I was searching around some job boards and came across a job that sparked my interest a little. When reading the "Position requires the following experience and knowledge" section, I saw it required knowledge of Domino R5. What is this and is it hard to learn? I read up about it on IBM's website, and it states that "It enables developers to rapidly build secure Web applications that incorporate enterprise data and streamline business processes." Anybody here have any experience with this software? What are the pro's and con's to learning it? I was gonna download the free trial, but saw I could download DB2 also, so I downloaded that instead :D If it's worth me downloading the trial I will, but I wanted to see what you guys thought of it.

Domino R5 is an all purpose Database server product.

It's the server part of the Lotus Notes product.

THere are two sides of it.

The Server and The Client.

The Domino R5 Server can do all of the following:
Serve Domino Databases(These are Hierchial not Relational)
HTTP Server
Mail Server
Proxy

On the Client side you can use either the Lotus Notes Client or a web browser depending on how the Database was designed.

Domino is great for Workflow type applications. Where you want to replace a Buisness SOP or paper workflow with an electronic one. You can build a database that can notify users when they have documents waiting for them or pretty much what ever you want. If the company uses Domino for their email it is pretty powerful.

Galaga has captured it well..

But Domino [whatever IBM claims] is basically a workflow engine with a very secure database of what are called documents and it is in .nsf format. It is used in most corporates [including ours] primarily as a mail server and also as a team collaboration tool

Domino can run on NT, Unix and AS400 [even mainframes I think] and there are two aspects to Domino R5 skills

One is administering the Domaino R5 server [which is setting ACL, users, routing, archiving, back up, mail certificates etc] and the other is developing workflow applications on Lotus Notes clients [now notes development is altogether a different kind of programming although the language is like Visual Basic.. because you dont have rows and columns and indexes like any other RDBMS but you have documents , views, fields and agents and it is somewhat confusing if you are from a procedural language]

You cannot learn admin of Domino thru a download [its like trying to become an Oracle DBA by using Personal Oracle on Win 95] - you need to be real hands on to get a job

But Notes development can be learned easily from books and IBM's notes.net and other places

Good luck with it

Cheers
Balaji