The way Domino works at a high level is that you have a "data" and "design" template applied to a database. A database would be a single file on disk, and it's something like a table (or a set of related tables) and various views attached to that data.

We had an internal Domino server with a set of internally focused 'design' templates applied to them. We used the notes clients, and our analysts had their workflow applications there. The design of these databases was focused on serving content to the notes clients - not to a web browser.

We replicated the data from those databases to our staging and development machines. Those staging and development machines had their own designs - which was the web-centric, customer focused design. There was a minimum amount of information available to you in the notes clients - data at this point was meant to be seen in a browser.

Those staging machines pushed the data on to our final production cluster. Every 15 minutes something was pushed. We'd go from internal to dev/stage 15 after the hour. 30 minutes after the hour the data from stage would go to production.

We used normal build/release tools control the flow of design template replicas making their way out of their playgrounds, but sometimes it happened. I say it's brittle because if you accidentally push design to the wrong place you could grenade a lot of stuff. More than once we accidentally flipped the switch to push design changes to development.

Here's a link to a presentation of the last thing I was a part of in the Lotus community. I'm pretty proud of the site we put together. It had a pretty nice feature set for the time period. This was put together by a coworker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL6D93ED85F970BAE6&v=v9IU...