langreiter.com plain, simple: Lotus Notes (aka Domino)

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Lotus Notes (aka Domino)

CREATED BY Peter Cahill • LAST EDITED BY Peter Cahill 8017 days AGO

Widely misunderstood, over-espoused by its fans and unfairly rubbished by its detractors (mostly Microsoft loyalists), Notes is essentially a message-enabled database system with, on one hand, a richly-featured client, and on the other a web/application server built in at the server end. It's great for collaborative applications, catalogues, anything the user needs to take off line, workflow. The DBMS is not relational, so if you've spent six months developing a complex entity model, don't consider Notes. It's brilliant for content management on websites, especially if the content managers use the Notes client (though the can use a browser) - users edit and lay out content in a word-processor-like environment, save - and it's on the website. No HTML, no geeks.

Errr... any clearer? Thought not. It's a difficult product to convey succinctly. It's the reason IBM bought Lotus but now they don't know what to do with it.

What's the difference between Notes and Domino? Same thing. If pressed, Lotus would say that Notes is the client and Domino the server. Some people use Domino to signify Notes used as a web application server. MY CV says Notes/Domino throughout so customers don't come back and ask where it says I've got Domino experience!