Lotus Notes and Domino

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Stands for: The Notes client and the Domino server: Lotus 1989, IBM 1995, HCL 2019

Lotus Notes, the client, and Domino, the server: the collaborative platform Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates built for Lotus from 1984 and shipped in December 1989, bought with Lotus by IBM in 1995 and owned by HCL since July 2019; a replicated document database with mail, calendars, directory, applications and public-key security built in.

HCL Notes, formerly Lotus Notes and then IBM Notes, is a proprietary collaborative software platform whose client is called Notes and whose server is branded Domino. It provides e-mail, calendars, to-do lists, contacts, discussion forums, file sharing, websites, instant messaging, blogs, document libraries, user directories and custom applications, all built on one storage model: the Notes Storage Facility, the .nsf file that holds an application's design and its data together, replicated between servers and between server and client so that a user works offline on a local replica and synchronises on the next connection. Its chief inspiration was PLATO Notes, the discussion system David Woolley created at the University of Illinois in 1973 and that Ray Ozzie used there; Ozzie's deal with Mitch Kapor formed Iris Associates in 1984, Lotus beta-tested the product so long it was called vaporware, and Price Waterhouse bought 10,000 copies before the December 1989 release, the largest single sale of PC software to that date. Lotus bought Iris in 1994, IBM bought Lotus in 1995 primarily for Notes, the server took the Domino name in 1996 when its HTTP add-on was folded in, IBM dropped the Lotus brand in 2012 and sold the products to HCL in a $1.8 billion deal announced on 6 December 2018 and completed in July 2019. Domino 14.0 shipped on 7 December 2023.

The origin. Lotus Notes's chief inspiration was PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley at the University of Illinois in 1973: user-created discussion groups, in today's terms, and part of the foundation of an online community that thrived on PLATO for more than twenty years. Ray Ozzie worked with PLATO as a student there in the 1970s, and when PC network technology emerged he made a deal with Lotus founder Mitch Kapor that formed Iris Associates in 1984 to combine the capabilities of PCs with the collaborative tools PLATO had pioneered; product development stayed under Ozzie and Iris, sales and marketing under Lotus. Lotus beta-tested Notes for so long that it was considered vaporware before the December 1989 release, and was unsure how to sell it, since Lotus sold through retail and Notes's corporate customers would buy direct and need support; Price Waterhouse bought 10,000 copies before the official release, the largest single sale of PC software. After the success of Notes R3, Lotus purchased Iris in 1994, and in 1995 IBM purchased Lotus primarily to acquire Notes; the HCL Notes article gives the price as $3.2 billion, the Lotus Software article cited on the Lotus record gives $3.5 billion, and both figures are recorded here.

The design. The standard storage mechanism in Domino is a document-database format, the Notes Storage Facility, whose .nsf file normally contains both an application's design and its data. A database can be replicated between servers and between server and client, so a local replica on the Notes client lets a user fully use the databases while offline, with changes synchronised when client and server next connect; many servers can hold the same information and many users can work on it. Security is granular, from ten parameters at the database level down to individual fields in specific records. Lotus 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. Until United States export law changed in 2000, IBM and Lotus could not export versions supporting symmetric keys longer than 40 bits; in 1997 Lotus negotiated an agreement with the NSA allowing export of 64-bit keys of which 24 bits were encrypted to a special key and included in the message, a 'workload reduction factor' that protected users outside the United States against private-sector espionage but not against the US government, and that many considered a backdoor. Domino can also reach relational databases through the Enterprise Integrator, ODBC or XPages, the Jakarta Faces-based technology IBM released in 2008 to surface Domino applications to browsers.

The names. Before release 4.5 the Lotus Notes brand covered both client and server. In 1996 Lotus released an HTTP server add-on for the Notes 4 server called Domino, which rendered Notes documents as web pages in real time; later that year the Domino web server was integrated into release 4.5 of the core server and the whole server program was rebranded Domino, while only the client kept the Lotus Notes name. In November 2012 IBM announced it would drop the Lotus brand and identify the products as IBM Notes and IBM Domino. On 6 December 2018 IBM announced the sale of a number of software products to HCL for $1.8 billion, Notes and Domino among them, and the acquisition completed in July 2019; since then they are HCL Notes and HCL Domino under HCLSoftware. The platform runs on AIX, IBM i, Linux, macOS and Windows; the 9.x Standard client is Java on Eclipse, earlier clients C++; the stable release at the time of reading is 14.0.0 of 7 December 2023, and HCL's product page presents HCL Domino 2026 as a 'Secure Enterprise AI and Collaboration Platform' and a rapid application development platform with Notes, Nomad, Verse, Domino Leap, Domino IQ and Domino Workspace around it, a platform that already powers thousands of business-critical applications.

Why a networking glossary keeps it. Because of what the Lotus record on the industry timeline says of the product: organisations built their actual business processes inside it, and a business process is far harder to migrate than a file format, which is why the same software has outlived three owners. Because Domino competes, in the encyclopaedia's words, with products from Microsoft, Google and Zimbra and is compared with SharePoint, so the network engineer still meets Domino servers replicating across WAN links and Notes traffic in firewall rules. And because the public-key story, a commercial product with certificate-based authentication in 1989 and an export-control compromise in 1997, is a chapter of the crypto wars told elsewhere on this site.

Also known as: lotus notes, ibm notes, hcl notes, domino, lotus domino, ibm domino, hcl domino, nsf, notes storage facility

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