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Analysts have had difficulty identifying a software category in which to place Lotus Notes.

It is in a broad sense a client-server database management system, although that label does justice neither to other database management systems nor to Notes.

Notes and traditional database systems supplement one another rather than compete with each other. Labeling Notes as document management software elicits a similar response; document management programs do not provide alternatives to Notes, but in fact in many cases use Notes as a platform on which to build their solutions.

The difficulty in categorizing Notes arises from the fact that until recently, there were no other products that did what Notes does.

Industry analysts heralded Microsoft Exchange as an alternative to Notes while it was in development, but during the process of development and release, Microsoft begin to downplay Exchange as a Notes competitor and to stress its strengths as an enterprise-wide messaging system.

Still, many prospective buyers are considering the question of whether Exchange provides an alternative to Notes. (A second potential competitor, Novell's GroupWise 5.0 -- code-named GroupWise XTD -- was lauched in September.)

NSTL uses the label "groupware" for this evaluation fully aware that neither Lotus nor Microsoft would be satisfied with that label; and that there are a number of products called "groupware" that serve very different functions from Notes and Exchange.

The term "groupware" suggests teams of users and/or developers communicating and collaborating with one another; that notion can encompass a wide range of software functionality.

What distinguishes Notes and Exchange is that they seek to facilitate such communication and collaboration not only among teams but across an entire enterprise, and they provide not only the user tools for accomplishing group tasks but both the storage platform and the infrastructure for storing and sharing information.

Indeed, both companies encourage development of third-party tools to provide additional kinds of user functionality based on their respective platforms.

This analysis explores the similarities and differences between Notes and Exchange and considers whether they are competing or complementary products. Novell did not make a fully functional pre-release of GroupWise 5.0 available in time for testing.

A wide variety of products, very different from one another in functionality offered, carry the label "groupware."

For purposes of this evaluation, NSTL defines groupware as software addressing the following aspects of group collaboration. and communication.

The Notes model

The centerpiece of Lotus Notes is a unique approach to database storage.

Unlike SQL-based relational databases, which store information in rows and columns, Notes manages unstructed information, such as documents. Each entry in a Notes database is a document rather than a record, and consists of a few informational fields (author, subject, date) and the document itself. Documents, stored in rich text format (RTF), may include attached files as well.

Users can browse lists of documents in a database, known as views, which display the informational fields.

Users can customize views to sort or group documents; display only certain documents based on field qualifiers; and can add additional fields to a view to add flexibility in categorization. Thus, at its heart, Notes is a system that brings the power and convenience of database management to the storage of non-traditional database information Notes also facilitates categorizing and locating documents in a way not possible in a standard file system.

Notes builds its functionality upon this database storage system. A server maintains all configuration and user information in a special database known as the name and address book. This database contains documents describing all servers at the site, all registered users, connections with servers in other locations, databases used for special purposes, and any other information needed to run the system.

Notes and e-mail

Electronic mail is. in simplistic terms, a mechanism for moving documents from one database to another.

When a user composes a mail message, Notes saves it as it would any other document, but does so in a special database for outgoing mail.

The system recognizes anything placed in that database as outgoing mail, and routes it to its destination. (Thus eternal programs, using the Notes API, can send mail simply by saving messages to the outgoing mail database.)

Each user has a mailbox, which is simply a Notes database that the name and address book identifies as the destination for mail addressed to that user.

Thus mail plays a secondary role in the Notes architecture; at the heart is storage, with mail added as a means of moving the stored documents.

In the past, Lotus has steered users whose primary need is electronic mail to its cc:Mail product line. It has even integrated access to cc:Mail into the Notes client desktop as an alternative to Notes mail.

However, in version 4, Notes mail has incorporated a considerable amount of functionality previously only. available in cc:Mail, particularly on the user side, with such features as rules for automatic forwarding and replying

For enterprise-wide information sharing, Notes provides relplication between servers.

Replication has been described as "what makes Notes Notes." With replication, the same database can exist in multiple locations; users add, delete, or modify documents and the system synchronizes all the changes.

Each server's name and address book contains connection documents specifying the servers with which to replicate and the replication schedule. Similar connection documents control mail routing.

Building databases

Notes provides a number of templates to facilitate creating, databases for different purposes.

The most common templates are discussion, document library, and mail. While all use the same underlying database storage, they differ in the built-in views (the forms provided for entering documents) and the fields employed for storing information. Mail, for example, includes information about recipients that is not pertinent to other databases.

Discussion databases have forms that allow quick creation of responses to existing documents, and a default threaded discussion view that groups responses with their respective documents. Databases based on the document library template allow users to configure review cycles, where changes to an existing document are saved as a new document. thus maintaining multiple versions with revision histories.

Security issues

Lotus uses a certificate-based security model, where the system provides each user with an ID file containing an encrypted key for the organization.

This key certifies the holder as a valid user in the organization.

A user stores his ID file locally, and when he logs-on to the system, the local ID file validates his password, eliminating the need to transmit passwords over the network where they might be intercepted.

Each server that the user accesses validates the ID by determining that it recognizes the certifier key,

This proves only that the system can trust the user to be who he claims to be; he can still only access those databases for which administrators have given him permission to do so.

Exchange's mail-centered approach

In contrast to Notes, which is at heart a storage system and builds upon that system the ability to move stored documents from one place to another, Microsoft Exchange is essentially a messaging system.

A major upgrade to Microsoft Mail, it is designed primarily to move information from one place to another, and adds to that core functionality the facilities for storing that information.

Because of its roots in electronic mail, Exchange is especially well-suited for organizations that need an industrial-strength messaging system without the additional groupware functionality.

Exchange provides many of the same end-user mail features as Notes, including automatic forwarding and replies. On the administrative side, it provides a point-and-click interface for setting up user's. The same interface sets up connectors to transfer mail to and from other Exchange servers and other mail systems, such as Internet mail.

Whereas Notes begins with the idea of publicly accessible databases and adds private mail databases for individual users, Exchange begins with private mailboxes and builds on that by adding public folders.

A public folder is a mailbox that does not belong to a specific user. Public folder owners can determine which users have what levels of access. As with Notes databases, users can display the list of entries in a folder in customizable views.