Application areas for Lotus Notes/Domino

Activities of modern organizations - both business corporations and government institutions - are based on interaction of employees, departments and external entities among each other. Controlled access to important information, re-use of previous work results, and document integrity protection are growing in importance. A major help in solving those tasks comes from using Lotus Notes/ Domino based applications.

Lotus Domino - with its client/server mail environment, replication system, teamwork system and Internet support services - is the ideal infrastructure for building a distributed information management environment. The universal object warehouse underlying these technologies provides powerful tools for implementing distributed applications free of complexities typical for traditional relational DBMS's. Lotus Domino/Notes provides information management tools, compatible with advanced Internet/Intranet technologies and appropriate for creating reliable teamwork environment.

Lotus Domino and Notes represent a full-fledged teamwork solution, and allow to solve complex technological tasks at any organizational level. Lotus Domino is simultaneously an E-mail server, application server (to work with documents and create business automation systems), Web server with advanced capabilities for integration with relational DBMS and ERP-systems. Lotus Notes is an integrated mail- and Internet-client. In addition, Lotus Notes also provides extensive opportunities for mobile (team) working.

Many of these technologies were well known before the inception of Notes. However, when combined together into one system, they bring in absolutely new value proposition to users.

Major Lotus Notes/Domino Application Areas


1. Creating a modern, reliable and scalable infrastructure for e-mail, message transfer and communications. Lotus Domino is a mail server, and Lotus Notes is an e-mail client with advanced capabilities.
2. Using Domino and Notes as platform and infrastructure for business applications, automation of business processes, workflow etc. In this case Lotus Domino is an application server, and Lotus Notes is a client for managing business applications, information and document processing.
3. Creating Web infrastructure. Lotus Domino is a Web server with advanced capabilities for dynamic update, information categorization, full-text search, etc.
4. Using Lotus Domino and Notes as a platform for integrating all kinds of information from various sources - relational DBMS's, ERP systems (SAP R/3), Internet, etc.

It's worth to say, that there are some Lotus architecture constraints narrowing down the area of using Lotus Notes applications. Lotus Notes is not the best platform for creating applications dealing with calculations on the large data arrays (for example, financial or statistical programs). Also, Lotus Notes is not the first choice for building large data warehouses.

However, the capabilities of Lotus Notes considerably surpass the limitations. Vast majority of Lotus Domino/ Notes users admit the possibility of effective solving all the above-listed tasks on the basis of the unified technology platform.

Real positive payoff from using the information technologies, which gives qualitative changes and competitive advantages, is achieved only when these technologies are used for creating market-oriented systems. These systems change radically the interrelations between a company and its customers and partners, as well as work processes within a company. Those Internet/Intranet systems, which combine the tools for data and transactions processing with the automation of business processes, are the most effective for building more profitable business relationships. Today IBM and Lotus technologies together have all necessary means your company might need for developing market-oriented systems.