What is Lotus Notes?

Lotes Notes is an application suite that include following component like email ,calender,scheduling ,contact ,chat & more services.This application developed by IBM .Lotus Notes is a mailing client which is used to send and receive mail.

IBM notes and Domino provide collaboration capabilities including email and calendering.

Lotus Notes is an application suite that includes the following components:

• e-mail
• calendaring and scheduling
• address book
• database
• web server
• programming

Unlike other application suites (like Microsoft Office) that split these pieces of functionality into separate products (like Outlook, Access, Front Page, etc.), Lotus Notes presents all of these components using a single front-end.

For many people, Lotus Notes is an e-mail system. While this is not necessarily it's largest strength as a product, e-mail is probably the most recognizable component that it has. It has most or all of the features of the other popular e-mail products on the market, including calendaring and scheduling, and it uses standards-based mail protocols such as POP3 and SMTP. Because Notes has both a client and a server piece, users can use it to read and respond to e-mail, and administrators can use it as an entire e-mail environment.

For all practical purposes though, everything in Notes is a database. Individual users have their own e-mail databases, and different sets of users can share application databases that can display, add, or manipulate information. Besides data, a database can also contain modules of programming code that will perform background, scheduled, or on-demand tasks for a user.

The Lotus Notes client is a desktop application that organizes and displays databases on a user's local workstation. The physical database files can be stored either on the workstation itself or on a server. A typical Notes client "workspace" will have icons for a handful of local databases as well as a number of databases that reside on one or several Notes servers. All of these icons can be grouped together, so that the distinction between local and remote data becomes very trivial.