Sometimes, when I speak to people about what I do, the question I hear most is, “What is Domino? You mean the pizza place?” After a quick laugh and jokes aside, I try to explain, in simple terms, what it all entails. I start with, “Well, we all have an e-mail address, right? Maybe it’s Hotmail, Gmail, or maybe even Outlook, correct?” They all nod accordingly. I tell them that Domino can do all that also, and a whole lot more. That’s basically when I lose them and when they all say, “Well, look at the time. Nice talking to you but I really need to go!”, it’s when the talk is over and we all go about our day, like nothing happened.
But seriously, what is Domino? To answer that question, we first need to say, it’s nothing like MS Exchange. Sure, it can do what Exchange does, but there is a whole lot more it can do and, better and more secure. It’s a multi-platform, highly complex and very secure system, designed to help users to collaborate better and more efficiently. It not only handles mail (which it does very well) and calendaring, it also has database and application possibilities, adding upon it, functionality that is does It has very sophisticated methods of communicating with other Domino servers that run on different OS platforms. You can have a server on a Linux Server and another on a Windows 2019 server, “speaking” to each other and sharing files and information, have them run in a cluster and even a pull/push replication system. You tell it what to do and it just runs, independently and just works.
It provides enterprises with the means to create, test and deploy, and the ability to manage distributed , multi-lingual applications. This all includes directory, database, application server, administration, security, connectivity. As well as web server, email server, calendaring engine, etc, etc, etc all built in one application.
A complete Domino installation consists of de server that can run on Linux, Windows 2019 Server and AS-400 operating systems. The client consists of de Administrator client, Designer and the Notes client. All three run on Windows machines only.