What's Happening with Lotus Domino?
by Greg Neilson
09/06/2000
With 55 million seats worldwide, Domino is one of the most effective platforms
for developing and deploying messaging and web applications, allowing new
communities of developers to enjoy its collaborative capabilities. The release
of R5 has taken collaboration to the next level and made Domino easier to use
than ever before. For example, with Lotus Domino R5 you can centrally modify
client configurations instead of hopping from one terminal to the next
throughout the company. And the new Domino Administrator interface enables you
to visually monitor the health and status of the Domino servers in your network
from a single screen.
However, sometimes it seems that Lotus Domino doesn't get the respect it
deserves. The R5 release has been out now for nearly a year and a half, and
the latest release announced is 5.04a. The platform is mature, and
corporations are currently upgrading or planning to upgrade to the current
version. And Domino is holding its own as the leading groupware server product
despite intense competition from Microsoft with Exchange.
The new features of R5 are well-documented, but I'll discuss some of the
new functionality planned for Domino in this article:
Windows 2000 certification and integration. Windows 2000 was considered
a supported platform with the 5.0.3 release, but it has still not undergone
sufficient testing for Lotus to consider it a certified platform. This
certification process will help put IT managers at ease because it ensures that
Lotus tech support won't recommend that customers change operating system
platforms later if problems occur. In many cases, the current Domino/Windows
integration features make use of NT 4.0 compatibility built into Windows 2000,
so a later release should interoperate with Active Directory natively.
Additional XML support. XML has actually been built into R5 since day
one. But its implementation has been hidden. When it renders a view into HTML
and uses the new java applets to display the data, Domino uses XML internally
to pass the data between the Domino server and the Java applet in the client
browser. However, since R5 it took several point releases for Lotus to add
methods so developers can access Domino database content. Currently, only view
entries and access to specific documents within a Domino database (called
"Notes") can be accessed via XML. Lotus is excited about the possibilities of
XML, and will be making further enhancements to allow more access to Domino
database content via XML.
iNotes. Announced in January at
Lotusphere, iNotes is the new strategy for enhanced usability
for Domino clients that do not use Lotus Notes. iNotes addresses the user
resistance to using Lotus Notes instead of Microsoft Outlook and also enhances
the existing browser support that Domino has provided since version 4.5. Using
technology borrowed from Lotus Quickplace, iNotes enables browser users to
download the contents of a Domino database, work with it offline, then later
reconnect to the Domino server and replicate the data changes to the server.
This process requires some small additions to the Domino database application
design for custom applications. (These additions have already been added for
Domino user mail databases.)
Currently, iNotes for browser clients is available as a separate download
called Domino Off-Line Services (DOLS), although this should soon be part of
the base Domino product. iNotes for Microsoft Outlook 98 and 2000 is currently
in its second beta release and is expected to be released later this year. This
will reportedly only require administrators to complete a single
configuration form, so each user will only need to complete three mouse clicks
to configure each client. Then each user will work with their mail and
calendaring in Outlook in the same way they would with Exchange.
Websphere Integration.Websphere is a suite of IBM Java-application-server products
that has some functionality overlap with Domino. The current plan is to
increase the integration between the two products. Originally there were
rumors that Domino would become merged with the Websphere product range, but
the plan is to keep the two as separate products. Domino 5.0.4 included some
new Java classes that allowed Websphere java programs on different servers to
access Domino server objects. Future Websphere versions will include support
for LotusScript (the BASIC-like programming language used in Domino and other
Lotus products) to create server pages, single sign-on for both products,
and will also share a common security and directory scheme.
Raven. "Raven" is the code word for the forthcoming Lotus Knowledge
Management product, which will use Domino and
DB2
(IBM's relational database product) to host and classify information from
Domino databases, file systems, or HTML web pages. Clients then can use the
IE 5.x browser to access their own customized portal site hosted on a Domino
server that contains information of interest to that user. This is currently in
beta and is expected to be released next year. Various trade publications
are already excited about the possibilities this will bring to the field of
Knowledge Management.
So in summary, although this is a mature technology with a large installed
base, there are a lot of new goodies for us to get excited about. If you
haven't already, you might want to check it out. You can register for and
download a demo version
of Domino.
Greg Neilson has over 11 years of IT experience.
He has worked with Lotus Notes/Domino since 1993 and has deployed it on various
platforms, including Windows NT, OS/2, AS/400, AIX, Solaris, and Linux. He is
certified as an CLP Domino R5 Principal System Administrator and a CLP Domino
R5 Principal Application Developer. He also has an MCNE and MCSE+I. Currently,
he works as a senior notes architect for a large IT services company in
Australia and is a contributing editor for Microsoft Certified
Professional magazine. And is he working as part of the Domino Support team
at the upcoming Sydney Olympics. He has also written about Domino for magazines
such as Microsoft Certified Professional magazine, Windows NT
magazine, IIS Administrator newsletter and NEWS/400 Magazine.
