Why you should get Notes/Domino 8.5.1 if you take Notes as a PLATFORM seriously

Yesterday Ed asked “Notes/Domino 8.5.1 available: So what do you think?” so I thought I would take a little time and reflect over the new release. I have to admit that I have been running 8.5.1 as my production client for so long that it’s difficult to remember what’s new but I’ll give it a try.

For me as developer and a “Java guy” the main things about 8.5.1 is of course the new DDE extensibility API and the official release of the Java UI API not to mention that we FINALLY have a decent LotusScript/Java editor in DDE. That’s great but that’s is not it.

On of my biggest pet peeves with IBM has been how they for a long time referred to Lotus Notes as a mail client. It IS a mail client but albeit much more than that. By far. Notes 8 (Standard) showed the way by giving us a PLATFORM to develop for. Part of the platform is Java extensions no matter whether they are for the sidebar, toolbar or context menus. Java extensions are of course also an integral part of the Composite Application framework. The biggest problem with the Java extensions when Notes 8 came out was that they were hard to provision to users. That was later remedied by the introduction of widget descriptors (drag’n’drop install of Java extensions to the MyWidgets sidebar or using the widget catalog) so that’s great. The approach had however one major flaw in that the Notes client prompted users when installed unsigned Java extensions. There were ways around it but it wasn’t pretty.

So….

The reason to get 8.5.1 if you take Notes as a PLATFORM seriously is a little, tiny, addition to the security policy in Domino Directory. “But you’re a developer” you might say and you’re (mostly) right. This addition is however of great importance to all developers – it may just be the one thing that gives you success with your Notes Standard client deployment.

Once you have upgraded to 8.5.1 open your Domino Directory and check out the Security Settings document for policies. Switch to the “Keys and Certificates” tab and scroll to the bottom. Look closely – you might not see it at first. Way down of the bottom there is a new section called “Administrative Trust Defaults”. In this section you can specify the internet certificates and/or internet cross certificates to deploy to your end users using policies. With this crucial piece in place you can deploy signed Java extensions to end-users and have them install them without being prompted. At all!! The wont get confused, they wont have the option of aborting the install. This is great news and it works great.

Now that we’re able to push internet cross certificates to end-users these issues goes away. So go!! Deploy away!! Break out Eclipse and get going writing these Java extensions and deploy them seamlessly and transparently…

Of course there are caveats and stuff you need to know but that’s for another day! Oh – and that’s what Lotusphere is for! 🙂