Major Lotus Notes and Domino application areas
There are four major Lotus Notes and Domino application areas.

• Creating a modern, reliable, and scalable infrastructure for email, message transfer, and communications. Lotus Domino is a mail server, and Lotus Notes is an email client with advanced capabilities.

• Using Notes and Domino as platform and infrastructure for business applications, automation of business processes, workflow, etc. In this case Domino is an application server, and Notes is a client for managing business applications, information, and document processing.

• Creating Web infrastructure. Domino is a Web server with advanced capabilities for dynamic update, information categorization, full-text search, etc.

• Using Lotus Notes and Domino as a platform for integrating all kinds of information from various sources: relational DBMS, ERP systems (SAP .R/3), Internet, etc.

It's worth it to say that there are some Lotus architecture constraints narrowing down the range of use for Lotus Notes applications. Lotus Notes is not the best platform for creating applications dealing with calculations on the large data arrays (for example, financial or statistical programs). Also, Notes is not the first choice for building large data warehouses.

However, the capabilities of Notes considerably surpass the limitations. A vast majority of Notes and Domino users admit the possibility of effectively solving all the above-listed tasks on the basis of the unified technology platform.

Real positive payoff from using the information technologies, which gives qualitative changes and competitive advantages, is achieved only when these technologies are used for creating market-oriented systems. These systems change radically the interrelations between a company and its customers and partners, as well as work processes within a company. Those Internet/intranet systems, which combine the tools for data and transactions processing with the automation of business processes, are the most effective for building more profitable business relationships. Today IBM and Lotus technologies together have all the necessary means your company might need for developing market-oriented systems.

Dmitry Irtegov has four years experience in Lotus Notes and Domino software development, business support system development, and system integration working for Novosoft LLC (at http://www.novosoft.us) as team leader and system architect. He has taught at Novosibirsk State University, Physical and Informational Technology departments. Courses include Operating Systems, Unix System Calls & Libraries, and Multithreaded Programming. He is the author of Introduction to Operating Systems (in Russian).