IBM Notes 9, went public beta December 14 2012, and has some very interesting news, in regards to functionality and design. Some of these changes seems minor but gives a much better user experience, both on the client and the iNotes interface.

Design

With IBM Notes 9 Social Edition a new UI interface and design is introduced. I know that design is a personal thing and we all have our private opinion about such things, but personally i like the new Notes 9 design. It is much more simple and easy to the eyes, and as a plus, the same design is extended to the iNotes client, so same user experience, no matter how you access your mailbox.

Inbox Notes 9

If you for any reason at all would like to change to another theme, you can do this through File > Preferences > Windows and Themes.

Theme preferences

Easy access

In Notes 9 the access to key databases has been improved. Select View > Show Shortcut Buttons and select the shortcuts you would like active.

Shortcut Buttons

Group By Date

With Notes 9 you can now group your mails by date and get a better overview based on date categories.

Group By Date

Inbox Grouped By Date

You can further enhance the date experience in your views, by using abbreviated date. When this is active, dates in your view will be shown as HH:mm on todays mails, “Yesterday” HH:mm on yesterdays mail and dd month (3 letters) HH:mm for older mails. My example uses the Danish word for Yesterday ( igår ), but you get the point .

Inbox with abbreviated dates

To set the abbreviated dates, open the view and go to View > Customize This View… .

Customize this view

Select the column containing the date and set the Use abbreviated dates check box and click OK.

Type and find

Finding mails in your inbox has become much easier in IBM Notes 9. You simply just start typing and the search will initially start searching for occurrences of what you type, based on the first column in the view and show you the result in that view as you type.

Type and find

While you type you can change the way you search by selecting another column or Any column in Find in.

Type and find

You can refine your search further if you select Any column.

Type and find – Any column

These features will be available when inbox is updated to version 9.

Introduced: Version 9.0