Thursday, July 27, 2006

Lotus Notes application deployment

I had a discussion with some technie friends about what they do. Most of them are on .NET or JAVA platform. So I'm the only Lotus guy there. Not one of them have any experience with Lotus Notes. So I get tons of questions. To simplify the explaination, I told them Lotus Domino is an all in one mail server, web server, application & db server, etc. They are more interested in the application that we run on LN. So I told them that LN application can be build easily (definitely with some limitation). LN Designer itself is a Rapid Application Development tool.

Then how do I deploy applications? Good question. I have read a lot of talk on how good Domino is but haven't read many who drill down on how easy LN application can be deployed. First, I do not have to worry about compiling the code. I just need to develop and then save the design. After finish development, I test it then send a request to make a new copy of the application on the production server (initial copy). And it's done. How about updates and upgrades, they ask. There's a few ways to do it, I can directly replace the design or create a template which the application will inherit the design from. If the application is located on many different server, replication will take care the deployment. I don't need to go to individual replica to update the design. Even different copy of the same application can inherit from a single template. They were impressed. Hmm.. maybe we can call Lotus a Rapid Deployment environment.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is the best description I have seen for what Domino "is". If IBM/Lotus could market the product in this basic fashion...I think people would understand Domino better.
Nice Blog!

Unknown said...

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Yin-Phin Lim (颖斌林) said...

"To simplify the explaination, I told them Lotus Domino is an all in one mail server, web server, application & db server, etc."

Yin-Phin: That's how I explained what Lotus Notes and Domino are too. Unfortunately, either at the marketplace or with friends, no one seems to be impressed by it. I guess SharePoint is more well-known. One guy told me SharePoint is so powerful. Didn't ask him why because I never tested SharePoint yet.

One of the overlooked best things about Domino is that it can function as a Web Server, Application Server and Database Storage. All 3-tier software development are all in one. Why, why, IBM Domino is sold to HCL? Why Exchange is better than Domino Mail server?