As a reminder, Lotus Notes and Domino support for version 6.5 will end on April 30th, which is two weeks from today. If you have a product issue and need support, you should enter your PMR now before time runs out.
After that you will have to upgrade your environment to a supported version in order to obtain support from IBM. If your software maintenance has lapsed, you can renew for a much reduced cost than buying new software. In fact, depending upon your usage patterns, it might be good to buy new, but different licenses. For example, if you are on 5 old 6.5 servers and its aged equipment, you could consolidate those servers onto new equipment - say down to 2 servers and save license renewal costs for those other 3 servers. If you were running on Windows, you could move your servers to AIX on a POWER7 and REALLY consolidate your environment, thus saving even more (power costs, software maintenance licensing, and hardware maintenance costs).
Here are 3 new features since 6.5 that are reasons alone to upgrade your environment:
- DAOS - IBM has seen up to 40% reduction in storage space using DAOS features of 8.5. I have personally witnessed a minimum of 17% on a small customer, up to 32% disk storage reduction on larger customers.
- Policies - use centralized configuration to manage your company's desktop user Notes client. This feature can control desktop, security, mail, archiving, and setup of Lotus Notes clients, saving valuable administrator time.
- MUCH improved Lotus Notes clients - the desktop client has many new mail and calendaring features including support for iCalendar, prining of calendars, mail threads, and overall usability
- Support for Mobile Clients - iNotes web access now has an ultra-lite mode that supports mobile clients. The UI looks great on iPhone and Blackbery browsers. Also, there is now a push based server called Lotus Traveler that can do store-forward, push based messaging to iPhones, Symbian, and Windows mobile devices similar to how a Blackberry Enterprise server works
Ok, so I can't count today. That's four reasons. If you need more, check out this article on IBM Developerworks
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/0/a2725372ae9549eb85257458006074cb?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=2#_Section2
If you are under software maintenance and have not upgraded, then ask the powers that be "why not"?Labels: domino, Lotus