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A team from Lotus was on-site at the MacWorld conference this week with an exciting announcement: Lotus Notes 8.5 is available! I was expecting this to be the big announcement at Lotusphere but was excited to see it announced early. I think it goes a long way to show their commitment to the Mac platform … which is great!

There’s only one problem: with the exception of a few trade rags and Lotus blogs, NONE of the Mac-based sites & blogs I read up on were talking about it. That’s incredible unfortunate because its a big announcement and worth mentioning (especially since some of those Mac-based sites picked up stories about iNotes uber-lite when that was announced). However, I realize that *I* maintain one of these Mac-based blog sites, so I’m doing my part to help spread the word!

I’m sure I’ll have lots to comment on over the next several days, but for now, let’s talk about the installation of the Notes 8.5 client for the Mac. The first big piece of news is that there is a “full” and “basic” client available. I didn’t see that coming – what a nice surprise!

My install started with the unpackaging of the tar file, which took some time.

After an hour (thankfully I had a meeting in my office during that time where I could see the screen, but didn’t need to use my computer), the program decided that it didn’t actually want to do the install, so it backed out of the idea:

I decided to try again first thing this morning. To my surprise, it ran through this step VERY quickly (I’m now assuming that something didn’t shut down correctly yesterday when I stopped Notes 7.0.2 before the install). One helpful screen I noticed during the install was an information screen telling me where it would install the program and data files. I rarely need this information, but always have trouble finding it when I do.

Another surprising screen was the options for installing Sametime and the Composite Application Editor – which I’m anxious to check out.

I was also suprised to see some defaulting options for mail, calendar and contacts. I left these checked, but I’ll admit, I’m a bit nervous about NOT using iCal and Mac’s address book as the defaults.

The most entertaining portion of the install is the confirmation screens. As you can see, Lotus REALLY wants you to know that things are done. The first display…

… and then…

… and finally:

You’re done. I got it! 

The other “trick” that I noticed was a “starting up” screen when loading. This is something Windows users have seen for a while now and I wondered when it would make it to the Mac. Reminded me of the old story about a building with a slow elevator that was expensive to replace and caused everyone to complain while waiting impatiently. What did the building owner do? Install mirrors. People were so preoccupied looking at themselves, they assumed the elevators were faster. This screen is the software version of that concept:

Now that the software is loaded and running I can say its a BIG improvement over the 8.5 beta. The team has clearly spent a lot of time working and refining this product and deserve much credit for doing so. It gives me renewed hope in the idea that Lotus is taking Mac users seriously.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll blog more about new features, etc. But one I have to mention now is the dock icon with a count of unread mail messages. This is something Mail.App has had for some time and its GREAT to see Lotus adopt it!

Tags: 8.5, lotus, mac, notes