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Any time there's a significant new release of Notes/Domino, especially one that includes a new type of design element (e.g. xpages), we get a flurry of questions from customers that go along the lines of "when are you going to support the new version of N/D?" The implication is that they really need, say, CIAO support for the new design element, because they're starting to use the new version right away.

Of course, in some cases that's true, but in some other cases, while the early adopters in the dev team might be playing with the new features, it will take a while for the new version of the platform to be rolled out to the extent that the new design elements can be incorporated into production apps.

Although we've been a design partner for 8.5, that doesn't significantly help with getting even a compatibility release out within a short time after 8.5 ships. The reasons are simple, and there are two of them. First, the internals of N/D keep moving around right up until the ship date. So we can't finalize our release until after that happens. Second, you might be surprised at how many different product variants we actually support. I was!

• We have 8 client-based developer tools, plus two server-based tools that are supported on Windows only (i.e. 10).
• Add to that 2 server-based tools that we support on 5 different O/S platforms (another 10 for a total of 20).
• All of the above are supported in two different languages, English and Japanese. (That makes 40.)
• Plus two (English-only, O/S independent) filter packs (42).
• Build Manager + Agent Registry are currently English only, Windows only (44).
• Usage Monitor + Security Manager are supported on 5 different O/S platforms and in 2 languages (64).

So, we have a total of 64 different product configurations to update, build and test for each release. By the summer, that number will balloon to 86 configurations. Oh, and we support (and therefore test) all of these configurations across all versions of Notes/Domino from R5 up.

So, when you hear that it'll take us a few weeks to get our 8.5 compatibility release out, please go easy on us. We have a lot of work to do!