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Messaging Delivery Options: Lotus Notes/Domino
To hone its ultimate goal of "knowledge management," Lotus is pushing its Notes/Domino product line about as high up the stack as it can. Notes, which is based on a replicated database model, is well-suited to handling electronic mail at the back end. But in addition to messaging, Notes offers simple groupware features such as calendaring, scheduling and contact management, as well as an application-development environment for creating custom workflow applications. Likewise, Domino is positioned as a Web application-development environment, and can be used as a document-management system.

The current Domino server 4.6 supports IMAPv4 and LDAP, as well as SMTP and MIME. Lotus claims its upcoming release 5.0 will fully leverage Internet messaging protocols. This means it will include basic "spam"-protection features such as message-size limits and filters at the MTA (message transfer agent). In 5.0, Domino also will improve its Web access to the Notes desktop. Roaming users will have full access to mail, calendaring, task management and contact management features through nearly any Web client.

For its part, Notes 5.0 will bring a completely new Notes client. Rewritten from the ground up, the new Lotus client attempts to address user complaints about everything from lack of Internet protocols to the need for a better user interface and smaller memory footprint. The new client will have an upgraded look and feel, with a new "Window Tab" for navigating folders. These changes mean a much more "Internet-aware" client that supports native SMTP addressing, POP3 and IMAP4.

Lotus is also opening its security strategy to include S/MIME, as well as Notes' proprietary public key-based security services. In addition, the Notes 5.0 client will have full (writable) access to the Notes directory service (or other LDAP servers) via certificate-authenticated, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)-protected access via LDAPv3.

Finally, to address the many users who are planning to migrate to groupware systems, Lotus will provide Domino Upgrades Services for cc:Mail, Microsoft Mail and Exchange.