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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

#61

Post by _nhh »

thr0w wrote: post #56
_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.

I totally agree. I am very grateful when we migrated off of it.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#62

Post by 1317 »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #41

So... PLATO user, Notes user and Thunderbird user here with a couple of notes. a. Everything you think is new was created in the 1960s by Don Bitzer @ UIUC or Doug Engelbart @ SRI. (and probably also Robert Creasy @ IBM.) b. Lotus Notes (and Groove) were products, not protocols. If you wanted to use them, you used Windows and the server and client from the vendor. c. Lotus Notes only sort of worked over the intarwebs…

> But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird as my email client. If I could figure out a way to get it to turn off HTML mail I would.

view -> message body as -> plain text :)

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#63

Post by NDizzle »

I joined a company using Notes back in '00. Performed the 4 to 5 upgrade, skipped 6 and went to 7.

We had our "email blast" code in the founder of the companies mail database. When we launched new features or had various announcements, you would log on to Mark's email database and run those features in the drop down. Of course there were various permissions in check that only certain people could do (or view) certain things in the database, but that's where it ended up...

I always thought the data/design replication was cool as well. I had to bake in what I called "relational fields" into the documents to be able to perform some standard relational database type of work, but it was really easy to work with overall. Maybe too easy - as one person mentioned in the thread, there were hundreds of little custom apps built by anyone/everyone in the company, because it was just that easy.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#65

Post by jhallenworld »

I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.

Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#66

Post by roryirvine »

p_l wrote: post #54
roryirvine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, Exchange is a good comparator because it shows what the mail aspect of Notes might have been like had it been designed in the mid 90s rather than the late 80s.

It's hard now to appreciate how different corporate IT was from the free-wheeling Internet world. The unexpected popularity of the web really did change everything.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#67

Post by slater »

There was a joke going round when Lotus Notes was still mildly popular:

There's exactly two people who LOVE Lotus Notes. One is the boss, cos he's never wrong, and the other is the Lotus Notes developer/integrator, cos he's getting money.

EVERYONE else in the org goes "Uggghghghhh, not Lotus Notes!"

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#68

Post by pjc50 »

jbgreer wrote: post #42

In the 90’s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc. Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comm…

An absolute classic of "we've done no requirements analysis at all, but our exec went drinking with the wrong people and that now defines the solution, regardless of the problem".

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#70

Post by altcognito »

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…

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.
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