Yesterday, IBM announced general availability of Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8.  Previously code-named "Hannover," the new version, which supports composite applications and uses the Eclipse framework, replaces both Lotus Notes version 7.x as well as the Workplace tools IBM offered in recent years.  The Notes client will support enterprise mash-ups, linking multiple systems together in a variety of ways to provide better and more contextual information to knowledge workers.  The Notes 8 client runs on Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and Linux operating systems.

 We've spoken to our clients who have been testing R8 and they tell us it is changing how many of their knowledge workers work and interact.  Notes 8 moves the locus of one's work from e-mail to collaboration and this is nothing less than a sea change for the knowledge worker community. This is important as we see this as a major step along the road companies embark upon when building true Collaborative Business Environments.

Features include "Recent Contacts" and "Message Recall."  With Recent Contacts, users will get a one-click, dashboard view of recently sent emails and chats to quickly locate a key contact.  The Message Recall feature will let users quickly recall an email message after it has been sent by mistake, saving a user from a potential conflict or miscommunication situation.

Within Activities, knowledge workers can bring together various e-mail messages, instant messages, documents, and other items into one logical unit.  It uses (so-called) Web 2.0 technologies including Backpack, Atom, Tagging, REST, Ajax, and JSON.

Notes 8 also includes productivity editors that support the Open Document Format (ODF).  Knowledge workers can create word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents in ODF format.  The productivity editors also support Microsoft Office and Open Office file formats.