Stu Downes

One interesting observation in my experience of the Notes 8 Beta client and mail template is that there are many occasions I need to use an R7 client.  My employers have wisely placed us beta testers in a test domain and our production servers have maximum client versions set to prevent beta clients accessing them.  However, for the first time in recent major upgrades (i.e 4.x to 5 and 5 to 6) the new client template is error message free and functional when opened from the previous generation client (i.e. R7 client against R8 mail template design).  I’m sure there will be some incompatibilities published but its great news that you can collect your mail and experience your calendar from the old client.  This is great news for enterprises as it will mean that in most cases (unless there is an incompatibility issue I haven’t spotted) you should be able to upgrade the mail template experience for all users while you are still struggling to upgrade the client on that last 5% of the population who are difficult to get to.  It also means you can still get to your doclinks and other important applications from any pilot environments you are planning.  Getting both clients working on the same build is documented in the readme files but I’d recommend you backup all your Notes 7 exes and data folder somewhere as I somehow on 2 different pre-public Beta installs managed to delete the exes – no doubt user error