I came across a news that the Lotus Notes 8 would be released by IBM in this year. As I read an official page of IBM’s Lotus Notes, IBM has improved several core capabilities of Lotus Notes in certain areas such email, calendar, contact management, Lotus Notes database, composite application editor as well as a set of office productivity tools have been included which support the Open Document Format (ODF) standard. To know further, you also can click here for the overview and the white paper of this product (in pdf).

In this Lotus Notes 8, IBM has introduced an exciting new innovation called activity-centric collaboration to Lotus Notes users. A concept direct from IBM Research, activity-centric collaboration lets users organize, navigate, manage and share information through the core capabilities found in Lotus Notes 8 for a particular activity or project. However, the beta version will release in next month and pricing of this Lotus Notes 8 is yet to confirmed by IBM, and I’ve been noticed that the each release of Lotus Notes, IBM is applying a brand new, and fresh UI (user interface) in their product strategy. One interesting idea I fascinating about this Lotus Notes 8 is its new programming model in such a way that it allowed components from other applications, or components created with J2EE or other development tools to run within the Lotus Notes client, i.e. the functionality of composite application as I mentioned in the above.