Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes is a proprietary, client/server groupware and email system owned by Lotus Software, of the IBM Software Group.

The server runs on several platforms, including Windows NT, Windows 2000, Linux, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, IBM iSeries[?], pSeries[?], and zSeries. The native client runs on all versions of Windows and MacOS 9.0, while the web interface is usable by most web browsers.

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.

Features include group Calendaring and Scheduling, SMTP-based email, NNTP-based news support, and automatic HTML conversion of all documents by the Domino HTTP task.

Extremely robust security is built into the product via public key cryptography in client-server and server-server communication, and SSL 3.0 support on the web.

Programming

Lotus Notes databases are created using the designer. The databases itself are hierarchy. Relational databases could be modeled with some work, because every document gets a unique ID.

Notes works with several programming languages. Formula[?] and Lotus Script are the two basic ones. Nowadays Java is also integrated in Lotus Notes.

History

• Release 1 - 1989 - The Notes client required DOS 3.1 or OS/2. The Notes server required either DOS 3.1, 4.0, or OS/2.
• Release 1.1 - 1990
• Release 2 - 1991
• Release 3 - May 1993
• Release 4 - January 1996
• Release 4.5 - December 1996
• Release 5 - 1999
• Release 6 - September 2002

External Links

• Lotus Developer Domain: Products, E-Zine, Downloads, Discussion Forums, Documentation (http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd)