You would be aware of blogs and tweets about the anouncement of Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.3 release with great new features. It will be next tuesday (as usual).

Last time, I wrapped up some blog posts about 8.5.2. I'll be doing this again and if I forget to give wrong/missing reference for other bloggers, please shout (or comment)...

Before the start, There are three things...

First, usual legal warnings... These features are not promised/guaranteed/etc. and subject to change etc. and based on beta program partners etc. etc. etc. :)

Second, next tuesday will not be the product announcement alone. There will be more. Whole licensing has been rewritten and some changes will also be announced like express licensing restrictions.

Finally, IBM listened the community and offering a new product which will be announced next week. I recently participated a limited call about it and I liked it very much. You should be patient about the details that I won't share but although it will confuse us a bit, it will cover a great gap in the whole product family. [end of teaser] :)

Let's start with the wrap-up:

1. Julian Buss started a great wiki about a good summary of new XPages features.

2. Darren Duke, Mary Beth Raven and Marie Scott about the general features:

• Ability to move server based full text indexes to another drive.
• Machine specific policies.
• Purge Interval Replication Control
• Re: and Fwd: are now ignored when you sort by subject
• New mail popup (slide-in alerts).
• Complete control of color of unread email
• Multiple signatures.
• Better control of "Recent Contacts".
• Sametime embedded is now 8.5.1 and Symphony is now 3.0
• A tool is provided to change a single user install to a multi-user install.
• Smart upgrade of Windows Vista and Windows 7
• ID Vault works in Citrix XenApp
• Dropping sessions on IMAP tasks
• Ability to search messages by recipient and subject from the view.

3. Declan Lynch, Eric Brooks and Niklas Heidloff blogged about the new features in Domino Designer 8.5.3

• Source Control Enablement - You can now run DDE with a source control server.
• Designer is MUCH more stable and responsive.
• Designer now has a new "Java Design Element." This allows you to add a java class as a true design element.
• New "XPages" Perspective.
• Better Javascript Editor.
• "Sign" button on all design element lists
• Ability to control automatic popup of infoboxes
• F2 on a design element now allows you to rename the name AND the alias.

4. Darren Duke, Niklas Heidloff, Eric Brooks, Julian Buss, David Marko, John Jardin and Declan Lynch (also here) blogged about some XPages enhancements:

• Full text sorting
• HTML 5 attributes added to XPages controls
• Preloading XPages applications at client and server startup
• Code aggregation makes JS and CSS files much faster to load
• Dojo 1.6.1
• Much simpler i18n support
• Easier deployment of ExtLib and other OSGI plugins
• Ability to disable tags around some container controls (repeat, panel, etc.)
• Show disabled control for read only
• New Dojo property panel for controls, so that you can set Dojo attributes more easily.
• New performance related application property “Evaluate entire page on refresh“.
• New “show XPage instead” property for views.
• In the fileDownload control you can change the image and confirmation message for the “delete” action now.
• A new event “view.postScript()” let’s you compute client side JavaScript which is executed every time a full or partial update is executed.
• OneUI version 2.1
• Relational database connection with Ext.Lib.
• (BTW, Extension Library is already compiled for 8.5.3)

5. Ulrich Krause (a.k.a. Eknori) and Paul Mooney (and here) has blogged about Traveler enhancements:

• Lots of enhancements in Android:
  • Android has a new set of widgets for mail and calendar.
  • Android will have multi-line signatures
  • Android Calendar enhancements
  • Android Tap to dial for calendar entries
  • Android Mail enhancements
  • Android OS 3.0 support
  • Installation improvements for Lotus Notes Traveler client for Android
  • Name Lookup enhancements for Android
  • Android chair side calendar actions
  • Android 3.0.x tablet menus
  • Domino encrypted mail support for Android
• Reply and Forward indicators from Apple devices
• Select which applications are allowed to sync for Apple devices
• New security policy option which requires approval for new devices
• Administrative approval for devices connecting to Traveler
• Symbian^3 support (with device encryption enforcement)
• Mail routing configuration no longer needed on the Lotus Traveler server
• Meeting notices sent from mobile devices are now sent “from” the mobile device user
• Name Lookup requests are now executed against the user’s mail server directory
• Lotus Traveler data only remote wipe for Apple iOS devices
• Domino Mail-in Database lookup
• Group name lookup

We may see more in the gold release. Stay tuned :)