Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article. I didn't know Domino was still around, let alone still being developed.

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.

> 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

Thunderbird user here. I wish you hadn't said that. I'll be forever missing this now :(

Having just one Big Ol' Container of Email and making views on that, based on whatever properties/tags like which project it's for, which customer, whether it's marked as spam by the system or by you, a keyword match, or sorting it higher if I'm in To instead of CC... yes please! Am I picturing right how this worked?

Outlook has this and I've been using it in a work context for many years. Create custom tags for domains and or projects, tag email, notes, meetings with as few or as many tags as you like, and create handy 'Search folders' which are basically a view on a query (you can use other query terms beyond tag of course). The actual email just goes into big ol' "Archive". I gave up on folder heirarchy many years ago precisely because some emails map to multiple issues/domains/projects.

I worked with a boutique management consulting company part time during college in 98/99. Notes and Domino came packaged with a few IBM servers they bought. I was tasked with setting it up for email. It was fun exploring the system, absolutely not knowing what I was doing. I ended up having a similar experience of building out an app in realtime to help one of the consultants manually compiling a large amount of data for a customer. Extremely rewarding. But, it was also a painful lesson in NoSQL (before we even had that word...)

It was a document database. The idea being that workflow was document based, and the applications you made for it were using documents in a workflow.

It was nosql.. until one used notessql to get it into ansi sql over an odbc connection.

I worked at Lotus, and then in banks doing Lotus Notes apps. It really was super simple to create a simple line of business app with minimal coding, proper security, workflow etc.

Writing Notes/Dominos apps was my first 'programming' job (if you ignore cutting and pasting random javascript into HTML files...) back in 97. We created a whole suite of in house apps that basically ran the business, including making most of them available as web apps for people who didn't have the Notes Client. It was so fast and simple do to that even a 'dumb' kid with only a high school education and who barely knew how to program could be instantly productive, I honestly can't think of anything that can really match it even today.

I've always been slightly confused why they insisted on selling it as a mediocre email client rather than a quite fantastic RAD tool.

"I honestly can't think of anything that can really match it even today"

This is exactly my thought.

Perhaps Attio or Google AppSheet?

I can offer only second-hand knowledge, but I was told at the time that Lotus was intending to keep the RAD aspects and drop email from it completely, leaving cc:Mail as a standalone product. But IBM came along and wanted to modernize their email system, so Lotus took a deal to take the direction IBM wanted because it also brought massive marketing and consulting power and could drive adoption better than Lotus could.

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