Why Lotus Domino? (2024)

But that is not the important point when deciding whether to use it, because it is absolutely not a viable platform from the "Can you find a team to actually code on this platform?" perspective.

By the time I had finished with that last gig, I told everyone the same thing: That I personally knew both Domino and modern web frameworks and could blend them together to have a modern front-end on that back-end. But I figure there are a couple dozen people in the world who know both sides well enough to do so, because the industry moved on. The talent moved on. Or retired. Most of my work post-2009 was decommission projects. At the same time, new frameworks have come to fruition since the 90s, so all the special features Domino has baked in just aren't that unique anymore. There are also almost no jobs in it, so no reason for people to learn it.

At the end of the day, you cannot run a company on a tech stack where there is no talent pool.

Reading through the article, it seems like that theory was proven out and along with the awful UI that Notes was, it led to many IBM shops adopting Exchange/Outlook and later SharePoint.

Something odd about Lotus Notes/Domino, and part of the reason for its awful UI, is that everything is a database (the NSF mentioned in the article). All UI is a view on that database. Viewing an email? That's just view on a item in the database. Sending an email? That's just adding a row into the 'Outbox' table. The entire product was built with this paradigm at the center of it all.

There used to be a joke that went round that particular office, there are exactly two people who LOVE Lotus: The boss who signed off on it (cos it made them look good), and the person who had to implement it (cos moneymoneymoney).

Everyone else went "Uggghhh, Lotus Notes."

What happened on December 13, 2024? [1]

[1] https://bostick.github.io/blog/2025/04/what-happened/

I spent a good portion of my time late nineties working with Lotus Notes/Domino. I even had all the certifications (Principal CLP Application Developer, Principal CLP System Administrator). (And I worked on migrations from OfficeVision and from cc:Mail.)

A few things I remember really liking, from both a development and administration perspective:

- trivial to set up a second or third server, and have data automatically replicate between them

- super-easy to create CRUD apps for custom business processes, without using any 'code' except formulae that were as simple as spreadsheet formulae

- ability to add extra functionality with a language very similar to Visual Basic

And a few things that were annoying:

- because email was just another Notes application, it wasn't as good as things made just for email (like Outlook or Eudora)

- many people thought 'views' were folders, and that if an email existed in two places that meant two copies, and that they could delete one of them

- 'replication or save conflict' (https://help.hcl-software.com/dom_designer/14.5.0/basic/H_AB...)

Several times I sat with a user at their desk, and developed the first version of a CRUD app for them in real time, whilst we were still discussing the requirements.

Specifically, say there is an existing app with many users and which is full of data (say travel planning app) and you need to add a feature to it, which maybe takes a week of dev time.

- Do you work in prod and hope you don't break the existing functionality for users? Maybe even copy all forms ("new-request" -> "new-request2") so people don't see WIP... or maybe do all the work during nights?

- Or do you make a copy of that NSF file to your computer and develop on it? What if it has gigabytes of data, or if it has private data (like that HR database)? What do you do when you done - can you somehow merge code from one NSF file to another but leave data intact?

- Or is this something else? Maybe single-file was optional and big databases were manager separately, or there is some other simple option I am overlooking...

Before IBM forced changes on Notes I would say it was a very nice environment. But IBM, maybe customers and maybe others wanted it to work like cc mail (Is that was it was called?). The changes they made to me ruined the environment.

I wonder how Domino is doing, I hope it can continue being used by some people.

I used Designer to improve a bit the UI of the e-mail app of Notes. In general I have positive thoughts for both Domino and Notes, as e-mail server & client. Nevertheless the majority of colleagues complained, mostly due to Notes being different from Outlook I think.

Yet, one day, a fellow colleague, a young beautiful woman (marketing, not an IT geek or something), came in IT office to announce us her resignation. Before leaving, she asked if it's possible to give her the Notes installer to install it on her PC at home. She disliked Outlook & Outlook express and really liked Notes :) (v5 at that time if I recall well). We were all stunned and of course gave her the installer and a guide on how to setup her yahoo or hotmail using pop3 or imap.

The year that IBM bought Lotus, they decided to create a mini-website about it for their annual shareholder's meeting. The plan was to host the site on Lotus Notes Domino as a way of showing the value of the acquisition.

Something about this was last minute, but I can't remember what it was: Either the whole thing was a rush job because the merger has just happened, or the decision to use Domino to host the site was. I'm not sure which.

IBM had hired a boutique firm in Atlanta to design and lay out the web pages with all the bells and whistles: Slick graphics, gif-animations, JavaScript interactivity, etc. (this was mid-1990s when flashing text was a big deal). But, of course, they had no Domino experience.

At the time, I was a 20-something wiz kid working at my first job after I dropped out of college for a Lotus Notes consulting firm in Atlanta, with contracts at Bell South, Coca-Cola, IBM and other big names. I had been the first one in the company to get into the web in general, and then combined that with my Lotus Notes experience to become the Domino expert.

When the design firm reached out to my company for help getting the website working on Domino, I was the (only) one to send over to help.

So I spent a few days at their hip downtown loft/office working on a Notes database that would host the site. This involved converting their ordinary web pages into something that would work in Domino, which had it's own way of storing templates and displaying pages based on the underlaying Notes database. I'd run into an issue and then get with the designers to work around some limitation or another. But by Friday we had it working and looking great. They sent the database and other files up to IBM where they would then get it up and running on their public web servers.

Around 5pm that Sunday, I get a call from my boss. The design firm had called in a panic: IBM couldn't get Domino working. They could see the site locally on the same machine, but they couldn't access it publicly. I needed to help their server team fix it. In New York. Tomorrow. (Me? Didn't IBM own Lotus?)

He tells me that IBM is sending a car to come around and pick me up in 30 minutes, to get me to the airport where I'll fly to New York. Another car will pick me up and drive me to Armonk, where I'll check into a hotel, and then Monday morning I was to go into IBM early and help them get the site working, as the shareholders meeting had started.

IBM wasn't messing around. They used black car service with driver, flew me First/Business class, booked me into a nice hotel, the whole deal.

So I arrive at like 6 am the next morning and am met with open arms by someone running their server farm who explains everything they've done so far. He then plops me down in a corner of a giant server room, in front of a machine running AIX, with a Unix version of Notes and a terminal open to the machine running the Apache proxy to their public servers.

I had never seen, let alone used, a Unix box in my life up to that point, and knew nothing about Apache. I wasn't even sure what a "proxy" server did. I remember just sitting there for a minute, wide-eyed - looking at the three-button mouse like it was an alien artifact, and boggled by the GUI (CDE? Motif?) which was also from Mars. I was the opposite of that girl in Jurassic Park. "It's a Unix system! I have no idea what to do!"

Thankfully the Notes interface was the same on all platforms, so I had an anchor point to start from. Besides the fact that it took me a minute to figure out how to scroll (middle mouse button), I was in my element there.

The problem, it turned out, was a simple configuration setting (thank all that is holy) which I recognized immediately. It took me longer to figure out the mouse button thing. So like the proverbial plumber story, I opened my toolbox, took out a small ball peen hammer, tapped the configuration options, and the site popped up online.

Hooray!

Smiles all around! Handshakes were given, backs were slapped, jobs were saved. I was out of there by 8 am and on a plane back to Atlanta a couple after that, the conquerering hero.

So there's my Domino story. 30 years later it's still amusing to me.

I loved the commercial and get nostalgic watching it now.

https://youtu.be/rRAhCCGb7BY?si=UtRbsD6Pnwpb2Kpo

At a company I worked for, an intern mangled a bit of lotusscript into an unintentional virus that forwarded the entire contents of his inbox to every email address in the company, causing a reply storm that took a week to recover from.

From then on we called it Locust — a plague.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250407003816/http://www.moohar...