For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

Back in the mid 90s, I spent a full year migrating my company and ~800 users across six sites from Exchange to Notes. I had no experience with Notes, and absolutely hated it when I started the project.

After a year of hacking, learning from mistakes, and countless hours of RTFM, we got it done. Email, calendar, file shares all migrated, cross-site replication, and some really great new features added in with workflows. I was really proud of it.

As soon as the last migration wave was complete, I called my manager to let him know that the long-awaited day had arrived. Exchange was dead, long live Lotus Notes! Literally, during that phone call he said "Ummm. Yeah. We are going to migrate back to Exchange because of some M&A coming up."

I was not pleased.

When discussing Lotus Notes it’s useful to have a good understanding of two perspectives. Some view it as an ugly version of Outlook/Exchange, but those functions were not really the point of it (so comparisons to Outlook/Exchange aren’t really correct). It was really a development platform, and email, calendar, tasks, etc. would be better understood as “sample apps” that could be built on it.

As mentioned in the article, this was a time when apps were built native to the OS, and deployment and updates were a full time job for the IT department. Notes encapsulated all these apps in a single app launcher in a standard way they could be deployed and managed.

The best comparison today is not Outlook/Exchange, but the whole Web itself which addressed the same problem of apps in a more universal way. However Notes enabled this at least a decade before the Web was advanced enough to handle this.

I worked on PC support at an investment bank in London in the early 90's and developed a Notes app to replace our paper-based tickets.

It took me very little time to develop and really revolutionized our team's ability to manage the incoming flow of tickets for our nearly 1000 users.

We soon gave access to the system to delegated principals in each of the departments who were then able to coordinate their department's tickets in real-time too. They loved it.

A company I worked for used Lotus Notes and Domino back in the day.

One day we got a mail sent to everyone at the company from the CEO, with some rather lewd content. As you can imagine it caused quite the stir.

As most here will know, SMTP by default doesn't verify sender. And the Domino mail gateway would happily match external addresses to internal accounts. The result was that it looked quite legit.

Turned out someone who was fed up with their job[1] had used this to appear to be the CEO, we have a 3 month notice period here in Norway, and well he got let go immediately...

Young me learned a lot about how mail worked thanks to that.

The core of Notes/Domino was awesome and ahead of its time including a "NoSQL" document database with reliable multi-master replication and a public key security infrastructure. Unfortunately, after IBM acquired it they never realized the potential as an application development platform and failed to enhance it to keep pace with the competition. Just some really stupid decisions like keeping a 64GB database file size limit and failing to fully support XML.

> But Notes is nowhere near holding the record for the oldest piece of software still being used. The US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), which takes care of contracts for the Department of Defense (DoD), is said to have a program called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), which was introduced in 1958, making it nearly twice as old.

Certainly but I'd say the most important ancient software is just a few years younger: the IRS Master Files. https://www.governmentattic.org/5docs/IRS-HistoricalFactBook...

> FEBRUARY 1962 The first master file, the Business Master File, was established at the National Computer Center

Individual Master File operations began a few years later. Let that sink in: every tax transaction a company or an individual makes in the United States is handled by a piece of software written for the IBM 7074. These were using a CPU of about 27 000 instructions per second and had 9900 words of core memory. It's hard to paint a picture of just how old we are talking about. While the Beatles already existed at the time, the Beatlemania is still a phenomena for the future. This https://i.imgur.com/dtmPy3a.jpg is a luxury car from that year.

One of my favourite books is Dreaming In Code which really does a good job telling the story of mitch kapors "chandler" product;

Dreaming in Code tells the story of the development of Chandler, an open source, cross-platform “personal information manager.” This software was the brainchild of Mitch Kapor (of Lotus 1-2-3 fame, and the founder of a short-lived non-profit called the Open Source Applications Foundation. While the OSAF was well-funded (to the tune of millions), and while Chandler was eventually built, it was marked by blown deadlines and cost overruns. And the project is now moribund.

In other words, as Rosenberg wryly notes, Chandler is another in a long line of failed software projects. Unlike building bridges, he notes, software engineering is hard.

This single-tool-usefulness thing is why, in a former life, I started out administering over 100 instances of Trac.

When Trac came out, it did everything confluence, jira, and bitbucket do, in one open source, easy to use tool that had tons of community-developed plugins.

The thing is, though, that it wasn't meant to be administered. It didn't lend itself to management. It was meant to be deployed, and then not managed, which is _fine_ if you have one or two of them, because they're pets, but in a world of cattle, you can't have 100+ special snowflake systems deployed like that.

I spent years mowing down every Trac instance I could find, migrating them to the actually-centrally-managed Atlassian stack. After I left that team, I would incentivize other people to carry on in my footsteps by buying a bundt cake for anyone who led the charge to remove a Trac instance from the infrastructure.

I gave away a lot of bundt cakes, but the infrastructure was better and more reliable because of it.

I worked for an F500 that was still using Lotus Notes as of late 2018. It was my first job so I didn't know how old that system was, but people used it to build all sorts of complex applications like ticketing systems, time tracking, product design docs etc.

I guess Notion would be today's modern equivalent, will turn into tomorrow's legacy system.

I sometimes wonder if people have done any research on these types of workflow abstractions and come up with fundamental data structures to work with them.

Using Lotus Notes was the only thing that finally convinced me how grateful I should be to use exchange and outlook at work.

Edit: this was in 2013.

I did some LN work way back at the start of my career. I got to know the C apis pretty well, it wasn't that fun.

Strangely, as CPUs/PCs got faster, it seemed to get slower. By the time 2000 rolled around it would take SO LONG for a notes square/app to open.

It was an interesting piece of software. Nothing has really replicated it. I'm kind of shocked it hasn't been dumped on the open source market and then rebuilt from the ground up.

I worked at an organization whose IT system was based around Lotus Notes, 2010-2014. It was clunky and awful at that time.

We tried migrating to Notes from Exchange when IBM became our service provider after outsourcing and I.T was selected as guinea pigs.

Needless to say, we hated the client interface and the exchange interchange was wonky - the feedback was extremely negative - "it is a pile of shit" was common and it was canned.

Domino, the server side was amazing compared to the competition.

It was super rock solid and reliable. even when you abused it by filling the disk space!

The client was god awful.

Wow, this article makes it sound like a combination of Outlook, Google Workspace, a database, Jira/Monday/Notion, and HR tools all combined in one platform.

Not bad before for a platform before we entered the world of Oauth and SaaS services.

> This writer worked for one publishing company that used Notes extensively, and I found it to be incredibly useful in its day. It provided not just your email, but an internal telephone directory, contact database, booking system for time off, company handbook, and more, all accessible via a single application and a single set of credentials, long before single sign-on became a thing

Sounds like Workday but less complicated (because Workday also does payroll, and payroll sucks)

Notes and Domino peaked in 2000. It somehow managed to balance the many needs of a business, including the email stack, workflow, database, and configuration, into a distributed platform that was comprehensive and at the time, clearly superior to Exchange/Sharepoint. The architecture was elegant but required a major improvement in 2000 due to performance woes and a web server that had been grafted on. Unfortunately IBM attempted to migrate all Lotus and Domino users onto their Websphere platform, which, despite engendering a worthy IDE (Eclipse), was in no way a true replacement to Lotus Notes/Domino. Microsoft also mustered all their uncompetitive practices of the day to destroy this rising threat that at the time had more business email accounts than Exchange. A real shame, because Sharepoint was an absolute dumpster fire in comparison.

In one of the big 3 auto manufacturers, this is still used today ;P

Wow didn't know Indian co HCL acquired this. My employer, a software company used this long long back. Had my email, internal support KB, Groups etc inside.

Computer associates used to be the graveyard of dead software.. Guess they're dead too.

Way ahead of its time.

I remember this do everything program way back in the DOS days called Framework - it was like a spreadsheet/word processor/database and programming system in one in a language called Fred.

Used lotus notes in late 1990s at a bank in London. It was pretty much all we needed for internal non trading apps. But I noticed that the intranet slowly started to creep in …

just to get an understanding how the UI was...

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm

Same goes for FileMaker every small town agency, newspaper and other media clients ran on it. Made good money as a 15 year old.

The bane of my corporate existence during a decade. It turns any Outlook hater into an advocate.

See also DEC’s All-In-1. These combined apps were for a while a pleasure to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1

Is there anywhere that has a good catalog for the API surface area of lotus notes? It seemed like it might have a lot of lessons learned to study

There is in my head a vague concept of a minimal corporate API.

Where there is a (global?) standard of data access - like

   For emp in biz.hr.employees.current: print emp.401K.contribution

I mean something like this exists for SAP (probably), but I imagine there is some FOSS version waiting out there that is the POSIX of organisational APIs

How it’s implemented is almost irrelevant. But it’s existence means management become software literate, means that companies won’t waste half their software devs doing things like reinventing ETL tools

It just seems a good idea

Obligatory reference to Lotus Agenda which arguably was inspired by Notes and arguably (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code) inspired Chandler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)

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