Finally IBM Lotus has focussed more on the Web Application Development side in Domino 9.

First of all, everything you do in Notes, will basically work as-is on the Web. I think this is the greatest improvement ever.

Starting with Domino 9, also Web 2.0 will be introduced, as well as the quite powerful and modern interoperability between Web Browsers and Domino Designer.

We've seen this before in Workplace Designer, but it was then drawn back, probably because IBM was still confident that these powerful features could be held back until 2009, as Domino 8 was going to be still way better than competing Web Application servers and Web Development tools.

Notes 9 will have a 3D OpenGL based workspace, where all Application icons are organized and navigated in a 3D environment, each workspace tab represents a seperate space, which can be linked seamlessly together with other workspace tabs, appearing as clearly seperated clusters in the global 3D workspace. In addition each 3D workspace tab also allows the creation of folders (as well as unlimited subfolders inside each folder), like people are used from operating system file systems. Applications can be grouped and labeled using those folders. Actually even the workspace tabs are folders, so we are talking about 2 base elements here only.

The Notes workspace also allows links to any kind of files, including Lotus Quickr based files. So it's basically a good alternative to current operating system file managements itself, which are far from being real 3D environments (Vista Aero and Linux Beryl).

With the introduction of the Notes OpenGL graphics engine, also all slowness of the Notes 8 Standard client are now history. OpenGL draws so much faster 2D and 3D graphics, that a hardware upgrade is not needed anymore.

Notes/Domino 9 Beta will start around Q4/2008, and the gold release is expected in Q2/2009.

This article is pure fiction, but I hope that at least some of these points will come true :)