What is Lotus Notes, and what is Lotus Domino?

Lotus Notes and Domino 101 - Part 1

With Lotus Notes and Domino gaining momentum, each day there are more and more people whom are "new to Notes". While Notes/Domino is incredibly powerful and secure, it does have aspects that can intimidate new users. Terms like domain, home server, replication, clustering, location documents, and connection documents may be things users have not heard before. I hope to explain many of these concepts via a series of blog entries that I will call... "Lotus Notes and Domino 101".

So let's start with the product names themselves, IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Domino... What's the difference?

• Notes is the software you have installed on your machine, often called the "Notes client".
• Domino is the software that your client connects to, running on one of your company's servers. You (as a user) have nothing to worry about with respect to controlling the Domino server.

Here's an analogy. You have a web browser installed on your machine (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, etc) and you use it to connect to web sites (such as www.ibm.com) but you never really think about what software is running that web site, nor do you need to. So your web browser is a client and the web sites you connect to are on servers. Similarly, Lotus Notes is your client, the databases you access are running on Domino servers.




Coming Next: Domains, Servers, Databases, Directories... What does it all mean?