The second chapter focuses on Service Orientated Architecture. This was very high level and included links to an external resource which I didn't check out. The book provides quite a number of these links, and they allow the authors to provide more information without increasing the page count. You won't be able to build SOA applications merely as a result of reading this chapter but at least you'll have a fair idea of what it's about and you may begin to formulate business plans which involve it.
The chapter on productivity tools is generally about Symphony. I got the feeling that perhaps a little too much marketing Kool-Aid had been swallowed, particularly with the phrase; "No matter what the complexity of the documents that you are creating or editing, this productivity tool can handle the job." but the chapter does give a lot of information on the products.
In particular, there is some great information that I haven't seen elsewhere such as information about where to store the templates for IBM Lotus Presentations and how to use policies to decide whether or not macros can be run.
Chapter 4 deals with changes to the Lotus Domino server. In particular, it looks at message recall, the out-of-office agent and mail threading. In these cases, it delivers more than simply "what's new" information and often shows you where exactly the settings can be changed.
Chapters 5 to 7 deal with deployment enhancements and the actual upgrade itself. It was quite interesting to read Chapter 6 because it focuses on the migration strategy more than the migration itself. In our company, our users are lucky to even get a warning other than an outage notice when we do an upgrade. The migration strategy talks about getting CEO/CIO support, user training and making decisions about individual component upgrades. Chapter 7 covers coexistence between various Domino releases.
Chapter 8 deals with the changes to domino designer and the new methods and facilities available. I think I was expecting a whole chapter on xpages here, and little else, but I was quite surprised. The chapter covers composite applications, DB/2 integration and the changes to designer. Xpages only gets a single introductory page but it is enough to whet your appetite.
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