InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
April 12, 1999
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Release 5 of Lotus' Notes and Domino offers enterprise-ready administration and great new uses, but the promise of a universal client goes unfulfilled
By Steve Gillmor and Jeff Angus
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he awaited release of the radical rewrite of the most widely used groupware platform will come out this week, and we're very enthusiastic overall. In a business environment in which everything is coming apart--from business models to decentralized companies and supply chains to expectations of the speed of evolution--groupware is both more vital and more difficult to execute properly. For Lotus Development's release 5 of Domino and Notes to succeed, it requires both an accurate vision of where collaboration is going and sturdy, scalable development execution.We think Lotus has nailed the vision side of the equation. At its core, administrating enterprise-scale Domino networks is quite possible with release 5. The internal development tools are both greatly improved and harmonic with the kind of integrated full-client and Web development efforts aggressive businesses are trying to implement. The interface for the end user, the Notes 5 client, is more than just a generational advance, but is also the confluence of attempts to deliver a universal client for accessing personal, group, and Web information with a host of refinements in both usability and presentation.
The execution has room for improvement. Architectural and tactical wish lists have yielded to the reality of shipping a product, and some ballyhooed features remain unfinished. While most fatal bugs have been excised, inconsistencies lurk within the revamped user interface. The universal-client idea was delivered still sporting some easily fixed shortcomings. And Notes developers will still favor the richer Notes client over the browser as a target for enterprise applications. We also think Domino and Notes represent the first compelling platform for those in what we call the new Webified Day-Trader generation--the executives, managers, and employees who track news, financial, banking, medical, and social information throughout the day from their desktops. The ability to make informed decisions about personal issues in tandem with professional responsibilities will not be easily surrendered. While IT managers will feel the impulse to crush this phenomenon, in the end, IT must have tools to manage--not curtail--this growing trend.
Earlier, we analyzed the final beta release for various types of organizations (Nov. 23, 1998, p. 48; The Domino Theory). The conclusions we had for each segment still hold: Nothing in the final release changes each group's pluses or minuses for the platform. In this review, we examine release 5 from the perspective of different roles in businesses: the executive responsible for IT strategy, the director or manager responsible for operational execution, and the end user.
The business executive needs to know if and why the release 5 approach fits the company's direction and how deployment might affect the business' approach to current and upcoming challenges.
The manager responsible for execution needs to know if the upgrade is feasible, what the training requirements are, and how easy the product is to maintain.
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Though Lotus has come a long way in incorporating Web technology into the Notes environment, more work remains. Most of the problems we uncovered are cosmetic, but Lotus has to meet a high standard to retain users within their universal client rather than returning to their favorite browser for many tasks. For example, those working at a screen resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels will grow annoyed with the paging algorithm, which requires users to search 10 lines down to resume reading each time they scroll. The Personal Name and Address Book has an attractive WYSIWYG interface, but clicking a letter to scroll to a list of names reveals only the first two or three in the view. The native Notes client supports frames, but forget about trying to forward a frame set to another user. Notes' SmartIcon point-and-click shortcuts are no longer displayed by default; some had trouble interacting with Web browser pages or worked differently than their menu item counterparts. The browser controls replace some SmartIcon functions, but with varying results. Clicking the Back button to return from one Web page to the middle of another doesn't respect anchor links, instead scrolling back to the top of the page. --Steve Gillmor and Jeff Angus |
All these people need to know two key things: Does release 5 make it possible to make and deploy applications the company knows it needs? And do release 5's capabilities create the possibility to create solutions that couldn't reasonably have been created before?
Executive Action
Development
Release 5 delivers a powerful set of development tools for just-in-time executive information systems. Since our last look at the Designer, Lotus has polished its new tool set into a sleek factory for Web-aware applications. The new release's core components--outlines, frame sets, and tabbed tables--have been used to construct a series of underlying templates.
Server templates--services and utilities that are part of the product--handle system responsibilities: Setup, Address Book (now renamed Domino Directory), Catalog, WebAdmin, Events, Logs, and Resource Reservations. Client templates include Mail, Personal Address Book, Web Navigator, and Bookmarks; the Journal template remains, but unfortunately it's not updated. Productivity templates include Discussion, Document Library, and the newly bundled TeamRoom (team collaboration) applications.
The templates dramatically illustrate release 5's new development tools. Tabbed tables condense release 4's text-laden server documents into organized property dialog boxes that work equally well in both browser and Notes client settings. There are new tools for aesthetic enhancements, intended for those organizations that need the aura of sizzle to get wide buy-in. For example, timed tables can be used to assemble logos one letter at a time, or to create animation effects--wipe, explode, dissolve, box-by-box, and roll. Nested table support provides granular control of absolute positioning; gradient colors, drop-shadowed borders, and multicell text wrapping enhance information display.
Designer 5 uses frame sets and outlines to construct richly programmable applications that can render personalized views of business information. Frames can emulate the legacy Notes user interface, but they prove much more flexible containers for outlines and other Notes interface elements that work natively in the Notes client and remotely via Java applets in browsers. Lotus has added JavaScript support to Designer and the Notes client to simplify the code necessary to run these new hybrid applications.
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