Through eight or nine major releases of IBM Notes and Domino and over a period of 25 years, many, many new features have been added to the platform. In particular, the application development environment has changed beyond recognition from the early days of formula language only. Despite all of those new features being added, the platform has managed to maintain what’s called backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility means you could take any application that was written for Notes any time from 1991 to the present day, and run it, unchanged, on the latest version of Notes.

We’re thrilled to announce that this week we’ve released Teamstudio NotesTools Edition 32.0. In addition to fixing a number of bugs, this release includes significant upgrades to a number of internal tools and components. While many of these upgrades aren’t directly visible to the user, they were required to ensure that we continue to base our products on reliable, supported components. One of the most notable upgrades is a new installer based on Microsoft Windows technology.

We’re excited to announce today that a new and improved installation process for Teamstudio NotesTools is coming at the beginning of July. We listened to your feedback and understand the frustrations you’ve had with the widgets. This new installation process leaves them behind for a Windows installer-based solution that’s easy, straightforward, and secure. There were complex technical challenges to navigate in order to create a better installation process. These challenges led us to take a completely different approach to solving this problem. In this blog post, we’ll describe some of these challenges and detail technical aspects of the new installation process coming next month.