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 remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?) remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to and then away from Lotus Notes.
“…and I almost forgot ahh, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ah, we sorta need to play catch up.”
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.
> The best comparison today is not Outlook/Exchange, but the whole Web itself
Data had bidirectional replication with the server. Apps ran from local NoSQL databases on your machine which you synced it up with the server including the App code. The Web runs apps on servers, Notes not so much.
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.
> 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.
Are you sure the IRS still uses the exact same data format that was used in the 1960's or would "Business Master File" rather be a name for a data exchange standard?
Because the IBM 7074 is so old, it predates the 8 bit byte length.
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.
> 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.
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 know some of it was just bulk load and dump migration APIs.
Otherwise it was 30 years ago, so I don't remember at all what was being done. But LN didn't really have a good query language. Sure it's all fun and wizards inside Lotus Notes itself, but one of the failings was that in the database part it wasn't really a database for anything but Lotus Notes.
I believe at the time there was the beginnings of an ODBC interface to it, but it was buggy or insufficient for whatever reason.
So LN wasn't good at sharing information, just like every office product really isn't good at it. Fine for people using UIs and Wizards. I mean, it is a TRAVESTY of possibly billions of dollars or more of wasted money that spreadsheet products and formats aren't trivially readable to get access to the data within them, but that is a rant for another day.
Anyway, so if you wanted to integrate with LN data between rando-system, it was obtuse APIs. A "good" API makes connecting and data marshalling/representation/access pretty easy, along with search/index, etc.
I believe there was locking annoyances that occurred as well when the API was in use. I'm not sure LN was built for multi-user all that well, but again I don't recall the technical limitations. I think a LN database was a single file, so if you're doing API-level mucking with the data, you had to lock it from the LN application/server from doing anything.
All I remember is that Lotus Notes was "meh" on that front. Domino may have improved things, but by then I had moved my C skills to something else.
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.
If your company just using it for email, then migration wasn’t worth it. But if you wanted to build complex workflows on top of email in-house, then it was very good at that. Today everyone uses a bunch of different web apps to do what Notes did.
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)
Sounds like SharePoint in some ways (except the payroll stuff). Not a fan of SharePoint but it does offer opportunities to centralise stuff into one place.
SharePoint itself was only built so that it could be marketed as a "Notes killer". It doesn't do nearly what Notes did, but most shops only found that out after they were told to try to replace their Notes apps with SharePoint.
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.
Still?? For a brief time I worked at one, and the entire 3-ish years I was there I got "Hey, we're migrating away from Lotus Notes for real this time". That was in 2013
None of the groups I was in ever used it, so I never saw how it was used in the wild unfortunately
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.
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 …
When I said "the intranet started to creep in" what I meant was that I noticed that content information (and later apps) that used to go into a Lotus Notes application was instead created by someone as HTML files, and put on a server somewhere on the intranet (often their local machine).
Writing a Notes app and getting manager approval could be a lot of hassle, so it was often far simpler to open a text editor, write some HTML, and share the local network path with fellow workers. In those days Windows machine on an intranet could have a dedicated URL, using a system called "WINS" I think
I think that writing static HTML websites then acted as the "gateway drug" to dynamic webapps further down the line.
I am an exception but I liked it and I really dislike outlook (and exchange). I was far more productive with Notes back in the day; it was easy just to automate whatever. I am happy I never will have to use either ever again, but thrown back in time, I would pick Notes over Outlook any time.
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
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.