April 12, 1999
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Designer's enhancements move Notes developers from the periphery into the mainstream of Web authoring development. Experienced Web-site designers can leverage Domino's frame sets, outlines, embedded applets, and JavaScript tools to deliver interactive sites that would take far longer to develop with conventional Web-development tools. Successfully migrating Notes applications from the proprietary architecture to the stateless Web will require significant resources in expensive Notes programming talent at the start, but over time the new release gives managers access to a much larger and expanding pool of Web authoring talent.
Administration and Deployment
Migrating from early Domino/Notes domains proved reasonably painless in our testing. The installation utility will let you install clients and server in separate directories, but Lotus recommends administering the server from a workstation. Release 5 supports a new On Disk Structure to enable transactional logging, in-place compaction, and online backup. The ODS does not replicate to legacy databases, but you should watch out for template overwriting. Installation automatically updates the 4.x Public Name and Address Book with new forms that are difficult to navigate using older Notes clients. Consultants and outsourcing firms that share their directory with clients' remote 4.x domains should not replicate the new design.
Domino 5 seems to require more RAM--we boosted our test servers from 128 Mbytes to 256 Mbytes when integrating Domino with NT's IIS. In this configuration, IIS's HTTP stack takes responsibility for serving and securing file system pages, provides virtual server and multihosting, and uses the ISAPI Web server extensions. When IIS authenticates a user, it passes the credentials to Domino. When a Domino request is made, authentication is passed back to IIS. Domino has improved Secure Sockets Layer support, providing unique key rings and individual port-security settings for multiple domain hosting. Administrators can use the new DSAPI extensions to provide custom authentication, name-translation, error-handling, and specialized logging.
Upgrading to the Notes 5 client converts the legacy Workspace into bookmarks. Internet Explorer favorites and Navigator bookmarks are added and dynamically updated--but only from browser to Notes. The system walks the user through setup wizards that create connection records and Dial-up Networking entries. Server setup profiles now refresh client preferences each time users connect. The bookmark.nsf and headline.nsf databases replace version 4.x's locally stored desktop.dsk, letting IT managers set defaults for different workgroups and use replication to update desktops from a central point.
THE USERS' VIEW
The Client
Lotus makes a strong case for the Notes 5 client as the hub for information transfer. Microsoft's Office 2000 manages mail, calendaring and scheduling, and to-do tasks in one interface (Outlook) and browsing and document access in a different one (Internet Explorer). Microsoft's Outlook Web Access and Outlook Today--which embeds IE within the Outlook user interface--deliver a degree of integration, but adding Web discussion threads and change notification add yet another management layer and data store. And groupware application development requires Exchange public folders, Visual Studio, and several programming object models to link SQL Server, IIS, Index Server, and Exchange Server.
By contrast, Notes blends browsing, calendaring and scheduling, to-do messages, discussions, Usenet newsgroups, Internet IMAP and POP3 mail, Notes mail, and workflow applications in an integrated environment. You can jump between mail, Notes documents, and Web pages via bookmarks, hyperlinks, and the browserlike Back, Forward, and History buttons. The native Notes browser is finally usable (with a few caveats; see story, p. 70), with frames and nested table support handling most sites with ease. Version 4.6's integrated Internet Explorer ActiveX control works more smoothly in Notes 5, but we liked the Notes browser's ability to open several pages at a time.
Does it match Outlook for ordinary users? It depends. The full-client Outlook is one of those products that is not easy to learn, but once learned is a very productive environment. You won't want to move long-time Outlook users to Notes for the interface.
Although mail, calendaring and scheduling, and to-do tasks exist within the same mail database, you can now open each tool in a separate window. Action buttons have been enhanced with drop-down menus, letting you perform most actions from views as well as from the document level. Scheduling tools that once were buried three levels deep can be managed from the Calendar, To Do, and Meetings views. Owners can reschedule, cancel, and confirm meetings; review participants; and broadcast memos. Participants can accept, decline, delegate, and propose new times. The new FYI capability lets owners inform people of the status of meetings and projects; participants can add FYI items to their calendars but can't use Participant Actions. You can also set delivery options that block delegation, counterproposals, and replies to meeting invitations.
We found numerous team productivity enhancements: Drag a list of addresses from an E-mail's Send To or Copy field to the Group Calendar folder, and Notes creates a Group Calendar with a graphic display of your team's schedules. You can set alarms to different advance time intervals according to the type of entry, giving you, for example, five minutes' notice before a phone call but 30 minutes' notice before an off-site meeting. To Dos, which were virtually unusable in previous releases, now roll over to the next day when they are not completed.
Summary
Notes 5 is a groupware dynamo. And Lotus has made very good use of the Web and HTML in moving the model to adapt to emerging users and uses.
But the company exhibited, we believe, some myopia in the execution. Most obvious is the lack of drag-and-drop capability between the Web client and the Windows desktop, something even intermediate end users take for granted in their standard client. Lotus has all the mechanisms in place to add Notes' full-client interface features to the Web client. It should do it.
Moving ahead, Lotus must also continue exploiting XML to access Microsoft Office document storage and to continue advancing its indispensability in this area.
Steve Gillmor is director of Southern Digital Inc., a Charleston, S.C., IT consulting firm; he can be reached at sgillmor@southerndigital.com. Jeff Angus is senior technology editor at InformationWeek.
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