Well, what should I say. The version I used before crashed often. The release I use now crashes 2 to 3 times a day. I think this is called progress. Unfortunately Lotus Notes / Domino Designer is the only program I have that crashes. Well okay this is not completely true as I run some games that crash from time to time.
I know that IBM has done a lot to make Designer usable again and I am not sure if I should be happy that it works quite well or be angry if it just decides to freeze after I created a new Lotusscript library and copied some functions. At the end I have to do my work twice.
While the Notes client itself is again working better it still is full of little bugs (but it does not crash). I like that my new mail now is plain red text again instead of bold black. Unfortunately after a few days IBM often decides that bold red would be a better fit for me (to which I absolutely do not agree). The preference window often disappears because the Eclipse client still has focus issues and does some magic things in the background. Things like the bullet icon sometimes don't work and I still cannot paste html in a text field (which drives me nuts because even Microsoft Notepad can handle this).
I think I have entered my Sametime account a thousand times and still it does not always log me in but asks for my account data from time to time. Not consistently though.
If you have been using Lotus Notes for some time, 8.5.1 is the version that you want to deploy. The client is stable, everything that you already have is still there and they really fixed a lot of bugs and added some nice features.
The server runs smooth too although every R8 release ran nice if you did not put in under heavy load.
So 8.5.1 does so many things better and still I am not always comfortable with it?
Indeed I still think that IBM has a long way to go. If you really want to sell this to new customers and maybe even win some lost accounts back, this platform needs more polish and some of the old stuff needs to get cleaned.