hong Kong so far:

R8 Launch
Technical Deep Dive: Performance Improvement
Lotusphere comes to you 2008
Mobilising the Lotus Notes/Domino System

I met with Stephan Wissel and Kevin O’Connel who both work for IBM. Stephan in Singapore and Kevin in Hong Kong.

I got a couple of interesting points from them that were a bit off topic from the seminar at the end, one on one. I was discussing our inability to upgrade to R8 because the eclipse client is just too slow and sluggish and we find too many bugs. Our hardware is not up to date (up to par) and we can’t ask the business to pay for a huge hardware and software upgrade, when all they really want is Outlook client.

I learned the following:
There are some benefits to upgraded to R7 client (mail recall, view index building while you work, improved Sametime performance and awareness capability)
Additionally, we could upgrade to R8 basic client. This would give us some of the benefits of R8 client without the heavy payload of the eclipse client and a major change to the UI which would require training.

The next item at hand is how do we handle the upgrades with Smart Upgrade without it causing us more trouble than it’s worth, especially when we have no idea what hardware is out there in the field.