Previous Page TOC Next Page



— 1 —


Describing Notes

Describing Notes to most information systems (IS) professionals is like describing an elephant to blind men. At first, most IS people see only one small part of Lotus Notes, ignoring the power of the overall package. This is natural. Lotus Notes is a unique product. It is a blend of various technologies including messaging (e-mail), a database engine, robust security, an application development environment, and network management (for Notes resources). If your background is database development, it's natural to focus on Notes' database components and compare it to other, higher-performance platforms. There are many other database engines available that can handle more data, but this doesn't mean that Notes is a useless database engine. It means that Notes has been specialized for a class of applications that don't require huge data flows. The same can be said for each of Notes' components. They have been specialized for a class of applications that have come to be known collectively as groupware.

Groupware such as workflow applications and discussion databases provides automated support for teams. Notes supports teams of any size, spread out over the entire globe. For some applications, your team could be the entire corporation—including traveling sales staff, international headquarters, and hundreds of remote offices. Notes contains all the functionality you need to support this environment. There is no need to cobble together products from multiple vendors—a practice that inevitably leads to an unstable platform.

This chapter presents an overview of Notes and applications typically implemented using Notes. Specifically, this chapter discusses

This chapter doesn't discuss any specific technical issues about Notes. Chapter 2, "Using Notes," conducts a more detailed discussion of Notes.

Notes in a Nutshell


Lotus has tried for years now to come up with a single 25-word explanation for Notes that will make sense to everyone involved in the implementation and use of Notes. A list of features doesn't suffice, and a general description of groupware just leads to the question "What is groupware?" It might not be possible to come up with a single set of 25 words that accurately describes Notes to all the different audiences (executives, application developers, administrators, users). This book will leave the short descriptions to salespeople. Instead of coming up with a description, this chapter examines the different concerns each Notes audience will have, and how you might consider addressing them.

Describing Notes to Executives


Executives have specific goals and problems they need to address. If you want to build support among the executive suite for a Notes deployment, you must show them how Notes can help them reach their current list of goals. When describing Lotus Notes to managers and executives, it is useful to lead them through a short list of questions like these:

If the answers are yes, Lotus Notes is right for their business.

The executive needs all employees to work cooperatively toward the strategic direction of the organization. She sees her organization needing a strategic tool to help the staff work together in attaining corporate goals. An executive sees Notes as a solution to building a more efficient organization. Here are some examples of improvements to an organization's capabilities that might interest an executive:

An executive who must decide whether to back a full-scale, organization-wide deployment of Notes will need to be convinced of the power of using a single integrated package to accomplish these goals.

Describing Notes to Application Developers


Application developers must understand all of Notes' features, how they interact, and how to use them to best advantage. Most application developers need to unlearn some lessons before they can develop truly powerful applications using Notes. This isn't to say that developing applications with Notes is difficult (although this has been said about previous releases of Notes). Developing application with Notes is different. Notes will be the first time many application developers will be faced with a database this flexible. Part of the learning curve involves coming up to speed on groupware applications. There is no doubt that Notes is the cheapest way to develop custom groupware concepts.

While talking to application developers, it is useful to emphasize what Lotus Notes is not. For example,

By first eliminating these spurious ideas (which seem to be quite common among new Notes developers), you can move on to the next stage, where an application developer sees Notes as a specialized development tool that nicely solves several problems unique to groupware.

An application developer might initially view Notes as a rapid-application-development tool with a lousy database engine. However, as he digs deeper he sees the Notes database engine as a container capable of managing and distributing unstructured business information.

Notes databases integrate data and application code in a single database (often in a single document). This simple fact removes one of the biggest headaches of client/server systems: code distribution. Keeping application code and databases in sync for a world-wide network is easy for Notes. It's even easier for smaller networks.

Describing Notes to Administrators


The capability of Notes to support a wide variety of platforms and networking protocols is challenging for the administrator as he gets started with Notes. Notes networks often involve multiple operating systems and network protocols, making problem resolution difficult. The ability of Notes to be used as an inter-enterprise-wide solution presents challenges to Notes administrators that can be very different from the challenges of enterprise-wide systems:

The message for administrators is not all doom and gloom. Notes Release 4 includes major advances to reduce the cost of administering Notes that also make life more pleasant for Notes administrators. These features include

When describing Notes to administrators, emphasize the tools available as well as the challenges of supporting a wide area network.

Typical Notes Applications


The best way to describe Notes to most people is to completely avoid feature/function discussions and focus on how other organizations are using Notes. Notes is widely used to build workflow applications, provide searchable databases, support remote and mobile users, and hold discussions. Notes is an ideal platform for automating the collection, processing, and distribution of unstructured data common in many day-to-day business processes.

Many day-to-day business processes are unstructured and have little or no control. Decisions are made and there is little or no record of how or why they were made. It may not be possible to know ahead of time what information will be needed by a specific person. Supporting these processes requires a very flexible database and application builder along with a powerful search engine.

Inside Notes Application Development


Workflow is the generic term used to describe a structured flow of information through an organization. Virtually all organizations have some predefined processes for handling critical documents.Documents are created and routed through departments. Each person along the way will add to or check/correct the information in the document.

A Notes workflow application electronically accomplishes the important task of maintaining control over daily business processes. Notes is able to automate and control tasks that cannot be supported efficiently any other way. Notes workflow applications actively route documents to the next person (or group) in the workflow, enforcing time limits and restricting access to sensitive data.

Examples of workflow applications include

Workflow applications typically have all of the following elements:

Application developers, administrators, and users all must understand these elements. Application developers must understand these concepts before designing workflow applications. Administrators need to understand how data is flowing through the system. Users need to understand the specifics of each application they use.

There are three types of workflow models:

The type of connection your users have can influence the model you should use. Users who are continuously connected (via LAN/WAN connection) can use the second or third model effectively. Browsing a shared database takes little effort and incurs no phone charges. Workflow applications supporting infrequently connected users may need to use the first model.

The model you use for your workflow applications is less important than identifying the correct roles and enforcing security. Chapter 3, "Understanding Security," and Chapter 4, "Advanced Security Issues," provide a full overview of Notes security.

Mobile/Remote User Support


Mobile and remote workers are becoming commonplace. A system that supports mobility has to make working from "anywhere," "anytime" a reality.

These features of Notes enable mobile computing:

Administrators and application developers cannot completely ignore the fact that Notes databases might be copied onto different servers and laptops. Applications must be crafted to ensure that remote copies of databases will work correctly. Notes integrates the widest range of features to support mobile users of any package available today.

Discussion Databases


The most important asset of a corporation is the knowledge possessed within the individuals working for an organization. This information is of little use except when shared with others within the organization. A discussion database is the means of conducting collaborative discussion between individuals, without having to assemble at the same time and place. Lotus Notes provides the means of conducting discussions as a means of facilitating teamwork and problem-solving.

If you've participated in an Internet Usenet discussion, you have seen a basic example of a discussion database. Notes discussion databases have far more capabilities than the Internet Usenet. Notes discussion databases support multiple categorized views, threaded discussions, searchable archives, and more.

Common examples of discussion databases include

Some organizations that started using discussion database to post meeting minutes soon found that they could eliminate the whole meeting. Notes discussion databases can be used to eliminate routine meetings such as status meetings.

Reference Databases


Sometimes you just want to publish information and let users do what they want with it. Notes reference databases are useful for distributing information to a large audience. Reference databases differ from most Notes databases in that information is pushed out to users rather than collected or routed to users.

Not all reference information comes neatly packaged. You might have incomplete information on some items and special notes about others. The unstructured nature of Notes databases combined with Notes full-text search capability makes it a great tool for a reference database. Notes allows users to create ad hoc searches, using individual words or phrases. Notes sorts documents matching the search criteria so that the most relevant documents are listed first.

Examples of reference databases include

The Notes database is an object store containing semi-structured and routing information in a common container. A database usually contains information related to some common interest. Because Notes is generally used in a team programming environment, it is usually shared.

The database consists of multiple documents stored within it. These documents could be compared to records in a traditional database.

Unlike typical records, Notes documents can contain any number of data types. These data types are stored in the Notes document as fields. Examples of data that can be stored in a document include:

Notes comes with an easy-to-use development environment that makes it possible for novice programmers to build and implement a Notes application. The basic application development toolset consists of:

All these application design elements are stored within Notes databases. This makes it possible to duplicate changes to an application over the network by using replication.

You also can develop Notes applications using C, C++, Visual Basic, and other languages. These tools are generally used to build applications that cannot be built using Notes macros, forms, and views. C/C++ is typically used to build custom gateways to other database systems. Visual Basic is used when you want a highly customized user interface that accesses Notes databases. There are many additional products available to support Notes application development.

Replication


Notes supports distributed environments containing multiple copies of a database. Different copies of the database all contain the same information (within a few hours, typically). The means of propagating information among databases is called replication.

Within Notes there is no concept of a "master" database. Rather, information is available at various places, kept synchronized by the replication process. Information isn't created at one site and distributed to other sites. Notes enables data creation, editing, and deletion at any site. By default, each copy of a database is considered equivalent (application designers and administrators can change this scheme, using security settings that force changes to flow in only one direction).

Each Notes server has one or more replication tasks. Each task can either "push" information to another client or server or "pull" information from another client or server. A Replicator also can send a request to the other server to pull or push changes to its own server. Keeping track of replication is a major part of a Notes administrator's job.

Other attributes of Notes replication are:


Integrated Searching


Information is useless if it cannot be located and accessed quickly. Notes enables a variety of search indexes to be created for a database. Using Notes, you can

Databases that will be searched often, such as reference databases, should have full-text search indexes created. Creating a full-text index enables the following search mechanisms to be made available to the user:

You don't need to decide in advance which type of searches will be made available. If you can decide in advance, however, Notes allows you to create search forms that can be used to perform complex searches without requiring users to understand anything at all about Notes searching.

Security


In the Notes environment, security can be controlled at server, database, document, and field level. This strategy allows applications to be flexible enough to be a powerful team tool, yet guard against accidental or criminal misuse.

Security is of prime importance when a system is highly dependent on the network for all its functionality. Security is important when many Notes users are mobile and geographically separated. Notes provides security at various levels as follows:

Notes security can take considerable resources to implement. Proper planning and a resonable set of expectations can help minimize this cost. See Chapters 3 and 4 for a more detailed overview of Notes security.

Summary


What then is the answer to the question, "What is Lotus Notes?" If forced to answer in a single sentence, it is,

A scalable platform for rapidly developing and deploying applications to support workgroups, including mobile and geographically dispersed users.

But this book is not written for executives or application developers. None of them risk giving up their personal life when Notes is implemented. This book is written for Notes administrators and project managers. Administrators and project managers should feel free to consider the rest of this book as the long answer to the question, "What is Lotus Notes?"

Previous Page Page Top TOC Next Page