How does Lotus Notes work?

Answer 1

Lotus Notes is a Client-Server, Collabrative application Lotus Notes is an application suite that includes the following components * e-mail * calendaring and scheduling * address book * database * web server * programming Unlike other application suites (like Microsoft Office) that split these pieces of functionality into separate products (like Outlook, Access, Front Page, etc.), Lotus Notes presents all of these components using a single front-end. For many people, Lotus Notes is an e-mail system. While this is not necessarily it's largest strength as a product, e-mail is probably the most recognizable component that it has. It has most or all of the features of the other popular e-mail products on the market, including calendaring and scheduling, and it uses standards-based mail protocols such as POP3 and SMTP. Because Notes has both a client and a server piece, users can use it to read and respond to e-mail, and administrators can use it as an entire e-mail environment. For all practical purposes though, everything in Notes is a database. Individual users have their own e-mail databases, and different sets of users can share application databases that can display, add, or manipulate information. Besides data, a database can also contain modules of programming code that will perform background, scheduled, or on-demand tasks for a user. The Lotus Notes client is a desktop application that organizes and displays databases on a user's local workstation. The physical database files can be stored either on the workstation itself or on a server. A typical Notes client "workspace" will have icons for a handful of local databases as well as a number of databases that reside on one or several Notes servers. All of these icons can be grouped together, so that the distinction between local and remote data becomes very trivial.

Answer --------

The Notes client is mainly used as an email client, but also acts as an instant messaging client (for Lotus Sametime), browser, notebook, and calendar/resource reservation client, as well as a platform for interacting with collaborative applications.

In the early days of the product, the most common applications were threaded discussions and simple contact management databases. Today Notes also provides blogs, wikis, RSS aggregators, CRM and Help Desk systems, and organizations can build a variety of custom applications for Notes using Domino Designer.

The Notes client can be used as an IMAP and POP e-mail client with non-domino mail servers. Recipient addresses can be retrieved from any LDAP server, including Active Directory. The client also does web browsing although it can be configured to launch the default browser instead.

Features include group calendaring and scheduling, SMTP/MIME-based e-mail, NNTP-based news support, and automatic HTML conversion of all documents by the Domino HTTP task.

Notes' integration with IBM's Sametime instant messaging allows users to see other users online and conduct chat sessions with them. A chat session can be with one person or multiple people. Beginning with Release 6.5 this functionality is built into the Notes client and presence awareness is available in email and other Notes applications for users in organizations that use both Notes and Sametime.

Since version 7, Notes has provided a web services interface. Domino can be a web server for HTML files too; authentication of access to Domino databases or HTML files uses Domino's own user directory and external systems such as Microsoft's Active Directory.

A design client is available to allow rapid development of databases consisting of forms, which allow users to create documents; and views, which display selected document fields in columns.

In addition to being a groupware system (e-mail, calendaring, shared documents and discussions), Notes/Domino is also a platform for developing customized client-server and web applications. Its use of design constructs and code provide capabilities that facilitate the construction of "workflow" type applications (which may typically have complex approval processes and routing of data).

Since Release 5, Lotus server clustering has been capable of providing geographic redundancy for servers.
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