Creating a corporate intranet that's easy to use is within reach with Lotus Development's Domino Intranet Starter Pack 2.0. It offers e-mail, contact management, customer tracking, threaded dicussion, calendaring, project management, company forms, fax services, job postings and an employee phone book—everything you need for a centralized information store and to automate everyday office functions. It can even spin out a Public Web site! The product also has a five-user license for Lotus Notes or Web browser clients and Domino Server.
Since shipping version 1.0 in July of 1997, significant enhancements have been made in all of its areas, and features such as fax services, SiteCreator and advanced calendaring have been added.
After a quick scan of the contents, we decided on the ‘Domino Install Guide’ and popped the CD-ROM into the drive. Our test machine was a Pentium II 400-MHz with 128 MB of RAM running Windows NT 4.0 and SP3. Setup was started, and the install process began. 25 minutes later, setup had completed, and we started the server. SiteCreator popped up, and we chose our favorite template from the many choices. SiteCreator also allows you to choose navigation for your site – either left, right, or top navigation sections. The ensuing “15-minute process” of “setting up our Web site” in reality took around 30 minutes. The only fault in the entire setup process: there was no status indicator letting us know that we were getting anywhere, just a flashing lightning bolt at the bottom of the screen.
After SiteCreator was complete, we were left with a great looking site, with a smooth navigational interface. No HTML or programming was required at all. By logging on at the intranet home page, we gained access to a contact manager, customer- and project-tracking program, and employee phone book.
Domino's easy-to-publish features and intricate document check-in and check-out system, which ensures that only authorized content gets posted breathe fresh air into an area often cluttered by unnecessarily complicated products. You can also assign users read and write permissions to designated sections of your site.
The option to either use Lotus Notes or a Web browser is a God-send for office roamers—you can be out of the office on business using your laptop and still be able gain access to the information stuck back at the office with relative ease. Lotus won’t solve those troublesome NT dialup connection problems plaguing most medium sized businesses, though—be sure to protect yourself from mad clients in case NT won’t let you in to access the information you need.
The Public Web Site was a pleasant surprise—it consists of advanced features such as customer registration and a full product catalog, as well as a personalizable front door to the world.
Lotus has obviously spent much time on the integration aspects of the product—all of the features seem to work hand in hand quite well—we were able to send faxes, emails, add contacts and post FAQs and such to the intranet with relative ease.
All in all, Lotus Domino Intranet Starter pack is an easy setup—but by no means lacking in power. Our only gripes were a lack of ability to introduce CGI scripts into the intranet natively—a fairly large and cumbersome caveat for legacy intranet users, but won’t be so much an issue for new intranet setups (which seems to be Lotus’ target market for this product).
If you’re looking for a solid, attractive all in one solution that’s easy to setup and maintain, Lotus Domino Intranet Starter Pack is the product for you.
