Given that our products often enhance features or patch holes in IBM's products, I may sometimes seem hard on IBM, and particularly on their rich text rendering capabilities. Over the next week, I will show a few posts which demonstrate how our CoexLinks Fidelity product corrects further issues with email, but before I do, I want to give a huge shout out to the Notes developers who worked on Notes 9. Customers have complained about rich text to MIME rendering for years, and IBM listened. Specifically, here is an example I have used often in the past, and how it looks when sent via Notes 8.5.3 and Notes 9. Note: Among my customers, Notes 8.5.3 is still the most common version out there, but Notes 9 use is growing.
The difference between the Notes 8.5.3 and Notes 9 mail is night and day if you have your location document set to send as MIME so the client renders the mail. Since tables have long been one of the most visible failings in the Notes rich text -> MIME conversion, the fact that Notes 9 now renders hidden/visible cell borders, cell border thickness and cell border color is a huge improvement. For sake of comparison, I also included the rendering sent from Notes 8.5.3 using the new CoexLinks Fidelity, and while there are few marginal improvements in exact font sizes and the text highlighting, for example, I wouldn't have written the product for this alone. And while it may be nice that Notes 8.5.3 users can also have this fidelity, an upgrade to Notes 9 would do it as easily and with other benefits.
Fortunately, there are other excellent reasons for companies to use CoexLinks Fidelity, but in the interest of general acceptance of IBM Notes 9 Social Edition, I applaud IBM and its developers. I'd far, far rather provide enhanced features/functionality than repair holes and defects, and this is a big step forward.
Correction: While this wonderfyl rendering is in the Notes 9 client, the rendering I thought was 8.5.3 was actually Domino 9.0.1 (rendered by the server rather than the client). The Notes 8.5.3 rendering is still not good, but it is not as bad as the Domino 9.0.1 rendering. Sigh! Still more work to do for IBM. At least we know the code already written.
Correction: This is actually the Domino 9.0.1 rendering:
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