I know this is not official Lotus support or sales, but I know that lots of Lotus employees and Lotus-savvy people are here, so I’m asking this question:
What is the purpose of 6.5?
What I mean is…if 6.5 is a major upgrade from 6.0x (and it sounds like it is), then it seems like maybe Lotus is getting ahead of themselves. Why release 6.5 when I still can’t delete an email that’s open and in the preview pane in 6.02? Also, for someone still on R5, what is Lotus recommending? Is 6.5 a ‘down-the-road’ release, or something to be considered today? Should someone leapfrog from 5 to 6.5? (and how much change can Notes users handle in one year?)
There is a good webcast about what’s new in 6.5 you can access from the Lotus.com homepage and plenty of articles can be found in LDD detailing the new features. I guess what you really want is opinion since the facts are readily accessible. So here’s opinion. First of all, I’ve only had one crash to date with it and I use the full product heavily all day–designer, administrator, and client.
I still giggle everytime I open my mailbox and see those green dots beside the names of the senders. I love having the choice of responding via email or talking directly to the sender. I know my users are suddenly going to “get it” about the usefulness of IM as they see it integrated into their most-used application, their e-mail.
That aside, the e-mail enhancements are very helpful, especially the followup feature which helps with planning your day and not letting things fall through the cracks.
Another feature useful in applications is the export as a CSV file option which is tons better than being forced to export as Lotus 1-2-3 and then opening in Excel and having to clean it up.
Those are my top of mind impressions…I certainly would not recommend to go from 5 to 6.02 when you can just as easily go to 6.5. Even if you are not running Sametime right now, the remaining features make it worth it.
Subject: If you have a mail cluster, you definitely want 6.5
Unread marks can replicate in 6.5. If your mail users are in a cluster, their unread marks will be intact when they fail over to another cluster mate. Now, they really won’t notice anything if a server goes down! Up until now, endusers would complain about ‘all my mail is red again, what’s happening’ in cases like that. Helpdesks will love this feature
