Domino 9: The Next Generation Platform for Social Business

http://www.gsx.com/blog/bid/82729/Domino-9-The-Next-Generation-Platform-for-Social-Business

Domino 9 has been a long time coming since it’s original inception along with Lotus Notes. General availability will be offered in a few weeks. The level of completion and capability on Domino 9 is truly amazing. It will offer a set of new features that takes a company to the next level with more social tools within the messaging environment. This IBM blog discusses the initial feedback from the Notes and Domino Social Edition beta released in December 2012, and invites you to join them for the March 13, 2013 special worldwide broadcast.

I took some time to review the evolution of Domino, since its inception with Lotus, to explore why the Lotus community of users is still powerful today. Back in 1973, the software was quite primitive considering its only function was the capability to tag a bug report with a user’s information and secure the file. It wasn’t until December 1996 that Lotus changed the name of the Notes server to Domino. This marked a major benchmark for Domino, as this is when it first became an interactive Web applications server. Lotus Domino could now offer the capability of providing organizations with the rapid development of solutions for businesses concerning intranets and the Internet.

Domino and Lotus Notes 5, released in 1999, was a significant step for the design of the program. They had revolutionized the design of the program to adopt a more modern look and closed the gap between the differentiation of the Internet and the server. Improvements, such as Internet messaging, really emphasized how important this new version was towards the evolution of the industry we have today.   

In October 2002, Domino 6 was associated with words like faster and cheaper…Key words that drive our industry to this day. This version of Domino was precisely that, one of the ground breakers towards efficiency. The enhancements on performance and measurability were focused mainly on two things: simplified maintenance and lowered administration overhead. By reducing the time it took to create and reuse code for new applications, the timelines to completion were cut dramatically. 

The release of Domino 7 in August 2005 had a major impact on the industry because it offered administrators Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM), which visualized statuses of multiple servers across one or multiple domains. It also provided Activity Trends that offered statistics on databases, users, servers, etc. as well as stronger encryption keys for better security. Then in August 2007, Domino 8 was available and it was the best version yet offering users a completely new interface, making it the most powerful and innovative version of Domino to date.

All in all, it can easily be said that much anticipation has been accumulating for this next release of Domino 9…Expectations are higher than ever. So what should we expect?

• Domino 9 now supports: True Single Sign On: Users are now offered a single sign on (SSO) in Notes and iNotes for a more simplified and convenient login.
• Open Standard Authorization
• HTTP Servers protected by TLS: Security is strengthened on Domino servers by using a TLS instead of the previously used SSL 3.0, making IBM http servers the leaders for Domino http servers
• Database Management Tool: this has been integrated to allow users the ability to issue various tasks simultaneously, allowing a more organized process for database maintenance
• Embedded Experience is enhanced by allowing users to have the ability to receive and respond to an email or notification in any application they are currently using, without leaving the program. This characteristic of Domino 9 is thanks to OAuth, the open standard for Authorization.
• Local Mail Delivery Failover (a kind of cluster in the DB level) offers a better accommodation when issues occur. For example, the administrator can be automatically sent an email or setup a request for specific actions when the server is nonresponsive. 
• Pure System: supports functions that check whether your program is up and running and also creates virtual system instances for further assistance before you run into a problem. 
• Quality Service Probe (QSP): for email and restarting Domino
• Domino Migration Utility (move from Exchange 2007, AD 2003 & 2008 to Domino)
• 8.5.3 Traveler High Availability (HA): API for access to mail and calendar data

Domino 9 will be available very soon. Please let us know your thoughts about your experience with the all-new Domino 9 in the comments below!