Comment by jjkaczor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjkaczor | Hacker News Reader

My first exposure to Lotus Notes was to work on a migration project that was moving from Notes to "Exchange WebStorage System" (WebDAV) - which was an aborted "go-nowhere" server/service which ended-up being replaced by SharePoint ("Teams Services") - which we had to also re-target mid-project.

We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate, a small team and an extremely limited time. (and varying levels of complexity in each app)

What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities.

We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app).

However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".

Agree with that, I've used both Notes heavily in the past and SharePoint/Exchange as a software engineer exposed to them and Notes always felt more cohesive. Notes (and Oracle products) get dumped on in discussions on Reddit and sometimes on HN but Notes worked well and was very consistent, Oracle products too for that matter, in my experience.

Notes and Sametime also worked very well on Linux on my IBM work laptop, supported by support, official Linux distro inside IBM. That was mid-late 2000's when many companies hadn't even thought of trying to support both Windows and Linux (or Mac).

Sametime had to work in Java Applets so portability was key. IIRC our biggest customer was the Australian navy.

I was briefly what is now called a developer-in-test on Sametime after Lotus Development bought them. I was untrained in C++ so my bug reports for that API were frequently closed with the comment "No".

Notes provided an amazing platform. I think its fatal flaw was that it targeted unskilled developers. The result was a bunch of poorly made applications which were naturally hated by users. Also targeting unskilled developers resulted in a developer experience hostile to skilled software engineers so they went elsewhere.

25yrs ago, doing any kind of revision control or compare different "versions" of the same "database" was next to impossible IIRC. Then there were those "replication failures", sometimes trivial to fix, sometimes completely impossible to debug. And god forbid you did something to the default email template to make it more compatible with external IMAP clients...

As a former Notes user (email, cal, plus apps for expense tracking, etc) - what did Notes in was the horrendous, non-Windows user interface. The second half of the article here is spot on, if anyone bothers to read it. Nice to see those old site ridiculing Notes, Jeff Atwood et al - a blast from the past!

As an end-user, I welcomed Notes demise.

And don't get me started on its god-awful local/offline sync behavior. Outlook ran circles around it. Hard to believe from todays perspective, sure, but yes, Lotus Notes was so much worse.

I was part of the small team that added Exchange Offline mode very, very late in the product cycle specifically to counter the Notes Local Replication story.

We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.

The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.

Kudos, as an owner of an offline/sync stack myself - this stuff is so hard at scale. You guys did a great job!

What was so bad about the non-Windows interface other than it wasn't Windows? I didn't have problems with using Notes email or developing apps for Notes. It had incredible workflow and database replication features. Blew anything Microsoft had at the time out of the water. When I was forced to start using Outlook, didn't care for it. Still don't think it's all that great. I guess Sharepoint is decent enough now.

Sure I guess if all you cared about as an end-user was email and Windows-like UI, then I guess I understand. But you were missing a ton of other things.

Finally within the last 1-2 years, SharePoint Online in combination with the various other M365 services (and Azure) is "pretty good".

Low-code/no-code is available with SharePoint Lists (with some level of JSON customization), but mainly PowerPlatform.

But if you need to, you can develop extensions/webparts in JavaScript/TypeScript. While the ability to include arbitrary JS within Pages is mostly "gone" (except I guess for this latest CoPilot/HTML offering - although you are limited in how/what you can do with JavaScript), that means better structure - we will see how the replacement of VBA with "Office Scripts" goes.

Then you link in things like Teams, M365 Groups, Loop, "Forms", Planner, Purview and you can get quite the mix of capabilities.

We migrated to office 365 around 2013 from notes, horrible to use compared to notes. The project was supposed to pay for itself with loweered license fees for notes users, then it turned out we had 2-3k apps in notes without any migration plan or budget, so most people still needed a lotus license for years.

Notes was legit. It was very featureful and cool but the amount of support and hardware required was quite high. A little ahead of its time.

>We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate

???

Mostly CRUD-type data collection - or essentially what would be "Pages" in tools like SharePoint, a landing location with linked resources, text, etc.

"BA's" had been building them for years before we arrived.

We categorized them into complexity buckets: Level 1 - simple CRUD, no "business logic" - we could convert those during a quick demo, 20m. Level 2 - slightly complex, including "@Formulas" - each would take about an hour to convert/migrate with some minimal manual intervention. Level 3 - even more complex - minor analysis/review. Level 4 - complex, detailed requirements and review needed.

Initially the first rough estimate without our "conversion/migration framework" was about 10-years (1-person) to rebuild them all.

After our tooling came live, we were able to complete in about 6-months with a team of 4 people.

Of course - a few short years later - truly starting at about release of SharePoint 2010 - Microsoft was evangelizing it's own "low-code/no-code" capabilities for users to dig themselves into the same situation. (SharePoint Designer Workflows, InfoPath, "smart/connected" Documents, data-driven Visio diagrams, "easy" customization of Sites/Pages via JavaScript/CSS/HTML, etc.)

100% my sentiment.

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