Write it on a Rock

For some reason, with the official announcement of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 being released tomorrow, I've decided to start blogging. I'd like to try and keep this focused mainly on Lotus related topics but I'm a big sports fan and an entertainment (books, movies, music, games) fan in general, so who knows what will show up.

No surprise to anyone who might actually read this post but IBM has announced the release of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 for tomorrow, Feb. 20, 2008. I first read about it here at Ed Brill's blog where he has a link back to IBM's site.

Currently I'm "managing" eight Domino servers, four on i5 boxes and four on Windows boxes, and the versions of Domino are scattered. The most up-to-date are two clustered servers on i5 that are running 7.0.3. The oldest release is the other i5 cluster running 6.5.4. Of the Windows servers, they are used as an Archive server, BES server, Sametime server and a Web Server. Our user base is around 600 with 90% using a Notes client - which are also on scattered releases.

I consider myself a designer (Nathan says we should say that instead of "developer" ) rather then an administrator but I'm lucky enough to do both. After Lotusphere this year I decided to try and start doing a better job on the administrative side and I've been waiting for this release to really begin doing that. Since I've been working with Notes and Domino we've never gone to a .0.0 release and have always waiting for a .0.1 release. This has been tough to do with version 8 as I have been dying to get Domino 8 on our servers. I've only played around a little on the Notes 8 client since 8.0.0 was released but I'm dying to start using that client as well.

As I'm sure many will do, I will be scrambling to download this release as fast as possible. Going to set one of the 7.0.3 servers into restricted mode so I can upgrade it as soon as I have the download tomorrow. Hopefully the install will be painless and I can get the other server in that cluster upgrading after some testing. I'll keep you posted.