Lotus Notes and Domino R5

It’s been more than a year since the last major releases of Lotus Notes and Domino. During this time, most other web application development and enterprise workflow environments have incremented their version numbers by at least one (and Microsoft’s Visual InterDev has leapt from 1.0 to 6.0). Lotus Notes, the grandfather of them all, has been steadily trudging its way through a series of betas that would be considered version numbers if they were any other Internet-related product, and has finally arrived at version 5, or Release 5 (R5). R5 features a host of cosmetic and user interface upgrades, as well as security and enterprise data access improvements. Today, Lotus is trying to stay ahead of a pack of slick, newfangled, and often less expensive solutions that have suddenly flooded into a market it largely created.

Domino (formerly Notes server) is reputed as an impressive and powerful enterprise workflow and messaging server. In R5, the Domino server takes important steps toward becoming a first-class web application server. Most significantly, Domino now serves Java applets (created in Domino Designer) to web clients—thus, providing much of the Notes client functionality without requiring the installation and user training that have traditionally been the downside of using a fat client application.

Setting up Domino servers is simple. When you start up Domino for the first time, a Notes client is launched and you are guided through a four-screen wizard that finds your server, asks you to designate an administrator, password, and domain name. Once you have completed this wizard, the server is ready to go. Then you can specify additional configuration and server management functions such as adding users and groups, linking to additional servers and networks, and setting replication schedules.

Domino administration has been greatly improved since the last release. You can administer Domino R5 through server console commands for UNIX workstations, the Domino Web Administration Panel, the Microsoft Management Console (in Windows NT 5.0), or through Domino Administrator running as a Notes application or in a web browser. Domino Administrator is much more intuitive and functional than in version 4.6. You can view, modify, and delete all the users and groups on all your servers using a simple and familiar, Windows Explorer-like interface.

You can also use Domino Administrator to do replication; server configuration; database, file, and application management; server monitoring; and message tracking. Using message tracking, administrators can check the status of mail messages by criteria such as sender, recipient, message size, subject, date sent, and so forth.

Domino Administrator R5 crashes during certain types of operations (such as changing server settings), and the overall responsiveness of the application seemed sluggish. The sluggishness probably occurred because I was running the Administrator on the same machine as the server (a 300MHz Pentium II NT Workstation decked out with all the RAM in the world), and since this is a beta, I expected some bugs. I recommend using a large monitor, or set your monitor to 1,280 x 768 pixels, or you’ll be resizing panes frequently in the Administrator’s densely packed interface.

Lotus Notes and Domino R5 contain many security improvements and support for a variety of standard protocols. You can send secure e-mail from a Notes client to a non-Notes client using x.509 V3 certificates and S/MIME. Domino supports the Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA) for application security, and password recovery has been simplified. The worst threat to the security of any network is users who choose insecure passwords. In Domino R5, you can automate password quality testing so t hat when a user tries to use a password like “password” or “123,” it will be rejected.

Setting up a Notes client is also much simpler in R5. Lotus’s goal for Notes R5 is to make it as easy to use as a web browser. In the setup process, Lotus has exceeded this goal. With all its capabilities, you can set up Notes in about a minute. Upon launching Notes, you specify the server name and your user name. You can then specify connections to Internet services, such as Internet e-mail and news, that you wish to retrieve using your Notes client.

Notes R5’s client application is wildly different from previous versions—most noticeably in appearance. R5 features slick graphics, a web-centric user interface, and much more out-of-the-box functionality than previous versions. In an attempt to make browsing Notes databases as easy as browsing the World Wide Web, Notes R5 features a set of browser-like buttons (Back, Forward, Stop, Open URL, Reload, and Search) that work both for Notes documents and web documents. Unfortunately, they are located in the upper right corner of the screen (whereas all other browsers put these buttons on the left).

When you’re browsing Notes forms or databases, the results of clicking these browser-like buttons (particularly the Back button) can be counterintuitive because Notes is not a web browser. For example, if you click the Back button after entering the contact database from the main menu, you are not taken back to the main menu. Instead, you are taken back to the last database or document you opened. This new way of navigating Notes is consistent with the tabbed windows from previous versions, though, and users upgrading from an earlier version of Notes will love Notes R5.

Users migrating from a browser-based intranet to a Notes-based intranet will be confused. Where Lotus chose between making changes to the way Notes has always worked and making Notes more like a web browser, the winner seems to be the status-quo, except in matters of appearance.

From what I’ve seen in this beta release, the integrated browser in Notes is vastly improved but, unfortunately, is not a suitable replacement for standard web browsers. There are still many important features missing, including HTTP cookie support and tabbing between HTML form elements. In addition, the Notes web browser renders pages slowly, and often displays tables and frames differently than Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. For these reasons, Notes has the potential to become a web designer’s worst enemy. Figure 1 shows the www.whitehouse.gov homepage (not exactly known for its browser capability-pushing design) in Internet Explorer. Figure 2 shows it in Notes.

Figure 1: whitehouse.gov in IE	Figure 2: whitehouse.gov in Notes

This dramatic non-compliance with the HTML rendering standards that web developers depend on is a major problem.

Despite the shortcomings of its integrated web browser, Notes has become more user-friendly. Features such as e-mail, scheduling, to-do lists, contact management, and news are easily accessible and require little, if any, configuration.

If you choose to use a web browser as your client for Notes applications, Lotus provides some pre-built web applications that use HTML, JavaScript, and Java to recreate much of Notes clients’ functionality. For example, the web mail application has a mini-text editor applet that looks and works like a simple HTML editor (but it doesn’t create HTML—more on that later) that you use to compose messages. You can use this editor to set fonts, text styles (bold, italic, or underlined), text colors, and alignment as well as create bulleted lists and hypertext links.

Domino Designer, Lotus’s IDE for developing Notes and web applications, has also been dramatically overhauled in R5. In addition to the Form, Views, and Agent Designers, Domino Designer now features the Outline Designer for managing links in an application, the Frameset Designer for creating applications with multiple panes, and the Page Designer, which resembles a WYSIWYG HTML tool. The Notes client in R5 can run Java applets, and Domino Designer now includes Java user interface components that you can use to create applications for use on both browsers and Notes.

In version 4.6, Domino Designer looked almost exactly like a standard Notes client at startup. In R5, it is much easier to open Designer and begin developing applications the way that comes most naturally to most developers—by pressing buttons, opening files, and typing code to see what happens. It’s not the most intuitive IDE I’ve ever seen, but with some poking at the sample applications and an occasional look at the help files, I figured out how to create a basic application. Notes Designer includes more than 20 templates, including a discussion board, a personal address book, and a journal. You can use these templates as a learning tool, or as a jumping off point for your first application.

Notes features a comprehensive help database that is divided into sections for each of the three types of Notes clients—Administrator, Client, and Designer. Selecting help while in Notes takes you directly to the appropriate section of the database, depending on which Notes application you are using. You can also use a web browser to view the help database. At least in this beta, this method proved more reliable than viewing help in Notes. You can search the database, browse the index, or view a table of contents. The help system didn’t appear to be finished in this beta—I encountered a few dead links and dead ends.

Domino Designer’s Page Designer works somewhat like a WYSIWYG HTML editor. A floating menu lets you choose fonts; set alignment, spacing, and margins; define styles; and set page properties. Although many of the icons look like standard HTML editor icons, don’t be fooled. You’re not creating HTML. Domino translates Notes documents into HTML upon a browser’s request. In R5, however, you can use “pass-through HTML,” which lets you type HTML code into the Designer’s text editor. This lets you paste existing HTML documents into Notes documents—taking advantage of the best of both worlds.

You can also create HTML-only documents in Notes, or import HTML documents into an application by selecting the “Treat document contents as HTML” property. You can create pages that contain both Notes interface components and HTML code, then specify which components to view on which type of client according to the type of client (Notes or web browser), or according to the result of a formula. For example, you can write a formula that evaluates whether the current user is a manager, where the user is located, and which department the user works in, then display or hide appropriate paragraphs on the page. Domino now supports JavaScript for writing client-side logic, and Java, LotusScript (Lotus’s VBScript clone), and Lotus’s Notes Formula Language for server-side logic.

The Form Designer is where you create forms for your Notes applications. Form Designer works exactly like the Page Designer, but with added options for creating fields. In R5, Lotus has included four user interface applets that you can use in your applications. These include view, styled text editor, action bar, and outline. The view applet allows active displaying and interacting with lists of documents, the styled text editor is the simple HTML-like editor mentioned above, the action bar applet lets you create menu bars, and the outline editor provides customizable site navigation. In addition, you can import Java applets that you create, download, or otherwise obtain into Notes documents.

The Outline Designer is where you define the flow and structure of an application. You can use the Outline Designer to organize your application before its forms and pages are completed, or you can use it to navigate a finished application. Outlines can contain links to different types of application elements. To restructure your application’s flow, you simply drag and drop the graphical representations of pages, forms, views, or framesets in the Outline window. Outlines also support actions. For example, you could program access control into an outline to restrict access to certain parts of an application based on criteria such as user name or previously viewed pages—the classic example is restricting access to a download page to only those visitors who have viewed the license agreement.

Domino R5 can use Domino Enterprise Connection Services (DECS) to integrate with a larger variety of back-end data sources and legacy systems. DECS is a forms-based, non-programmatic tool for natively connecting web applications to live data from a variety of relational databases, ERP applications, and transactional systems. The supported back-end data sources include DB2, Sybase, Oracle, and EDA/SQL. You can access additional data sources using ODBC. You can also access external data using LotusScript or Java classes. Java data access uses the Domino driver for JDBC.

Lotus Notes and Domino R5 is one of the few upgrades that actually earns its integer version number change. A few years ago, Notes was a proprietary, almost closed system. Today, it has almost completely adopted industry standards such as HTML, Java, and JavaScript. Unfortunately, performance and stability are lost by such a dramatic change. Nearly all the problems I encountered in this release could be solved if Lotus integrated one of the leading web browsers into Notes, rather than trying to create its own. With the current direction of Notes and Domino R5, Lotus might be wise to follow the lead of its upstart stepchild, Silverstream (developed by a team heavy with ex-Lotus personnel). It should forget about the fat Notes client and focus instead on delivering a thin Java interface that you can view on your browser of choice.