Introducing Lotus Notes 6

Part

1

Introducing Lotus Notes 6

In this section:

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Chapter 1: What Is Lotus Notes?

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Chapter 2: Getting Familiar with Notes

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Chapter 3: Working with Databases

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Chapter 4: Tailoring Lotus Notes 6 COPYRIG

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ATERIAL

Chapter 1

What Is Lotus Notes?

Lotus Notes is a

powerful, integrated information management client. It can help you manage your e-mail, business and personal contact information, schedule, and tasks, and it can act as a multipurpose Internet client. With Release 6, you can browse Internet or intranet websites while connected to a net-work or retrieve previously browsed information offline. You can search for information in Light Direc-tory Access Protocol (LDAP)–based directories on the Internet or your company’s intranet. Release 6 can integrate multiple Post Office Protocol (POP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) mail accounts—the two dominant protocols for receiving e-mail—into a single, universal Inbox or, if you desire, into separate mailboxes that you can switch between with a menu option. It will even enable you to participate in Usenet discussions on the Internet, online and offline. Notes does all of this through a consistent, integrated interface, and it can do so on multiple platforms; the Notes client is available for both MacOS and Windows.

Notes is also the client-side software of the Lotus Notes/Domino family of products, which pro-vide you with the most complete solution for effectively communicating and collaborating among teams, groups, and entire enterprises. Used to access Notes databases on the Domino server, Notes can provide immensely powerful applications tailored to the needs of an organization. Notes data-bases are particularly strong when it comes to workflow applications and document-centric applica-tions such as online catalogs and discussions. Notes can also be used within environments entirely based on Internet-related services such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)/Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), LDAP, POP3/IMAP/Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). It won’t act as a fully featured File Transfer Protocol (FTP) cli-ent, but short of that kind of intensive file-transfer activity, Notes provides you with just about any communications protocol you’ll need.

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Introducing Lotus Notes

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Uses of Notes

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What’s new in Release 6?

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WHAT IS LOTUS NOTES?

Uses of Notes

You can use Notes in a variety of personal and business situations. For example, you can use Notes with your Internet service provider (ISP) account to communicate with family and friends or to access the full range of web-based information. As a tool for those involved with businesses, Notes can work on a local area network (LAN) or with an ISP account to communicate with colleagues or customers, keep up with changes affecting the industry, research business opportunities, and stay competitive. Combined with Domino, Notes can unleash the full potential of teams, departments, and entire enterprises. Indeed, using Notes without Domino is like driving an 18-wheeler and never hauling more than a few bags of groceries.

The Core Functionality of Notes

No matter how you plan to use Notes—either as an Internet client or a Domino client—you can start out by recording your personal information. Just “out of the box,” without any attempt to communicate with other computers via an ISP or LAN, Notes includes core functionality that lets you manage your personal information as follows:

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Store contact information

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Manage your schedule using the built-in calendar

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Take control of your tasks by entering items in the to do list

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Keep a personal journalYou store and manage your Contact information using the Notes’ built-in personal address book.

You can think of this as your electronic Rolodex. Notes enables you to store a wide variety of infor-mation about each contact, including phone numbers, physical addresses, e-mail addresses, and so on. By recording your contact information in Notes, you eliminate the need for paper address books.

Notes includes a calendar for you to keep track of your schedule. You can enter appointments, anniversaries, reminders, and events just as you can on a paper calendar. You can also use the calendar group scheduling if you are participating in a Domino-based collaboration environment.

There is even a personal to do list in Notes. It contains personal task entries that can include, for example, priorities, status, and start/due dates. Your to do list also contains group to do items assigned to you if you are participating in a Domino-based collaboration environment.

Also, Notes includes a personal journal that can store other information. If you use Notes in con-junction with a Palm handheld or IBM WorkPad personal digital assistant (PDA), your personal journal synchronizes with your PDA’s memo pad application. This makes the personal journal a con-venient place to store information, such as a travel itinerary, notes for a meeting, or directions, that you may need when you’re away from your desk.

Notes as an Internet Information Client

If you plan to use Notes as an Internet client, you’ll have the following added capability:

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You can receive e-mail from one or more POP/IMAP mail accounts and send mail to any SMTP server.

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You can access LDAP-based directories, such as Bigfoot and VeriSign, to search for people.

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You can participate in Usenet-based discussions.

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You can browse Internet or intranet websites.

USES OF NOTES

5

As a full-featured messaging client, Notes can be configured to retrieve POP mail and copy it to your local mail database. You can configure it to retrieve IMAP mail and copy it to your local mail database, access IMAP mail accounts online, and even replicate a copy of an IMAP mail account to a locally stored database for offline use. You can configure Notes to send outbound messages directly to an SMTP server. For message content, Notes supports a wide range of stan-dards, including Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME), Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME), HTML, and X.509 certificates.

Whether you are using Notes to access the Internet or an intranet, you can use LDAP directories to search for people or to address e-mail. On the Internet, you can configure Notes to access popular directories such as Bigfoot and VeriSign. On an intranet, you can use Notes to access your corporate directory, assuming it has been made available through LDAP.

You can also configure Notes as a newsreader, too. This means you can participate in Internet-based Usenet discussions in the same familiar interface you use with your e-mail. Also, Notes allows you to replicate newsgroups to a local database so you can interact offline or use Notes’ powerful full-text search capabilities.

For browsing, Notes provides two integrated solutions. First, Notes includes a native browser. This native browser supports HTML 4 standards and can be used to access most sites. Second, Notes provides integrated browser services using the Microsoft Internet Explorer object linking and embed-ding (OLE) object. This means you get the all the features of Internet Explorer within the Notes interface and with Notes’ capability to store pages for offline use, forward pages that are formatted exactly as they are in the browser, and so on.

Notes as a Domino Client

As useful as the Notes client can be as a personal information manager and Internet services client, using it as a Domino client is where its true power lies. In addition to all of the personal information management and Internet client capabilities mentioned, Notes is also the value-added client for Dom-ino server environments. You can use Domino servers exclusively to provide messaging and applica-tion services to Internet clients such as web browsers, POP/IMAP mail clients, or newsreaders. This is a great way to provide capabilities to a wide range of client environments. The downside is that you are limiting the functionality to what these Internet clients can support. To go beyond that, you can use the Notes client to add the following functionality:

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The ability to natively access Notes/Domino database applications

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The ability to use Domino as your mail server

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The ability to use Domino for group scheduling

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The ability to replicate databases to your computer and work disconnected with full applica-tion functionality

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A greater range of application security, including encryption to the field level

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Full-text searching on all information stored in indexed databases, both locally and on remote servers

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The ability to read all major file formats using built-in file viewer technology

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Data integration and management services such as import/export and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)

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Integration with network environments that are not based on TCP/IP

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Presentation of all information in a consistent, easy-to-use mannerYou can even use Notes in conjunction with hosted Domino environments and receive all of the

benefits mentioned. Lotus has teamed with service providers to offer shared or hosted Domino ser-vices. Shared Domino services enable organizations to take advantage of all the capabilities of Dom-ino without the burden of deploying and managing the infrastructure. This extends the sophisticated capabilities of Domino to a broader range of organizations.

Note

Just to make the relationship between Notes and Domino clear: Notes is client software. It runs on your com-puter and exchanges information with a server as you interact with it directly. Domino is server software. It runs on adifferent computer, probably much bigger and faster than yours, and it serves as an administrative center and a centralstorehouse for data exchanged with any number of clients.

Flexible Configuration

In addition, Notes is installed on your computer in a way that enables you to start using it for one pur-pose and easily change the configuration as your needs change. For example, you could start using Notes exclusively as an Internet client. If you later encounter a situation that requires access to a Domino server, all that’s required is a simple change in configuration. You would not be required to reinstall Notes.

Notes can maintain multiple configurations, and these configurations are based on location. This means you can use Notes with one configuration while you’re in the office and another when you work from home, all on the same machine. With this feature, you can use Notes for a variety of purposes.

Key Concepts

Behind all of Notes’ features, there’s a definite structure, and knowing how Notes works will help you figure out how to use it. You should become familiar with a few key concepts before dealing with the Notes client and Notes databases.

Databases

The Notes client is, at its heart, a client for using databases created with the Domino Designer cli-ent. The information Notes deals with and the tools for dealing with that information are con-tained within a single database file (Notes database files generally use the suffix

.nsf

). For example, the configuration information that allows you to switch between using Notes as an Internet client and a Domino server client is stored in a database on your computer. Messages you receive, whether from the Internet or from within a Notes network mediated by a Domino server, and even web pages you view if you use Notes as a web browser, are also stored in a database.

In addition to the data itself, a Notes database contains a number of design elements that provide user interface features and automation. Every button, list of items, or page layout you see within a Notes data-base is given shape by a design element. The database may also contain a great deal of program code to perform calculations and do other automated tasks. This program code can be in a number of different languages: the Notes formula language, a relatively simple language derived from a spreadsheet macro

KEY CONCEPTS

7

language; LotusScript, a more complex, powerful language, similar to Visual Basic; and the cross-platform languages Java and JavaScript. There are advantages and limitations to each, and which lan-guage is used can be limited by the context in which the program code is to run. We’ll get into the spe-cifics of these languages in Part 4, “Developing Lotus Notes Applications with Domino Designer.”

The data in Notes databases is held in structures called

documents

. Documents are discrete, semi-structured bundles of information. Like a table row in a relational database, a document consists of a number of items called

fields

. For example, a document might contain the following as separate, iden-tifiable elements: a creator’s name, a workflow status, lists of potential and future approvers, and a block of text discussing a proposal. However, unlike a relational database table row, a document in a Notes database is not limited to a specific set of fields. During its life cycle, a document can have any number of fields added or removed and their data changed. You can think of documents and databases as paper documents in a filing cabinet. Related documents may have things in common (for example, they could all be survey forms, with different answers to the same set of questions), but there’s nothing to stop you from scribbling notes in the margins.

Still, even though documents aren’t rigidly connected to one another like rows in a relational data-base table, they can be linked together. Documents can be linked in a parent-child relationship. That is, documents can carry with them information marking them as being related to a specific parent doc-ument. Other documents may in turn have those documents as parents.

To get to documents, you’ll often use design elements called

views

and

folders

. Views and folders are elements that provide the user with lists of documents, a bit like a table in a relational database. Each row represents a single document, and each column represents data in the document (or, at least, information derived from data in the document). The Contacts view in your address book is a typical view (see Figure 1.1). Each row is a single contact. Each column shows some bit of information about that contact: the contact’s name, phone number, and so on.

Figure 1.1

Contacts view

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Views and folders are nearly identical. The only difference is in how documents are selected to appear in them. Views use a formula to automatically select documents; if you’re familiar with rela-tional databases, the contents of a view might be regarded as the results of a Structured Query Lan-guage (SQL) query. The user selects the contents of folders, on the other hand, on an ad-hoc basis. Rather than applying a formula, the user adds documents to a folder exactly like you might put several pieces of paper into a physical file folder.

You’ll use

forms

for your main interaction with documents. A Notes form is a template that includes prompts and field interface objects that provide you with a means for entering information. You can think of a form as a shape into which the data is poured. A document, by itself, has no page layout infor-mation or controls; it’s just a batch of data. The form designates where (if at all) each field appears, as well as its font, size, and color. It also includes any labels and other static, explanatory text, program code to validate input, computations, and code to perform automatic actions such as saving changes, creating responses, or sending update notifications. The Contact form is a commonly used form (see Figure 1.2). The document itself can’t be displayed; it’s just a bunch of data. The Contact form is what tells the com-puter where to display all the names and address information. The form design also includes the action buttons at the top as well as the program code behind them.

Figure 1.2

A document using the Contact form

One point for experienced database users to keep in mind is that although Notes is a database, it is not a

relational

database. At first glance, you might think fields and documents are similar to columns

and

rows in relational databases, particularly because views and folders display them in a similar fash-ion. Although you can use Notes design elements to emulate columns and rows, they are different in many ways. Relational databases are repositories for highly structured information. They contain

tables

, which logically structure data into

rows

and

columns

. Every row in a given table has all of the col-umns defined in the table, no more and no less. This lends itself to collections of rows that are similar to one another. Most relational database tables also incorporate unique key values to identify indi-vidual rows. For example, a table containing a list of employees might have an employee ID number

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9

as a key. Each row would represent a single employee, so no two rows could have the same value in the employee ID field; the database will reject any attempt to duplicate an employee ID. No such con-straints exist in Notes; there could be multiple documents with the same employee ID.

Another aspect of relational databases that is different from Notes databases is how data is mani-pulated in sets. The user or developer interacts with the relational database by using SQL, which is designed for working with sets of rows in tables. It’s possible to select a group of documents with the Notes client’s search functions or program code, but ultimately you manipulate the documents indi-vidually. There are many other differences, but another important one to note is that relational data-base servers are designed to manage concurrent access to the sets of rows in the database. Because of this, they are well suited for applications/systems in which many users must modify the same infor-mation. With new document-locking capabilities, Release 6 is better suited to such applications, but still not as well as many relational databases.

What Applications Should and Should Not Be Developed Using Notes/

Domino?

The following types of applications are not generally well suited for Notes:

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Those involving a high degree of concurrent editing of the same data

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Those with highly structured data

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Those with high-volume data requirements

An airline reservation system is a clear example of an application that is not well suited for Notes. Thou-sands of travel agents will be accessing the system concurrently, trying to book reservations on a finite setof flights. It involves a high degree of concurrent edits and has high-volume data requirements.

On the other hand, a system to manage the process of conducting business travel would be a good appli-cation for a Notes database. Consider the following simplified process:

1.

The employee completes a form to initiate the travel approval process.

2.

The request is either approved or denied and communicated back to the employee.

3.

If approved, the employee contacts the appropriate organization to make the travel arrangements.

4.

The reservations are made and communicated back to the employee, along with maps, driving direc-tions, and other relevant information.

5.

The employee verifies that the arrangements were made properly.

6.

The employee completes the trip.

7.

After the trip, the employee initiates the expense-reporting process in a similar fashion.

8.

If the travel request is denied, the employee completes the instructions provided with the deniedrequest and resubmits it.

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Replication

One of Notes’ long-standing strengths is replication. A

replica

is a special kind of copy of a database. When presented with replicas of a database, Notes can synchronize them. When told to replicate the databases, Notes will quickly compile a list of changes made to both copies since the last time the two were synchronized and send the updated information in one or both directions, bringing both copies up-to-date with one another. This capability allows users to create and maintain mobile copies of databases without the time and trouble of creating complete new copies to replace out-of-date ones. Users can also work on a database while separated from their organization’s main servers; when they connect to their network again, they can replicate, sending only their new information to the organi-zation’s servers and downloading only new information added by others.

Security

Notes has put considerable emphasis on storing data securely. It provides solid security at a number of different levels, allowing users and administrators to fine-tune access to databases and individual documents, even limiting permissions to sections of documents and individual fields. In addition to access permissions, individual items of data and entire copies of databases can be encrypted so that even if users get inappropriate permission, they won’t be able to read the data. Users and groups of users can be prohibited from accessing Domino servers and running potentially dangerous program code in contexts where it can do real damage. Is it any wonder that Notes has been used as an internal mail client by the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency?

In this example, the travel request is only relevant to a single user at a time. The employee creates the requestand sends it to management for approval. The manager acts on the request and returns it to the employee.Also, the process involves communicating with nonstructured data, maps, and other relevant informationalong with the itinerary. Process-oriented applications such as this one are generally well suited for Notesdatabases. Notes databases are appropriate for many different types of applications, including:

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Process-oriented (as previously mentioned)

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Broadcast, where common information is widely disseminated to a large audience

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Discussion

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Library

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Mail/messaging

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Surveys or information collection

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Communities of interest

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Online publications

What Applications Should and Should Not Be Developed Using Notes/

Domino?

(continued)

WHAT’S NEW IN NOTES 6?

11

One feature introduced in Release 5 and enhanced in Release 6 is that permissions can be set to selectively prevent program code from being executed within the Notes client itself. That may sound unspectacular, but it’s actually an important security feature. A profound vulnerability of some e-mail clients is that they’ll happily run program code written in appropriate languages. The problem with this is that it becomes easy for someone to write malicious code masquerading as a friendly e-mail message. The code executes when an unsuspecting recipient opens the message. Indeed, a great many computer viruses are spread that way these days. In Notes, however, every bit of program code carries with it a digital signature identifying the last person who modified it. When the code runs, Notes checks permissions that have been granted in the client to that person, and if there’s something wrong with the digital signature or if the instructions in the code exceed the author’s permissions, it will ask you how to proceed. In short, you can determine whose code you trust and whose you don’t, making it hard to write viruses like those plaguing other e-mail clients.

Messaging

Because Notes is all about sharing information, another of its major functions is messaging. Notes makes it easy to send messages to others in the form of e-mail.

Others

, in this case, means individuals, groups, and even other database applications. Messages can be sent in an automated fashion, messages can be sent to potentially any database, and potentially any document can be mailed, quite possibly carrying its own user interface and automation with it. Messaging also permeates many of the Notes functions mentioned so far. For example, you can share and coordinate to do items and calendar events between groups of people via specially constructed e-mail messages.

What’s New in Notes 6?

The change from the earlier family of Notes products to Release 5 could have been called revolu-tionary. There were fundamental changes to both the Notes client and Domino server. The move from Release 5 to Release 6 is more evolutionary, adding a number of smaller features and fine-tuning existing ones. However, for this kind of software, even small changes are significant. Included in this section is an overview of some of the most significant changes in Notes, including:

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Mobile user improvements

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Welcome page and navigation enhancements

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Mail enhancements

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Calendar enhancements

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Rich-text enhancements

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Security

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Other client interface enhancementsFor Domino Designer, the highlights include the following:

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New design elements

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Revamped underpinnings for formula language

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Improved programming interface

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Easier integration with enterprise data

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Improved language supportAs important as these changes are for the Notes/Domino product line, database design isn’t some-

thing with which most users will ever deal. Details on the new and improved Domino Designer, and what it means for building Notes databases, begin in Chapter 16, “Introducing Domino Designer.”

Mobile User Capabilities

Configuring Notes to work with standard Internet protocols has become much easier. Release 6 pro-vides a client configuration wizard, allowing you to quickly configure Notes for use in a new envi-ronment and quickly move from one batch of settings to another if your computer moves between environments.

Release 6 also introduces the idea of the “roaming user.” A user who has been designated by admin-istrators as a roaming user can move from one computer to another—say, a desktop connected to a LAN at work, a laptop in the field using a modem, and a second desktop at home connected to the serv-ers via a digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable modem connection—keeping separate copies of a mail-box, a calendar, and a personal address book synchronized.

Welcome Page and Navigation Enhancements

The Welcome page, the Notes client home page, is now more customizable. You can choose between information-dense framesets, providing links to just about any web page or database the client can reach, and more ornate Personal Pages, combining web page/Notes database information, applets, and personal touches such as pictures and background patterns.

Many Welcome page styles include a Quick Notes frame. Quick Notes gives you a place to write a quick memo, take a note, create a reminder, or insert a contact entry into your address book without having to go through all the steps to open the relevant databases and create new documents.

The new Bookmark launcher allows you to insert bookmarks into your Welcome page, letting you launch favorite databases and web pages quickly.

The Welcome page is discussed in Chapter 2, “Getting Familiar with Notes.”

Mail Enhancements

Release 6 has an improved addressing interface, making it easier for you to find names and addresses. Not only can you search by full name, you can search by individual items such as first and last names, address, and company name.

Mail folders have been greatly enhanced. Folders will now retain sorting orders, and users can change the order in which columns appear. Folders also display how many unread documents they contain.

You can create replies in a broad range of styles, including Notes-native rich-text replies, streamlined replies with attachments stripped out, and Internet-style plain-text replies with bracket-commented text. In earlier releases of Notes, bracket-commented replies could only be created with additional programming.

Notes memos are now compatible with

v-cards

, a popular electronic business card format. Most of these features are covered in Chapter 5, “Communicating with Notes Mail.”

WHAT’S NEW IN NOTES 6?

13

Calendar Enhancements

Calendar entries can now be individually color coded, allowing you to graphically distinguish between, for example, personal and business appointments, religious and company holidays, or events associated with different departments or projects.

Calendar navigation is now faster, with choices more visibly apparent. The layout of calendar doc-uments has also been altered, making it easier to enter and find scheduling information. It’s also easier to customize the chunk of time displayed by the calendar. You can go from showing arbitrary (or nearly so) numbers of days or weeks at a time and limit your calendar to displaying work weeks and work months, excluding weekends.

Calendar invitations are now more sensitive to time zones. That is, you can designate a specific time zone for the meeting regardless of what your time zone is. This makes it easier to coordinate meetings and teleconferencing in geographically widespread organizations.

It is also easier to view the status of meeting invitees. In earlier versions of Notes, it took additional steps to see who had replied to a meeting invitation. In Release 6, participant status is visible on the invitation itself.

Most of these features are discussed in Chapter 6, “Calendaring and Scheduling.”

Rich-Text Enhancements

The bodies of memos, calendar entries, to do documents, and documents in discussion databases are almost always rich-text fields. The same rich-text capabilities are also used for designing some impor-tant database elements, so changes to Notes’ rich-text capabilities have implications for both users and designers.

There are several new table capabilities. Tabbed tables can now have tabs on the side as well as on the top. Tables can also be built as a series of collapsible sections. Entire rows, columns, and tables can be selected without having to drag through them.

You can now rearrange text lists (for example, bulleted lists and numbered lists) by dragging and dropping selected lines.

You can give buttons in rich-text areas color, borders, and a fixed size regardless of their contents. You can hide selected paragraphs from mobile devices, such as PDAs and text-enabled cell phones.

In the previous version of Notes, it was possible to selectively hide bits of text if they were being viewed through a web browser or Notes client. This capability has been extended to mobile devices.

Security

You can now change passwords more easily. It’s also much easier to synchronize the Notes client password and the Domino server password. The Notes client password is stored within a file on the Notes client machine, and the Domino user password is stored on the server. With Release 6, the server can mediate changes to either password to synchronize them.

Notes can use Smartcards, a credit-card-like electronic identification card, for login and locking the user identity. This requires a Smartcard reader, an additional bit of hardware.

All security settings, from automatic message encryption to code execution permissions, are now displayed together in a detailed User Security screen.

Most of these features are discussed in Chapter 12, “Integrating Notes with Other Applications.”

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Other Client Interface Enhancements

Long limited to adding documents to folders, drag-and-drop capabilities have been added to other places in the Notes interface. You can drag documents to the computer desktop to create shortcuts, and you can drag databases in the Replicator page.

Spell checking is somewhat more flexible. It can now ignore words in all caps and words contain-ing numbers.

Printing is much improved. Notes can now do background printing, sending jobs to a printer without locking up the Notes client until the job is done. You can also print calendars in a variety of time ranges and time zones, address book contents as a mailing list, and framesets in their entirety rather than one frame at a time.

Notes now features document locking without extensive additional programming. Relational data-bases usually have a feature called

record locking

, which prevents multiple users from attempting to edit the same row of a table at the same time. Document locking provides similar safety.

Summary

In this chapter, we provided an overview of what the Lotus Notes client is and how it can be used. We also introduced some of the basic concepts underlying how Notes works and highlighted some of the new features of Release 6.

In the next chapter, we’ll begin exploring the basic features of the software. We’ll introduce you to navigating and customizing the Welcome page. We’ll also discuss the elements of the Notes appli-cation window, personalizing Notes with bookmarks, and using Notes Help.