IBM Notes and IBM Domino Social Edition – FINALLY!!!

If you’re part of the Notes/Domino community you are probably excited today!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you have seen and/or heard the announcements from IBM yesterday about the upcoming IBM Notes and IBM Domino Social Edition. If not do yourself a favor and go watch the recording. And a new major release – no longer is it 8.5.4 but 9.0!

I’m SO pleased that IBM/Lotus/ICS FINALLY took the plunge and stripped the “Lotus” from the product – not that I dislike the Lotus brand but we (the community and the customers) have been in a strange state of flux for so long. From Lotus, to IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) to IBM Social Business. We’ve been wondering what the product we love and work with every day would be called or whether it would actually go away and be replaced with some “Websphere thingy”. With the announcement of IBM Notes and IBM Domino Social Edition yesterday IBM finally tore of the Band-Aid that should probably have been torn off back when IBM bought Lotus (or at least shortly thereafter).

With the move to IBM Notes and IBM Domino we can move past all that and look forward knowing that there’s at least a 3 year roadmap and the product isn’t going anywhere. With the best (and only?) public webcast in a long time IBM made it official! IBM has got our back!

And even better – we will also have a PUBLIC beta (see the sign up form). The “public” part is important – no longer is the beta and code drops for the select few of us in the design partner programs but for all. So be sure to take this opportunity and sign up for the beta. Download it. Use it. And most important of all – tell IBM what you think!