Today’s announcement about the release of Notes and Domino 8.5.1were expected, but what I did not expect was that Domino Designer now will be free! I think this will help in marketing Notes and Domino. Developers who are interested in testing Notes development can now get it for free. As Ed Brill said: it is bringing Notes back to it’s roots.
If now IBMwould setup up a Domino server for the developers to try their applications on, IBM would have a winner. I know OpenNTF have been talking about something like that, but I would imagine there being a need/use for a IBM hosted offering like that as well.
The licensing of the client is also changing. The old Collaboration license is changing name to CAL Enterprise. The old Messaging license will be called CAL Messaging. Those two licenses will be used for all different ways to access Domino data, no matter if it is using the Notes client, iNotes or other clients.
Personally I am very interested in playing around with 8.5.1 myself, despite myworkplace just being in the process of upgrading fromR5 to ND7…
I also think it was really cool that IBM is pushing OpenNTF in the announment.