Mixed metaphors
Lastly, the visual interface metaphors could use some work. Views and folders are great, but I need a desk. Desks are great for shuffling things around, putting documents into piles and sticking high priority notes on the top of everything else. Notes provides the closest thing to virtual paper management I've seen, and it has scope to do more. Partly this will be enabled by folders sitting above databases, partly by more flexible parent-child relations and partly by an interface closer to Explorer.

My dream desktop
My ideal Notes desktop would be littered with the Employee documents for my team, the Task documents for my projects, customer documents, meetings and so on. I'd be able to attach the tasks to employees, and the same tasks to customers. Those tasks would show up in my team's to-do lists and calendars, and in a bigger project plan. There would be just one document for each task. As soon as a team member made an update to the completion status of a task in his or her to-do list, others would be able to see the change in their view, and the project plan would update next time anyone did a refresh. I'd be able to work with individual documents when I wished, and perform the same operations on whole stacks of virtual paper.

Whatever the recent dogma of the death of thick clients [That's software, rather than portly customers. -- DG] and worldwide conquest by Web browsers, the above scenario is much more likely to be realized by a Notes client than any browser. The superficial prediction that Lotus' strength will be in the Domino server as Web server, with the Notes client hanging around as a legacy product, may have it all round the wrong way. The Domino server is much more vulnerable to a new generation of XML-wrapped object stores, but there's nothing on the horizon that matches what the Notes client does -- just try moving a heavy Notes user to a web browser if you need to confirm that!

Summary
Lotus has pulled ahead of the rest of the pack with R5 (although not before time!). There are open source alternatives at some stage of development, but the individually-led projects are fragile, the task of replacing Notes and Domino is more than most have grasped, and the timeframe to a ripened business-ready product is at least several years away.

There are present challenges to Notes as a mail and groupware client, and to Domino as a Web server. However, it's the synergy between the two products that is their main strength, and which, as illustrated here, has plenty of room yet to grow. The project management scenario I described above can only be achieved with that tight co-operation between desktop client and server. And it is that ability to deliver what businesses need, rather than a particular dogma or empty marketing concept, that will continue to keep Domino ahead of the competition for some years to come.

DominoPower Contributing Editor Jeffrey R. Burrows has been working with Notes for several years and Domino since its beta cycle. He is currently implementing Notes and Domino solutions for local government in Scotland. His web site experience stretches back to 1992 and the popular rec.travel guide to Morocco, which he still maintains with a trusty DOS editor. Jeffrey can be reached via email at jey@compuserve.com.