HCL Notes


HCL Notes is a proprietary collaborative software platform for Unix, IBM i, Windows, Linux, and macOS, sold by HCLTech. The client application is called Notes while the server component is branded HCL Domino.
HCL Notes provides business collaboration functions, such as email, calendars, to-do lists, contact management, discussion forums, file sharing, websites, instant messaging, blogs, document libraries, user directories, and custom applications. It can also be used with other HCL Domino applications and databases. IBM Notes 9 Social Edition removed integration with the office software package IBM Lotus Symphony, which had been integrated with the Lotus Notes client in versions 8.x.
Lotus Development Corporation originally developed "Lotus Notes" in 1989. IBM bought Lotus in 1995 and it became known as the Lotus Development division of IBM. On December 6, 2018, IBM announced that it was selling a number of software products to HCLSoftware for $1.8bn, including Notes and Domino. This acquisition was completed in July 2019.

History

Lotus Notes's chief inspiration was PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley at the University of Illinois in 1973. In today's terminology, PLATO Notes supported user-created discussion groups, and it was part of the foundation for an online community which thrived for more than 20 years on the PLATO system. Ray Ozzie worked with PLATO while attending the University of Illinois in the 1970s. When PC network technology began to emerge, Ozzie made a deal with Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor that resulted in the formation of Iris Associates in 1984 to develop products that would combine the capabilities of PCs with the collaborative tools pioneered in PLATO. The agreement put control of product development under Ozzie and Iris, and sales and marketing under Lotus.
Lotus beta tested Notes for so long that it was considered vaporware before its December 1989 release. The company was unsure at first of how or whether to market the product, as Lotus traditionally sold products through retail while Notes's corporate customers would buy from the company and require support. An example was Price Waterhouse, which bought 10,000 copies—the largest single sale of PC software—before the official release. In 1994, after the release and marketplace success of Notes R3, Lotus purchased Iris.
In 1995 IBM purchased Lotus for $3.2 billion, primarily to acquire Notes. By then large companies bought the software in volume for tens of thousands of employees. In 2008, IBM released XPages technology, based on Jakarta Faces. This allows Domino applications to be better surfaced to browser clients, though the UX and business logic must be completely rewritten. Previously, Domino applications could be accessed through browsers, but required extensive web specific modifications to get full functionality in browsers. XPages also gave the application new capabilities that are not possible with the classic Notes client. The IBM Domino 9 Social Edition included the Notes Browser Plugin, which would surface Notes applications via minified version of the rich desktop client contained in a browser tab.

Branding

Prior to release 4.5, the Lotus Notes branding encompassed both the client and server applications. In 1996, Lotus released an HTTP server add-on for the Notes 4 server called "Domino". This add-on allowed Notes documents to be rendered as web pages in real time. Later that year, the Domino web server was integrated into release 4.5 of the core Notes server and the entire server program was re-branded, taking on the name "Domino". Only the client program officially retained the "Lotus Notes" name.
In November 2012, IBM announced it would be dropping the Lotus brand and moving forward with the IBM brand only to identify products, including Notes and Domino. On October 9, 2018, IBM announced the availability of the latest version of the client and server software.
In 2019, Domino and Notes became enterprise software products managed under HCLSoftware.

Design

HCL Domino is a client-server cross-platform software application runtime environment.
Domino provides email, calendars, instant messaging, discussions/forums, blogs, and an inbuilt personnel/user directory. In addition to these standard applications, an organization may use the Domino Designer development environment and other tools to develop further integrated applications such as request approval / workflow and document management.
The Domino product consists of several components:
  • HCL Notes client application
  • HCL Notes client, either:
  • * a rich client
  • * a web client, HCL iNotes
  • * a mobile email client, HCL Notes Traveler
  • HCL Verse client, either:
  • * a web email client, Verse on Premises
  • * a mobile email client, Verse Mobile
  • HCL Domino server
  • HCL Domino Administration Client
  • HCL Domino Designer for creating client-server applications that run within the Notes framework
Domino competes with products from other companies such as Microsoft, Google, Zimbra and others. Because of the application development abilities, HCL Domino is often compared to products like Microsoft SharePoint. The database in Domino can be replicated between servers and between server and client, thereby allowing clients offline capabilities.
Domino, a business application as well as a messaging server, is compatible with both Notes and web-browsers. Notes may be used to access any Domino application, such as discussion forums, document libraries, and numerous other applications. Notes resembles a web-browser in that it may run any compatible application that the user has permission for.
Domino provides applications that can be used to:
  • access – store and present information via user interface
  • enforce security
  • replicate – allow many different servers to contain the same information and have many users work with that data
The standard storage mechanism in Domino is a document-database format, the "Notes Storage Facility". The.nsf file will normally contain both an application design and its associated data. Domino can also access relational databases, either through another server called HCL Enterprise Integrator for Domino, through ODBC calls or through the use of XPages.
As Domino is an application runtime environment, email and calendars operate as applications within Notes, which HCL provides with the product. A Domino application-developer can change or completely replace that application. HCL has released the base templates as open source as well.
Applications can be developed for Domino in several programming languages, including:
The client supports a formula language and JavaScript. Applications can be built to run either in the Notes application runtime environment or via web server for use in a web browser, although the interface must be developed separately unless XPages is used.

Use

Notes can be used for email, as a calendar, PIM, instant messaging, Web browsing, and other applications. Notes can access both local- and server-based applications and data.
Notes can function as an IMAP and POP email client with non-Domino mail servers. The system can retrieve recipient addresses from any LDAP server, including Active Directory, and includes a web browser, although it can be configured by a Domino Developer to launch a different web browser instead.
Features include group calendars and schedules, SMTP/MIME-based email, NNTP-based news support, and automatic HTML conversion of all documents by the Domino HTTP task.
Notes can be used with Sametime instant-messaging to allow to see other users online and chat with one or more of them at the same time. Beginning with Release 6.5, this function has been freely available. Presence awareness is available in email and other HCL Domino applications for users in organizations that use both Notes and Sametime.
Since version 7, Notes has provided a Web services interface. Domino can be a Web server for HTML files; authentication of access to Domino databases or HTML files uses the Domino user directory and external systems such as Microsoft Active Directory.
A design client, Domino Designer, can allow the development of database applications consisting of forms and views.
In addition to its role as a groupware system, HCL Notes and Domino can also construct "workflow"-type applications, particularly those which require approval processes and routing of data.
Since Release 5, server clustering has had the ability to provide geographic redundancy for servers.
Notes System Diagnostic gathers information about the running of a Notes workstation or of a Domino server.
On October 10, 2018, IBM released IBM Domino v10.0 and IBM Notes 10.0 as the latest release. In December, 2019, HCL released HCL Domino v11 and HCL Notes v11.

Overview

Client/server

Notes and Domino are client/server database environments. The server software is called Domino and the client software is Notes. Domino software can run on Windows, Unix, AIX, and IBM mid-range systems and can scale to tens of thousands of users per server. There are different supported versions of the Domino server that are supported on the various levels of server operating systems. Usually the latest server operating system is only officially supported by a version of HCL Domino that is released at about the same time as that OS.
Domino has security capabilities on a variety of levels. The authorizations can be granular, down to the field level in specific records all the way up to 10 different parameters that can be set up at a database level, with intermediate options in between. Users can also assign access for other users to their personal calendar and email on a more generic reader, editor, edit with delete and manage my calendar levels. All of the security in Notes and Domino is independent of the server OS or Active Directory. Optionally, the Notes client can be configured to have the user use their Active Directory identity.