News and rumours from Lotusphere, and it hasn't officially started yet. Rumour: there will be some sort of major announcement in the opening session, one that hasn't yet been anticipated.

Facts: there really will be a Notes 9, 10 and beyond. The roadmap is becoming clearer; there will be unification of Notes and Domino functionality with Workplace Collaboration Services functionality, but it appears that you won't have to unify stuff that you don't want to. You will be able to develop and run traditional Notes apps the way you always have, or you can include them with Collaboration Services in the Workplace Rich Client, and run them on Macs and Linux, and also be able to customise the UI. All of this will be much clearer as "Hannover" gets closer to shipping -- which could well be before Lotusphere 2007. Post-Hannover, the server start to unify, too. More to be revealed in the opening session, tomorrow, Monday, 08:30am. -- Mick Moignard, DominoPower Senior Technical Editor