IBM Lotus Notes - Concept

Concept

Lotus Notes is a multi-user client-server cross-platform application runtime environment, it is the primary user-interface or client of the Lotus Domino/Notes suite. It can be used as an email client without a Lotus Domino server, though this is unusual.

Lotus Domino/Notes provides a broad range of integrated functionality including email, calendaring, instant messaging (with additional IBM software voice&video conferencing and/or web-collaboration), discussions/forums, blogs, an inbuilt personnel/user directory and IBM Lotus Symphony, a full office productivity suite. In addition to these standard applications the organization may use the IBM Lotus Domino Designer development environment and other tools to rapidly develop additional integrated applications such as request approval / workflow and document management.

Lotus Notes has no single direct competitor which offers a similar wide range of features. It competes with a suite of products from other vendors such as Microsoft.

Because of the application development abilities, Lotus Notes is often compared to products like Microsoft Sharepoint. The database in Notes/Domino can be replicated between servers and between server and client, thereby allowing clients offline capabilities. It is often classified as a NoSQL database, as it is document centric and not relational.

The Lotus Notes product consists of several components:

• Lotus Notes client application (since version 8, this is based on Eclipse)
• Lotus Notes client (either as a rich client, a web client called Lotus iNotes, or in mobile email clients via Lotus Notes Traveler)
• Lotus Domino server, a cross platform application server which supports data replication to other servers and clients for offline access.
• Lotus Domino Administration Client
• Lotus Domino Designer (Eclipse-based integrated development environment) for creating client-server applications that run within the Notes framework.

Whereas typical email applications such as Microsoft Outlook are programmed to be an email client, Lotus Notes is an application platform, where mail is just one of many possible applications. Lotus Notes may be used to access a document management system, discussion forums, document libraries, and numerous other applications. Lotus Notes is similar to a web-browser in that it may run any compatible application that the user has permission for.

The Lotus Notes framework provides applications with functionality to access, store & present information through a user-interface, enforce security and replicate (that is, allow many different servers to contain the same information and have many users work with that data). Lotus Notes standard storage mechanism is a document database format, the Notes Storage Facility—or NSF—which may store both the application and associated data. Lotus Notes may also access relational databases, usually through an additional server called Lotus Enterprise Integration for Domino.

As Lotus Notes is an application runtime environment, email and calendaring is an application within Lotus Notes, albeit one that IBM provides with the product, but one that can be changed or completely replaced by a Domino application developer. IBM have released the base templates as open source as well.

Applications for Lotus Notes are developed in a variety of development languages including the Java through XPages, as well as with a Visual Basic-like language called LotusScript. Applications may be developed to run within the Lotus Notes application runtime environment and/or through a web server for use in a web browser, although the application interface would need to be developed separately for each. IBM is attempting to resolve this with a new development solution called XPages, where the application is consistently displayed using web-technologies.