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Each of the last few releases of Lotus Development's Notes and Domino products has brought fairly significant improvements to the company's goupware, collaboration and messaging platform. But the evolution of the feature set in Release 5 (R5) product suite of Notes, Domino and Domino Designer eclipses that of previous releases and serves to punctuate the progress that Lotus has made with the Notes/Domino platform in recent years. From a competitive stand-point, R5 makes significant strides in eliminating some of the product suite's past weaknesses. Specifically, the ease-of-use and general interface enhancements to the Notes client make it much more competitive than past versions with Microsoft's Outlook, the client for its Exchange Server. Meanwhile, enhancements in Domino's development and server infrastructure start to make the platform a more attractive choice as an Internet-based application server. And enhancements to the platform's administration tools not only make the platform much easier for administration to manage, but they also should help redefine users' expectations of how distributed messaging and application server environments should be managed. Client Evolution Typical Notes end users will see the benefits of R5 in two ways: improved general usability and enhanced features in the new Notes client; and more feature-rich applications that developers will be able to provide because of enhancements in Domino tools. The conventional Notes client has been completely overhauled in R5 to provide a Web-like experience for Notes users. Lotus also has separated the three elements of the Notes client - into distinct components. Each component still uses the same common code base, but administrators now can discriminate easily which components get installed on each user's machine. Lotus provides four predefined Welcome pages from which to choose. You are able to customise the look of each page and add custom pages fairly easily. Notes power users can use Domino Designer for more advanced customisation. However, Lotus could have enabled a bit more advanced tailoring capabilities from the general Notes interface. In addition to the Welcome page, the general client interface has undergone a lot of changes. Lotus has incorporated the use of bookmarks and subscriptions into the Notes interface. Bookmarks allow quick access to specific Notes databases, documents or Web pages on the Internet, while subscriptions monitor specific Notes databases for new activity and publish a list of new items posted to those databases. The new Notes client also benefits from a number of enhancements to core Notes databases, such as the user mail and personal address book databases. These enhancements go a long way towards making the general Notes user experience a more pleasant one. Application Design While most people probably do not think of Domino Designer very often when they think about the Notes/Domino platform, this component is critical. Compared with previous versions of the product, Domino Designer R5 is nothing short of awesome. R5 introduces the most robust design client of any previous Notes/Domino release. In particular, the features in this version start to make Domino and the Web look like a natural companionship rather than a forced one. Using Domino Designer, you are able quickly to create basic Notes applications. Among Domino Designer's new features, you are able to create framesets, which make it possible to present multiple HTML pages as a single cohesive page, which worked well in Notes and a browser; pages, which now allow for static documents in Domino databases; and outlines which provide reusable, hierarchical navigation elements to be used in forms or views. For general form and view authoring, Domino Designer includes numerous small enhancements - such as aligning specific Action buttons to the right or the left, or setting the background colour of a view - that will give developers more creative control over the look and feel of their applications. The new release also provides the ability to use JavaScript as an embedded scripting language within forms. Keep in mind, though, that the JavaScript implementation doen't really replace Lotus' own LotusScript, because it doesn't really tie the JavaScript language to a Domino-specific object model. As such, the option to use JavaScript only appears on relevant design elements within a form. Server Advances There are several key advances in the Domino R5 server. If offers the full complement of Internet Protocol standards support, including SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, NNTP, LDAP version 3 and support for X.509 version 3 certificates. The notable improvments in this release, however, are the integration of Domino Enterprise Connection Services (DECS) and support for running Java-based servlets - Java-based server-side components - on the server. DECS enables Domino to work more harmoniously with external relational data stores, such as IBM's DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Microsoft's Open Databse Connectivity-compliant databases as well as ASCII databases stored on a file system. The addition of DECS to R5 significantly broadens Domino's capabilities by extending its back end to support more robust database engines while simultaneously providing an integration layer for future knowledge management applications. Domino has other key points of integration with other platforms. In particular, Domino now allows administrators to configure the product to use Microsoft's Internet Information Service (IIS) Web server, as opposed to the product's built-in Hypertext Transport Protocol server (which is based on code from IBM), as the core HTTP server. Users will be able to integrate Web applications based on Domino and Microsoft's Active Server as a single cohesive Web server platform. In implementing this feature, you are able to configure Domino as an Internet Server application program interface for IIS. After you complete this task, IIS handled all of the HTTP services, passing requests for Domino databases to the Domino rendering engine. After Domino performs the HTML translation event for the requested database document, it passes the HTML back to IIS. IIS then services the client request. Meanwhile, IIS serves up general HTML pages from the server's file system. Domino R5 also supports Corba and IIOP for supporting object calls to and from other distributed application platforms that conform to the specification. Administration The functionality in Domino R5's Domino Administrator puts it at the forefront of application and messaging server management. The Domino Administrator client runs over the traditional Notes client framework. However, the management console itself is constructed in Java, which unfortunately comes with a little bit of a performance disadvantage. After getting beyond the performance implications of the Java-based tool, you will be thoroughly impressed with the capabilities that the Domino Administrator client presents. The tool gives administrators a complete console for keeping tabs on the status of Domino services as well as building and viewing reports and a comprehensive battery of server monitoring statistics. Ovrall, the array of improvments in this release of the product suite is staggering. Current Domino shops definitely will want to pursue the upgrade. For sites currently considering a messaging migration, Notes/Domino is a powerfully strong candidate. |