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Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

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Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#61

Post by redcap »

jasondigitized wrote: post #52

I cut my teeth on Lotus Notes straight out of school. It was way ahead of its time and anyone who knows about Ray Ozzie knows that dude puts out good kit. Bill Gates didn't make him CTO for nothing. Anyone who reduced it to a email client didn't understand where its true powered lied which was workflow and document / record management. If you knew how to combine the ACL with forms, views, and agents you could build s…

I'm currently working in a patent law firm in Japan, and we make heavy use of Notes to manage work we bill and to manage all the information relating to filing cases and managing the client correspondence for each case. There's a myriad of forms but it all (still) works.

Naturally at this point we use a different email client, but I don't think there's any incentive to shift away from Notes as it just works.

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#62

Post by brazzledazzle »

jasondigitized wrote: post #53
jquast wrote: post #27

I appreciated the nosql-like database model of a "notes" and "views". It inspired the way I managed data for the remainder of my career. I believe the concept of "tags" of flickr or "labels" of gmail are Notes-inspired concepts. Maybe it doesn't scale well for late 90's internet-enabled desktops, but Ray Ozzie developed software with a solid 15-year shelf life. I'm happy to have had the few years experience as a lotu…

Absolutely agree. I spent a lot of time in Notes, read all the blogs, and had all the certifications. It definetly shaped how I look at things even 15 years later. The combination of the ACL, reader / author fields, views, agents, and forms was beautiful

What do you think fills that role Notes had today? Or would you say it's split between various products/services?

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#63

Post by [deleted] »

jasondigitized wrote: post #53
jquast wrote: post #27

I appreciated the nosql-like database model of a "notes" and "views". It inspired the way I managed data for the remainder of my career. I believe the concept of "tags" of flickr or "labels" of gmail are Notes-inspired concepts. Maybe it doesn't scale well for late 90's internet-enabled desktops, but Ray Ozzie developed software with a solid 15-year shelf life. I'm happy to have had the few years experience as a lotu…

Absolutely agree. I spent a lot of time in Notes, read all the blogs, and had all the certifications. It definetly shaped how I look at things even 15 years later. The combination of the ACL, reader / author fields, views, agents, and forms was beautiful

[deleted]

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#64

Post by taurath »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #60
topspin wrote: post #13

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and we used Notes for all internal document management, email and later even web content management. The thing just quietly kept everything in sync; distributed servers, mobile users and their laptops and traditional desktops, and never lost a byte of it despite fl…

UI/UX is so important. When I was involved with a migration from Notes/Domino to Exchange/Office several years ago you would have thought, based on their reactions, that hundreds of employees were being set free. It doesn't matter how technically superior something is if people don't like it.

It felt like you were using a point of sale system from the 1980s - the business folks all liked it because of how powerful it was but to the end user absolutely nothing made sense and you just wanted to get back to common paradigms. It required F-key hotkeys to advance in most workflows for gods sake!

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#65

Post by brazzledazzle »

codingdave wrote: post #17
chaosite wrote: post #4

"Notes is a document creation, editing, and storage system." Strangely, at the last (and only, thankfully) place where I had to use Notes, it was not used for that purpose. Instead, it was used as an e-mail system and an inventory management tool.

Before IBM bought it, Lotus was planning on killing the email functions, and just leaving it as a database and application system. IBM was a mixed blessing to the product - they made it large enough to succeed, but also totally messed with its purpose. IBM used it as email first, application server 2nd. That was never its strength. Oddly, IBM has since spent the last 20 years proclaiming it to be more than email, whi…

I get the impression that anything that aims to be an accessible platform for building business collaboration apps is doomed to get a bad reputation (whether it's earned or not) because any crappy app built on it is going to put a sour taste for the platform in the mouth of anyone that uses it. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#66

Post by baldfat »

glhaynes wrote: post #9
baldfat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually found Notes to be an amazing tool and found it to be a great system to work with. I just wish they kept the development going with a strong user experience in mind. I found my love of using PIM in Notes.

It seems like everybody who ever used Notes either loved it or hated it. Makes me wish I'd ever used it. Or glad I haven't?

You can still use it.

The UI was not for the Non-Tech crowd and even then drove everyone a little batty. F5 in Notes locked your account as opposed to Refresh and the like. Different parts of the program would have very different UIs. I didn't mind it.

They say more people use it now then ever but ....

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#67

Post by bokchoi »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #33
WalterGR wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timelessness of the promises made in this specification are very interesting to me. To me as well. Reading the PDF, it reminds me of WinFS, which I worked on. (Though I don't remember WinFS's collaboration story.) Dreaming in Code [1] is a great book about Kapor's attempt to build such an open source platform, post-Notes. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the problem space. [1] https://www.amazon.co…

I have no specific questions to ask, but I'm intrigued to hear you worked on WinFS. WinFS is something I wish happened, albeit I'm sure that what I thought it was wasn't what it actually was (since I never actually used it, wrote any code the APIs, etc, I can't ever be sure). I was enamored with BeFS. When I heard about WinFS I was excited to think it might bring some of the coolness that BeFS provided to a mass audi…

I too was sad to see Chandler die as well. It looks like the source was imported into github:

https://github.com/owenmorris/chandler https://github.com/owenmorris/chandler2

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#68

Post by m_mueller »

Havoc wrote: post #47
topspin wrote: post #13

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and we used Notes for all internal document management, email and later even web content management. The thing just quietly kept everything in sync; distributed servers, mobile users and their laptops and traditional desktops, and never lost a byte of it despite fl…

>A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. [...] 2004 Well then its become progressively worse since. Been using it for 3 years now and each version has gotten progressively worse (unstable, slow, bloated). Random people's Notes crashes multiple times a day, others have mysteriously slow ones, sync issues etc. Its only redeeming feature is SameTime...

Agreed. The eclipse client made everything worse IMO.

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#70

Post by Jaruzel »

goatlover wrote: post #69

What replaced Notes for doing custom workflows? Despite whatever hate or legitimate criticism it received, Notes was really good at letting you putting together workflows. And the Domino servers with their ability to replicate databases was really nice.

Microsoft would like you to believe that OneNote and SharePoint filled that gap.
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