Symetrik Domino Consulting

I posted this over at the Notes 8.5 Beta forum:

I’ve just downloaded the 8.5 Beta 1 all clients (Admin, Designer, and Notes).

I previously tried out 8.0 (non-beta) and 8.01.
Both of them were just way to sluggish and slow and buggy and periodically froze up.

I have a desktop and a laptop at my desk, and I eventually restorted to mostly using my laptop which has 6.5.6 CCH2 on it because I have to rely on it for administration.

I infrequently used the extra desktop machine on my computer unless I really had to because it was frustrating when it would lock up.

With 8.5, it took about 30 minutes to unpack, expand the install, run the install program, and then when I started it up, it appeared to be performing some sort of 8.01 uninstall, or 8.5 update from 8.01 maintenance tasks.

I also like the fact that there is now a startup temperature bar, so it looks like the client is actually starting up instead of just sitting there.

After all that took place, I shut down and restarted the client a couple of times. There is a significant improvement to the “snappiness” of the client now over both 8.0 and 8.01.

Thank you very much for this.

Another improvement that I have found. One that has annoyed me for a very long time.

While in the admin client, if I want to connect to a remote server that is very slow (because of a long or slow communications line)…and the admin client is working to open the connection or view of a database on a remote server, in 6.5 and 8.0/8.01 when I switch to the Notes client, both clients just sit there until the admin client is finished.

In 8.5, when I switch to the Notes client, it is a “little” slow switching to the Notes client while the admin client works away, but it does in fact switch and I am able to perform tasks in the Notes client.

This is a huge leap for busy admins who switch between Admin and Notes client fruquently. I even have two machines on my desk because of frequent multi-tasking between the two clients.

I haven’t tested too much with the 8.5, but what I’ve seen so far is very much impressive.

BUT, this is what I was expecting of 8.0 and 8.01. Unfortuantely, our management has already seen 8.0 and 8.01 and are looking at the alternative of migrating from 6.5 to Exchange because of the necessary hardware upgrade required for the 6.5 to 8.0x upgrade.

Their view is that if we have to pay for a hardware upgrade, that we might as well make a bigger project out of it and migrate to Exchange because of the demand by the user-base for the more intuitive that outlook has. (Sad but true political situation occurring in my organization right now).