InformationWeek

April 12, 1999

A Notes-Worthy Release

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With Microsoft's Office 2000 adopting HTML as a companion native file format, Lotus has an opportunity to position Domino and Notes as a dynamic container for fluid information storage and retrieval. The Notes client makes it easy to capture Web pages and forward them to individuals, groups, or mail-in databases. Once you bring the content to the client or Domino server, these documents are automatically indexed for full-text searching. You can drag-and-drop them as bookmarks to folders, or add them to embedded views in frames that Domino can push to corporate desktops via the customizable Headlines page.

Rather than being competitive choices, Notes 5 and Office 2000 seem to increase each others' value when deployed together. Lotus continues to have a viable opportunity in managing the Office 2000 discussion model. That model will not be easily deployable on its own until Windows 2000 reaches the market. Dependencies on SQL Server and Exchange Server's different object stores make Web discussion and notifications unnecessarily difficult to manage. By contrast, Domino's administrative client is very intuitive, and the Notes client's Headlines technology can be rolled out by both administrators and users. Outlook Today, a parallel feature inside Microsoft Outlook, is not really designed with user-configuration in mind.

Applet-extended browsers can be used for human resources, help-desk, and other workflow-enabled tasks, taking advantage of reduced training and client costs while still using Domino's robust access-control and security tools to distribute content creation and management on the intranet. We believe this architecture offers new revenue streams for companies as they open portions of their executive information and marketing systems to partners, suppliers, and customers via extranets and virtual private networks.

Administration
Just as Designer creates new opportunities for Notes applications, the new Domino Administrator gives Notes shops a fresh approach to administration of Domino servers, applications, users, and directories. The Admin client sports an Explorer-like interface that offers control of multiple databases, access-control lists, replication schedules, and account registrations. Administrators can change a user's server by dragging and dropping the user name-- Domino moves the user's mail file, reconfigures the Person document, and revises desktop settings to reflect the new server.

Messaging enhancements include message tracking, configurable message routing based on size of attachments or time of day, and topology maps that graphically monitor mail routing and replication. A live console screen lets you interactively control remote servers over the Internet, and a new server-restart command makes it possible to make server configuration changes that used to require manual shutdown at the physical server. We suggest companies consider delegating some Domino administration tasks to Windows NT administrators, particularly given Domino's tight integration with NT's Internet Information Server. This may allow small Back Office shops to consider integrating Domino as a messaging and groupware solution, adding a single staffer as a Notes developer and Webmaster who doubles as the Domino server administrator.

Deployment
The Notes 5 client successfully marries Web browsing, E-mail, and calendaring and scheduling. Innovations such as the multiwindowed task bar and browser-navigation controls for Notes and Web documents will be an improvement for many users over Office 2000 and its Outlook personal information manager. Companies that stayed with Notes through the transitional 4.6 release may have training issues with the new Bookmark tools, which some find less flexible than the previous Portfolio interface. Lotus has improved the integration of Internet Explorer within the Notes client, but left out drag-and-drop support between Notes and the Windows desktop, an unnecessary friction.

We don't believe Lotus has yet succeeded in delivering a browser-based replacement for the native Notes client. The Mail template offers far more "WebMail" features than its 4.6 predecessor, but it's best used as a way of accessing your E-mail from a browser when traveling and not as a full-time tool. Applications that rely on the document-library template's integration with Microsoft Office suffer when adapted for a browser audience. Cost-conscious shops may be better off splitting the deployment into three groups, each made up of different user types, with key personnel migrating to the new client, some remaining on earlier client versions, and the rest switching to the browser version for testing and training evaluation.

Managerial Timber

Development
User-interface innovations in the Admin and Notes clients are carried over into the Designer client as well. The multiwindowed task bar makes it easy to navigate between design elements in multiple databases. The context-sensitive Help databases take advantage of the new Web-friendly application constructs; they each launch in a separate window, using frames, a hyperlinked index, and the Notes browser controls to jump back to buried documentation. The program examines the Windows registry and automatically adds icons for installed browsers so you can click to preview your work in Notes, Internet Explorer, and Navigator.

The new frame set and outline editors make it easy to convert the legacy three-paned user interface, adding much richer design constructs. We expect that developers with Web authoring experience will appreciate outlines for their chameleonlike properties--first as site-design tools, and later as programmable navigational elements. Outlines effectively replace release 4's navigators, though navigators continue to be supported for backward compatibility.

You can embed outlines in forms to add common navigational controls to multiple pages, or embed them in the new Page object to create different styles as part of a frame set. Outline types can be configured either at design time or dynamically on the fly. Tree style lets you display a nested hierarchy of links, while the Flat setting creates context-sensitive menus that reveal one level of the hierarchy at a time. Multiple outlines are allowed, in which Notes views can be embedded only once per frame. By contrast, FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion employ shared border technology that is difficult to format or customize.

Outlines also support programmable images, using the new image-well technology to create rollover effects (but not on the Web in this release). Images can now be stored natively in GIF, JPEG, CGM, PIC, PCX, TIFF, and BMP formats as shared resources, both for performance on the Web and to simplify programmatic access and managing libraries of content. Pages, forms, outline entries and backgrounds, table cell backgrounds, and action buttons can all use image resources.

The mail, discussion, document library, TeamRoom, and Directory templates use applets that have inherited the user interface of Notes 4 (outline, view, editor, and action bar) to extend Notes client features to Java-enabled browsers. Developers can add them to an application simply by clicking an InfoBox check box; the applets are optimized for fast downloading, ranging from a 10-Kbyte compressed CAB file for the action-bar applet to about 150 Kbytes for the editor. The outline and view applets use the Extensible Markup Language over HTTP to communicate between host and client, caching data to minimize round trips to and from the server.

In making the decision to support version 3.x and 4.x browsers, these applets suffer from Java Development Kit 1.0.2's limited graphics, font choice, and clip-board support. For example, you can cut, copy, and paste text within the editor applet, but not between applets. Images inserted with a Notes client are not preserved when edited with a browser. And unsupported elements such as tables and frames are preserved but not displayed. The net result is a significant reduction in duplicate code required for mixed-client applications, with as much as 70% of database development working reasonably well in both Notes and browser clients.

To move even closer to "write once, run anywhere," Lotus licensed JavaScript 1.3 and embedded it in both the Designer integrated development environment and the Notes client. JavaScript in turn provides access to the Document Object Model, letting you write client-side processing routines that work in Notes and on the Web. The improved Object Browser lets you click on an object and expose its properties and methods; a filled circle indicates where underlying code resides. The Reference tab switches between Java, JavaScript, LotusScript, and the legacy Formula language.