Lotus Notes/Domino for Small & Medium Businesses
Domino is the best way for small and medium businesses (companies with revenues less than $500 million) to achieve productivity gains with technology. Even in this world where everything is web enabled, building forms to run in a Notes client is still the fastest and most economical way to improve productivity, and all forms are web ready. Taking advantage of some of the many Domino products, like Xpressite from Kolaco, companies can start realizing the benefits almost immediately. For example, one of our clients was unable to get their site updated and needed a way to post information to their site quickly, at a moments notice. Their information was often so time sensitive that they could not wait the couple of days it took using an outside consultant to make the changes. With Xpressite, we were able to convert their site in a couple of days. Realizing how fast and easy it was to update their site, they quickly acted to add additional functionality including their members’ directory, a discussion forum, a document library, a group calendar and an email newsletter. They now have a website that provides more functionality then they originally expected, while staying below their original budget.
Rapid Application Development
Domino provides a Rapid Application Development environment using an unstructured document database that is created on the fly as forms are created. Since Domino is a messaging server as well as an application server, all forms created are easily mail-enabled for added workflow and approval processing. Creating a form in Domino that is workflow and mail enabled and has the reports to view these forms by status, name and type, can be completed in about ¼ the time to develop in alternative technologies. The structure of Domino, where code, fields, sections and subforms are stored separately and shared for reuse, streamlines the addition of new forms. Using a quality developer, companies can reuse code from one database to another very quickly to minimize their development costs.
All web pages stored in a database
Domino stores the data entered into each form as a document in an unstructured document database. This type of database is preferred for storing web pages since they can contain text, formatted text, tables, images and other OLE or animation objects. By storing pages in a database different pages can be rendered to different users at different times depending upon their individual access rights, the date, the status of the document, etc.
Multiple Levels of Security
Out of the box Domino comes with 7 different levels of security.
- Server – different people or groups can be given or denied access to an entire server of information. This is especially important when a certain group of users has rights to one server (e.g., the web server) but should not have rights to the intranet server. For example, your customers can access the web server to view your products, company information and order some products, but you would not want them to have access to the server for the Sales Reps that contains information on promotions, pricing and quotas.
- Database – Within each database you can assign individuals or groups to different access levels including No Access, Depositor, Reader, Author, Editor, Designer and Manager. These assigned rights dictate what users can do in the database. You may have one group that has rights to create (author) or edit existing documents, while another group may be restricted to only read documents or pages.
- View – Views are reports. Different views can be created for different groups of people so that the information is presented to the right people. For example, a manager would look to a view showing all the items pending his approval, where accounting would look to a view to process all items that have been approved.
- Form – Restricting who can use which form is important to control the content that is entered into the system. Creating a new sales tool attachment from the marketing department can be done in marketing, yet the entire sales team can read it and down load it, but cannot add their own versions. This keeps marketing intelligence databases controlled and populated from a central source.
- Document – Depending on the status of each document or the type of document, individual security can be set so that only those people or groups of people that need to see a document at a certain time can see it. In workflow applications this is important to restrict access to a document until the person needs to act on it. Until the document is ready for approval, the manager does not even know the form exists, nor should he. This is particularly important on the web. In general, web pages are usually documents in Domino. Proper use of reader access can control access to secure information. If a customer gets to a view with all customer information and reader names are implemented correctly, they will only see their own information.
- Section & paragraph – Certain parts of certain pages may be restricted to different people. The customer may pull up their sales order and see one display of information, where the sales rep would pull up the same order and see a listing of additional information, ranging from customer history to last discount offered, phone notes and payment status.
- Field – Similar to paragraph security, certain fields can be turned off for editing or reading for certain groups of people. A request for a new job posting might have a salary range field that is hidden for all but HR and management.
Taking advantage of these many levels of security already available in Domino significantly reduces development time while providing such a high degree of security granularity.
Support for Disconnected user
An application built in Domino can be replicated and taken off line and worked on with a laptop or disconnected workstation. This provides the same functionality to a user that may not have access to the internet or the server.
Web, Notes and Wireless Client Access
Creating a single form in Domino can allow 3 different client types to access the form; the Notes Client, the Web Browser and the Wireless user. The designer client provides the ability to present different types of information to different client types. They all share the same data and the same database, but are presented with a page that accommodates their particular client.
Upgradeable to larger systems
Since all documents and records are stored in a Domino database, the information can be migrated to larger mainframe systems if they company’s size dictates. Also, Domino can be used as a front end to display information stored in a mainframe or other backend database.
Domino Scalability
The server hardware plays a major role in determining the scalability of Domino Applications. Domino can run on an NT Server, AS400, RS6000, Sun Server, Apache and IBM Main frames. The application development also plays a major part in the performance of the system. The web server we host our sites can run advanced queries on Domino data on about 50,000 records and return a result in about 4 seconds. If the query needed to search 100,000+ records, we may recommend that the data be stored in a back end database and use Domino to call a SQL script to run the query, which is run by the database server and then the results presented in a page in Domino. We can comfortably accommodate 500+ concurrent users.
Kolaco, Inc.
88 East Main Street, Suite 300H
Mendham, NJ 07945
P 973.984.3000
sales@kolaco.com |
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