Disclaimer: this is beta and there are no guarantees that the features described here will be in the final product that IBM ships.

Some weeks ago a customer of ours complained about the performance in one of our applications. He used Notes 8.5.0. Since I could not reproduce, I suggested to upgrade to 8.5.1, which did a significant performance boost. So, until now Notes 8.5.1 is as fast as Lotus Notes can get.

Not anymore. I'm very pleased to report that the most recent Lotus Notes 8.5.2 Beta is notable faster than 8.5.1 in many aspects:

• Startup is faster due to a new "load parts of Notes at operating system start" option.
• Opening Mail is faster.
• Opening complex framesets with many forms, pages and so on is faster (in my test scenario: 8.5.1 about 4 seconds, 8.5.2 about 3 seconds).
• Opening Notes documents with complex forms (lotus of tables and images) is faster (in my test scenario about .5 seconds).
• And overall the client feels more responsive.

I hope that IBM is still tweaking performance where possible, since performance always makes a real difference for customer satisfaction. But personally I feel that with 8.5.2 we will get a client that's as fast as (or as slow as :-) ) competitor products, but has tons of additional functionality.