Getting started with Notes applications

An IBM® Lotus Notes® application contains information about a particular area of interest, such as the forms and policy documents for a department, or it might contain documents of a similar type, such as e-mail messages. In addition, some companies create "discussion applications," where employees can post responses to particular topics.

Most applications are stored on one or more Domino® servers, accessible by many users. These are called shared applications. Some applications are used only by you and reside on your computer.

You are running the "standard" configuration of Lotus Notes. This means that you can access applications on both Domino servers and IBM WebSphere® Portal servers. You must create an account on the home portal server before you can access portal applications.

For information on creating an account, see the topic Specifying the Portal Home account.

Lotus Notes comes with templates you can use to create your own Notes® applications. These templates have the file extension NTF. The Notes applications have the extension NSF.

Notes applications also have Access Control Lists (ACLs) that control the actions people, groups, and servers can perform in the application. For example, one person may be able to create and read documents in an application, where another person may be allowed only to read documents in the same application.