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Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

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Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#51

Post by _nhh »

andrea76 wrote: post #15
cube00 wrote: post #9

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 app…

Our company has now migrated its Lotus applications to web applications written in Java, but it took us quite a few years.

I am in the middle of it. We might do it till the end of 2026 with only two developers and about 50+ databases. Once we just _ported_ the databases instead of rethinking them, we increased speed by a order of magnitude. We can rethink later on the new platform

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#52

Post by p_l »

ubermonkey wrote: post #34
maguay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, an…

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

More like 3 years, and in a very niche network that was not generally deployed in companies looking for email outside of certain niches.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#53

Post by thataccount »

Well, there is another angle here from the Defense sector. Lotus Notes had a big ole backdoor in it: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#54

Post by p_l »

roryirvine wrote: post #43
jklowden wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins. That and, you know, Micros…

Sure, but Notes was built for a world where ccMail, MS Mail, and GroupWise were the main workgroup email systems. Notes followed a similar pattern, with a proprietary "post office" system with optional gateways to larger x.400 / SMTP / UUCP / OfficeVision networks for those who needed them. Going SMTP (or even x.400)-native from the start might have been a better choice in the long run, but that's only clear in retro…

Exchange is funny because it's X.400 native internally, even if recently they dropped external X.400 support

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#55

Post by maguay »

ubermonkey wrote: post #34
maguay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, an…

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

Absolutely, but it came several years before MIME for example for formatted emails with attachments, and other things.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#56

Post by thr0w »

_nhh wrote: post #46

It's 2026 and I am still in the middle of porting our notes databases to web. Notes is still the main platform for our applications, we have around 50 or so. I have a lot of respect for what notes is and what it enabled developers to do and I try to bring some ideas of it to the platform I am building. Funny enough today is exactly the day I did the initial commit on the new project one year ago. Happy birthday to my…

That's crazy. I did a Notes migration to a custom Java/Red Hat platform 20 years ago, even at that time it was like "can't believe these guys are on Lotus Notes". I remember Howard Stern used to reference LN on his radio show in the early 90s.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#57

Post by _nhh »

kwanbix wrote: post #48
_nhh wrote: post #46

It's 2026 and I am still in the middle of porting our notes databases to web. Notes is still the main platform for our applications, we have around 50 or so. I have a lot of respect for what notes is and what it enabled developers to do and I try to bring some ideas of it to the platform I am building. Funny enough today is exactly the day I did the initial commit on the new project one year ago. Happy birthday to my…

I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8. The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a pr…

> The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing.

It is. And it's the main thing why my boss does not understand why rebuilding databases takes so much time. For him its just a little thing, some fields and off you go...

Unfortunately it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#58

Post by iso1631 »

cube00 wrote: post #13
steveBK123 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" which isn't feature complete 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.

My only interaction with outlook in the last 15+ years has been via web view, as I run linux. It does the job -- indeed I find it better than modern gmail.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#59

Post by theturtle »

flymasterv wrote: post #20

I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room. Same thing with Google Wave, really.

[dead]

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#60

Post by kwanbix »

jjkaczor wrote: post #50

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…

100% my sentiment.
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