I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one internal app or a hundred.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.
It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
> that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one internal app or a hundred.
Our company has now migrated its Lotus applications to web applications written in Java, but it took us quite a few years.
Lotus Notes was underrated imo.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.
It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
> that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
As written in the article, the UI sucked to many to us. Then our corporate migred to GMAIL and never looked back.
"Lotes" as we used to call it in my first job.
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.