Development Suites for Building Workgroup Applications (Network Compatibility)

Development suites for building workgroup applications

New Dynamics in the Notes Development Market

What is workgroup computing?

Today, as eroding trade barriers and technology improvements converge to raise the level of competition, companies often find little room to improve profitability. Instead of price increases, profit strategies are focused on new or expanding product lines or improved cost management. Technology has been instrumental in this regard by changing the ways people work together.

In the past ten years, corporations around the world have invested more than $1 trillion on information technology. These investments have predominately centered on collecting information, reducing costs in the form of automating clerical work, or in some cases, complex decision-support systems for senior management.

But what about improving the productivity of the "knowledge worker," middle manager, and corporate executive? Beyond merely collecting information, companies are looking to computers to share information, help automate business processes, and improve communication among workgroups, departments, and even other companies. That's why many leading IT specialists are turning to workgroup computing – as a way to improve the productivity of the white-collar worker.

This demand is a natural outgrowth of the rise of personal computing. As the knowledge worker moved from standalone PCs to shared information through peer-to-peer and LAN computing, the need to work collaboratively rose. Workgroup computing is the technology that uses networked computing resources to achieve that collaboration.

As a technology, workgroup computing – also referred to as "groupware" or "workflow" – has grown to convey different meanings to different audiences. In the early 1990s, some believed that electronic mail qualified as "workgroup computing." Today, others argue for a more rigorous definition that encompasses not only email, but also document routing, process "workflow," and shared repositories of information.

Revelation Software believes that workgroup computing is defined not by a collection of technical features, but by how the applications are used. Workgroup applications define and coordinate a workgroup's activities and how those activities flow. They empower users to locate information; share results and ideas; and streamline business processes such as customer service and people-oriented activities such as account management. Workgroup applications stress communication and sharing of information among teams, departments, the enterprise, and even with other organizations.

With more than XX million seats in thousands of companies around the world, Lotus Notes from the Lotus Development subsidiary of IBM is the underlying technology that most often serves as the foundation of workgroup applications. Most industry analysts agree that the success of workgroup computing is tied to the rise of Notes.

In the early 1990s, Notes-centered development projects fell outside the mainstream of corporate applications development. Interfaces were not very elegant , and structures were simple, but the resulting productivity gains from these early groupware applications – often found as part of the wave of "business process re-engineering" – were nonetheless undeniable. From these humble beginnings, Notes has emerged as a strategic platform for many corporations. This heightened profile brings the need for a stronger class of development and reporting tools.

Today, developers of all levels – from end users, to power users, to professional application builders and ISVs – require a complete tool set that will address all aspects of developing Notes applications.

Lotus Notes: The Platform for Workgroup Computing

Lotus Notes is a comprehensive client/server platform for developing and deploying workgroup applications. Notes includes the components for a successful workgroup application platform: basic application development and deployment; an object store; bi-directional replication; security; messaging; cross-platform support; and scalability.

At its heart, Notes provides a client/server implementation of a distributed document database with a complete messaging transport system. This sophisticated document repository can be shared by all users and viewed from a variety of perspectives. It can also be replicated across distributed servers, and is the foundation for workgroup applications.

For the corporate application developer, the questions have become "How do I develop, support, and adopt this new paradigm for strategic applications development? What is the right tool – or suite of development tools – that will enable me to design, build, deploy, and maintain rich workgroup applications for my business?"

The Complex Lotus Notes Environment

This incredibly rich but complex environment offers the application developer a diverse blend of features and characteristics that enable workgroup application development. When evaluating Notes development options, support for the following features is critical:

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) – Notes' support of OLE enables the Notes compound document to be a container for other objects and applications. OLE support also extends to integration –data sharing – with other applications such as spreadsheets, graphics programs, and forms software.

Rich Text – Unlike conventional database managers, Notes supports Rich Text Fields (RTF), to store and display text with its font, color, point-size, and bold/italic/underline characteristics. This is a requirement for non-numeric, unstructured information. Beyond RTF, Notes can even accommodate images, audio, and video to create multimedia-style applications.

Messaging – One of the hallmarks of a Notes groupware application is its ability to communicate. Notes' integrated messaging, directory, security and gateways to external users offer the complete platform for mail-enabled applications.

Multi-user support – By their very nature, workgroup applications involve multiple users accessing the same data. The Notes engine encompasses concurrent and asynchronous data access by multiple users, including versioning, security for access control, and replication.

Multi-location support – Since workgroup systems are typically adopted by dispersed user communities, Notes supports distributed application deployment through messaging, replication, and security features. This even includes mobile users (pager, wireless, and telephone access).

Native Notes support – The right Notes development tool must not treat the ability to access Notes data as a side option. While workgroup applications do increasingly encompass SQL data, at a minimum, the development tool should directly access and handle native Notes data.

Connectivity to SQL Data – Since Notes applications are not used in isolation, it is imperative that they can communicate with, and accommodate data from SQL-based relational databases. Connectivity to SQL databases such as Microsoft SQL Server integrates Notes into the more traditional structured-data applications. Support for the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard further integrates Notes into the SQL world.

Multi-value field support – One of the distinguishing features of the Notes database is its accommodation of unstructured data. Notes can accept fields of varying and unlimited length. This is essential to handling fields of textual data.

Security – Notes supports full security features: authentication (including so-called "digital signatures"), authorization, and encryption.

Application integration – Beyond OLE, Notes also supports a host of standards that ease application integration: Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), Apple Publish and Subscribe, and the UNIX LEL. Notes F/X (field exchange) also provides field-level integration among popular programs and databases.

Import/export filters – Notes' import/export facilities ensure that applications are not isolated. In particular, Notes SQL and DataLens provide data integration.

Workflow management – Notes supports both message-based and database-centric models of workflow. Notes offers macros, structured fields, and intelligent routing, as well as application and data integration features.

Application deployment and management – The replication engine and data dictionary of Notes provide it with facilities to deploy new applications and manage application changes efficiently.

Scalability – Effective groupware applications grow. The application must be extensible beyond the team, department, or division to encompass enterprise-wide or inter-enterprise usage. This implies platform independence, messaging standards support, and high-speed networking support.

Choices for the Notes Developer

To address this broad set of Notes characteristics, today's corporate application developer requires a complete, powerful tool set. The Notes development continuum should accommodate not only the end user looking for simple, independent access to Notes data, but also the power user who wants to create his or her own Notes applications, to the corporate development team that is constructing enterprise-wide strategic Notes applications.

There are numerous choices for today's Notes developer. Each has its strengths, but they carry extensive limitations.

The integrated Notes development environment – Notes includes a series of form designers and view designers that enable experienced programmers to construct a simple, albeit primitive, application. Typically, this style of "application development" is restricted solely to modifying some of the 25 application templates that are bundled with Notes. While the modified template applications bring productivity gains, the applications are crude prototypes of what they could potentially offer the corporation.

There is no reusability of the application code – Once an experienced developer creates a new application or modifies the template, the code can not be reused for similar work in the future. It must be re-created again from scratch. This not only wastes developer time, it provides no guarantee that the subsequent work will function exactly as the original development work.

The user interface is not standards-based – Standard Notes development tools employ awkward and crude interface conventions such as space-bar scrolling through pick lists; non-standard check-boxes; and flat, one-dimensional screen elements. In short, there is little support for Windows standards. That increases training time for both the developer and, later, for the end-user as well

Extensions of SQL client/server tools – While companies such as Gupta and Powersoft have successfully met the needs of SQL client/server developers, their tools have not fully addressed the Notes environment. The lack of native access and support for the unique nature of multi-value fields, Notes F/X, and rich text make these an awkward fit for pure Notes development.

No support for Notes data access – Without native access, Notes development is a compromise. Data must be retrofitted to the client/server tool, losing its unique structure in the process. A Notes development tool must be "Notes-first" in its support for native access to data.

No support for Notes multi-value fields – Unlike structured SQL databases, Notes is built to accommodated unstructured data that can vary in field length and number of entries. This is one of the keys to Notes. More generic client/server tools overlook this richness in order to fit it into their paradigm of structured data.

No support for replication/messaging – Finally, today's client/server development tools have no features for handling Notes' unique messaging and replication services.

The Suite for Modern Notes Development

With such a myriad of complex factors, deciding regarding which development tools can handle the job is critical to the success of the Notes development initiative. At Revelation Software, we believe that no single tool can meet the needs of a company's total Notes application development requirements. That is why we offer a suite of tools for Notes development.

Revelation Software is the only provider of professional-caliber visual development tools that enable developers – regardless of skill level – to create, re-use, and scale Lotus Notes workgroup applications. What sets the Revelation Software suite apart is that it is the only suite available that is architected exclusively for Lotus Notes development.

Report Designer for Lotus Notes– This is the leading native Notes visual reporting tool. With this easy-to-use reporting tool, even novice users can quickly retrieve and share information contained in Notes databases. Report Designer is built to be intuitive, fast, and easy to use. Some of the features of this banded, two-pass reporting tool include:

"Quick Report" Templates to create columnar, tabular, or Avery label reports.

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to include objects from other Windows applications in reports.

Reporter BASIC for sophisticated queries and calculations.

Drag-and-drop layout tools.

Advanced capabilities for cross-tab reporting.

Customizable toolbar and formatting ribbon.

ViP for Lotus Notes – ViP is the industry's leading visual development tool for extending native Notes applications. ViP is the perfect tool for the individual developer who is frustrated by the limitations of the primitive integrated Notes development facilities, and wants to build powerful Notes applications quickly and easily.

Superior to basic Notes development tools – ViP extends far beyond basic Notes development, enabling the creation of custom graphical interfaces, integration of heterogeneous data sources, added programmability, reporting, and charting.

Individual developers will be productive immediately – ViP's visual development environment includes drag-and-drop access to a wide range of standard graphical controls.

ViP is not just for developers – Power users in marketing, sales, or finance for example, can use its patented Visual Linking system to connect pre-defined Lotus Script code with objects in the application. Visual Linking includes more than 80 standard behaviors. Power users can create applications without writing a single line of code.

Superior support for Rich Text – More importantly, ViP offers superior integration with Notes' rich text fields. That means applications can browse, edit, and update components stored in virtually any rich text field.

ViP is fast and flexible– Developers will appreciate the speed with which they can build, test, and debug Notes applications.

Fast-start tools and samples – ViP also includes more than 15 additional developer tools and sample applications.

OpenInsight for Workgroups – This is the industry's only team development environment for native Notes application development – the professional's choice for developing enterprise-wide Notes applications. It includes visual tools to create windows, pop-up dialogs, "quick events," menus, and messages. Beyond its superior development tool set and native access to Lotus Notes data, the key to OpenInsight for Workgroups lies in its central development repository. As a repository-based development tool, OpenInsight for Workgroups offers a total environment for teams of developers to develop, manage, store, maintain, and – most importantly – re-use groupware applications and their components.

With OpenInsight for Workgroups, development teams can store and re-use application components, such as bitmaps, icons, menus, or source code modules. In addition, the repository protects the integrity and eases the maintenance of the application by providing version control, automatic documentation of components, impact/net change analysis, and other management capabilities. In addition to providing these tight security features, the OpenInsight for Workgroups repository gives development teams freedom and flexibility. Some examples:

Check-in/check-out – lets developers work on a project at remote locations with no risk to overall application integrity. Long-term check-out lets users temporarily move components to other drives, devices, or workstations. Short-term check-out automatically locks an entity while it is being viewed or modified.

Extensible architecture – lets project managers combine third-party development tools and libraries.

Intuitive design – permits non-developers, such as icon designers and documentation writers, to use the repository. This allows project teams to depart from a traditional delineated model.

Automatic documentation – if a member leaves the project, the rest of the team will know the status of their work.

Equipped with ViP, Report Designer for Notes, and OpenInsight for Workgroups, corporations are well prepared to embark on scaleable, reliable, workgroup development projects that can be implemented in phases.

Is The Payback Really There?

Does Notes really work? After all, respected MIT economist Lester Thurow is on record as saying that IT investments over the past generation have had "no measurable impact on ROI."

Fortunately, recent data suggests that Lotus Notes deviates from Mr. Thurow's harsh assessment. In a survey by International Data Corporation of more than 60 firms that used Lotus Notes to create a single groupware application, the average return on investment (ROI) was a staggering 179 percent, with an average payback period of less than 2.5 years.

There are many reasons for this high payback. White-collar workers have higher salaries and expenses. Therefore, returns are larger and faster than with clerical automation. And, at a macro level, no major equipment investments are required. Notes applications piggyback on the PC and LAN investments that have already been made. When you consider that these figures arise from a single Notes application at each surveyed company and that other Notes applications will surely add to the ROI, it becomes clear that workgroup applications do deliver a solid return.

Further Reading

"Lotus Notes: Agent of Change" - International Data Corporation, 1994

"So, just what is Lotus Notes?" - Data Based Advisor, October 1994

"Visual Programming for Lotus Notes" - BYTE, December 1994

"Alternative Notes Development Tools" - Patricia Seybold Group,

November 1994

"OpenInsight Chops Chores in Programming for Notes" - PC Week,

July 3, 1995