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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

I was in IT support during the Notes era working alongside notes devs. It was a grand vision. Perhaps too grand. Notes was supposed to do much more but I never saw it actually deliver in production. And between Exchange and GroupWise it got its ass kicked.

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It couldn’t survive under IBMs care as they declined, which was a shame.

I worked in places that did everything from comprehensive correspondence management to configurators for factory systems. It’s a pretty powerful set of tools.

The Microsoft world was much more primitive until the mid 2000s. GroupWise and Notes shops didn’t have the ridiculous mailbox size limitations that Exchange had up until about a decade ago. Even today, the dumpster fire that is SharePoint is arguably inferior to what Notes was shipping in 1996 in some ways.

Dumpster fires everywhere are offended that you’ve compared them to Sharepoint.

The myth that Sharepoint really, truly stinks and you should not use it even when your choices are dire, is as real and true as a dumpster fire.

Having seen at least three or four multinational-level SharePoint environments, I would strip them all back down to raw HTML with an ACL enforced editorial process. Then try again from scratch. I shudder to think of ever being a SharePoint admin.

I'll be honest the syntax of your sentence is so confusing you could tell me that you hate SharePoint or that you've made millions administering it and love it, and I would believe you either way.

That being said, I've work on a handful of installations of various sizes, including large state governments and Fortune 500 companies setups, and have never encountered one that wasn't a massive struggle to work with compared to just about any alternative solution.

I've never seen a product where even the people who run the platform pretty much hate it.

The only open question is that will Teams, which is at it's heart a bizarre mashup of SharePoint and enterprise IM/Voice/Video will eventually engender the same universal disdain.

SAP. In my whole career i've never heard of an SAP implementation described in terms other than "total nightmare".

Notes within IBM fulfilled it's vision. distributed app running on the platform making large use of replication and delivered as needed where the norm.

it suffered of development inconsistency if anything, much like java applets

turns out if some platform access is too easy, everyone starts publishing crapware

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