10 Minute Guide to Lotus Notes Mail 4.5 - 1 - Understanding Lotus Notes Concepts In this lesson, you learn about Lotus Notes concepts and how Lotus Notes stores information. You also learn how Lotus Notes presents that stored information to you. Understanding Clients and Servers Lotus Notes works on a client/server technology. Your PC is the Lotus Notes client. It requests and receives information from the Domino server. In the office, you're "attached" to the server over your network. You communicate with the Lotus Notes server through a series of wires and cables (hardware) and networking software. The information you request is in Lotus Notes applications, or databases. The Domino server usually stores those databases so that they can be accessed by many "clients" at one time. In most cases, when you double-click on a Lotus Notes icon, you are actually opening a database stored on the server. Your client (your PC) requests that database from the server and when the database opens, the database that resides on the server appears (see Figure 1.1). This figure is like the connection you have at work to your file server. You often store work that you create in other software programs (other than Lotus Notes) on the file server on your network at the office. You might create a Lotus 123 spreadsheet or a Word document. When you save those files, you might save them on your drive F:. Your drive F: is actually space dedicated to you for storage on the file server. Figure 1.1 How clients and servers work. There are three types of clients available for Lotus Notes: Lotus Notes, Notes Desktop, and Notes Mail. All three of these types include mail. Understanding Databases There are many different uses for Notes databases. One database might hold customer information, while another holds information about company projects, and still another holds your mail. Even your e-mail is a Lotus Notes database. Databases are like little miniprograms or applications. Just like having multiple spreadsheet files with different formulas and calculations for solving various business problems, Notes databases are usually created to solve a specific business process, such as customer service calls, client tracking for sales, or expense reporting. Although many Notes databases are created by an Application Developer, as mentioned earlier, the Mail database is already created and comes with all three client types of Lotus Notes. If you only have Notes Mail installed, you can only use the Lotus Notes Mail database. If you use Lotus Notes or Lotus Notes Desktop, you have a bigger software program that includes more features than Notes Mail; you can use the other Lotus Notes databases for client databases and discussion databases. The Mail database is different from other Lotus Notes databases you may be using because it is a private database for your use only. Others cannot access or use your mail database. On the other hand, other departments or the whole company can access customer databases. Even though your Mail database is private, it is stored on the Domino 4.5 server. Unless you are a remote (or mobile) user who uses Lotus Notes at a PC at home or on your laptop on the road, you usually don't even have a copy of the Mail database on your PC. All that you have is the icon for the database that, when double-clicked, opens the database on the server. Understanding Documents and Forms Lotus Notes database stores everything in documents (containers for the data in Notes). Each document that represents data you have entered contains fields for each of the pieces of data you have entered. It's a little weird to say that you never really see these documents but you don't. Documents are like records; and a record contains fields. In this sense, Lotus Notes works like other kinds of databases. What's different about Lotus Notes is that you don't actually see the records, or documents. You see contents of the documents by looking at them through forms. Plain English: Database Record A collection of data entered into fields. Consider the phone book. When you look for a person in the phone book, you look for the information that has to do with a specific individual. That information is the name, address, and phone number, which would be considered fields. All of the information for that individual is a record, and all of the records in the phone book combined is the database. Every database in Lotus Notes has custom forms designed for use within that database. The Lotus Notes Mail database is no exception. In the Mail database, there are many forms. The ones you'll use the most are the Memo, Reply, Calendar Entry and Task forms. These forms contain fields such as the To: field and the Subject field. It's not important to memorize all the fields and forms but it is good to understand that you work in fields and forms (see Figure 1.2). Figure 1.2 The Mail Memo form. Understanding Views Now that you know you have fields of information stored in records (documents) that you see through forms, you can see a list of documents by looking at a view. The view acts like a table of contents listing the documents in your Mail database. Your Inbox is nothing more than a view listing the documents (mail) you've received (see Figure 1.3). When you want to read your mail, double-click on the piece of mail in the view and you will read your mail in a form. Figure 1.3 The Inbox View listing documents. In this lesson, you learned about clients and servers. You also learned about Lotus Notes databases and how Lotus Notes displays the contents of its databases. In the next lesson, you learn more specifics about the Mail database.

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