A touchstone of Lancaster University's learning technology strategy is the use of IT to support collaborative learning. As such the choice of a robust, flexible collaboration system is an essential element in implementing that strategy. Initially, consultation with the user-base was undertaken to form evaluation criteria to apply to the various conference systems on offer at that time (early 1995) and an extensive review of these systems was then undertaken against criteria generated by the user community consultation. Another review is currently underway, this time including an evaluation of some web-accessible Managed Learning Environments that did not exist in 1995.
The potential advantages of using Notes were identified and implementation in various scenarios has shown that these have been realized in practice (since 1995).
Advantages as far as distance learners are concerned are the integrated support for offline working; the ability to share documents electronically; and the multiple media possibilities that Notes supports, for example, sound files, graphics, and video clips. Developments such as Domino's very effective use of the Web, have merely served to support the original decision.
Currently, in our opinion, some of the main strengths of Domino to support collaborative learning and research are:
the support it offers for offline working;
the excellent web development tools including fully integrated server-side programming, XML, Java, Javascript, C, C++, Visual Basic etc.;
the integration with mail systems, Domino is an SMTP server, supporting IMAP, POP3 and Notes mail clients;
the secure and fine-grained access control to web sites with support for NT and LDAP authentication;
the flexibility to support many different forms of collaboration (not just discussions) ;
the potential for adaptation for specific requirements, e.g., in research and administration projects;
the extensibility through the API, integrated development environment and companion products;
the potential to integrate other sources of data, e.g., institutional data systems and ERP systems utilization of standard backup (e.g., ArcServe, Legato) and anti-virus tools (e.g., Norton).
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