What are the significance of Lotus Notes?

What are the significance of Lotus Notes?

Lotus Notes is the client of a collaborative platform. IBM describes the software as an "integrated desktop client option for accessing business e-mail, calendars and applications on IBM Lotus Domino server. It also contains database, a  Notes database  generally contains information about a single area of interest such as a help desk, a set of news items, or all the processes, forms, and policy for a company.

Security Notes was the first widely adopted software product to use public key cryptography for client–server and server–server authentication and for encryption of data. Notes and Domino also uses a code-signature framework that controls the security context, runtime, and rights of custom code developed and introduced into the environment. It has also an integrated system called Lotus Protector for Mail Security which  Complete  collaboration security solution, providing content filtering for Lotus Notes and Domino, Microsoft Exchange, and mixed email environments, as well as virus protection for Lotus Quickr for WebSphere Portal and IBM Connections deployments.

Advantages Because of its database driven structure, information is located centrally on the Domino server. Centralized storage provides organization wide access to organizational information (e.g. organizational address book) and individual user databases. This means information stored in users’ Lotus Notes databases are accessible to other users – with the appropriate access – whilst travelling between sites or from anywhere in the world via the Internet

Another advantage of storing information centrally on the Domino server is that if there is a problem with a user’s local desktop application, the Notes database is not lost, but can still be accessed, either at a different workstation, or via one of the web clients.

Lotus Notes developers can develop very specialized applications to interact with the information stored in the Notes database. This means that Lotus Notes has the capacity to be customized to a much greater extent than other groupware applications and indeed the implementation of Lotus Notes can be customized to some extent to suit the needs of your environment.