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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

#71

Post by newsoftheday »

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…

Agree with that, I've used both Notes heavily in the past and SharePoint/Exchange as a software engineer exposed to them and Notes always felt more cohesive. Notes (and Oracle products) get dumped on in discussions on Reddit and sometimes on HN but Notes worked well and was very consistent, Oracle products too for that matter, in my experience.

Notes and Sametime also worked very well on Linux on my IBM work laptop, supported by support, official Linux distro inside IBM. That was mid-late 2000's when many companies hadn't even thought of trying to support both Windows and Linux (or Mac).

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#72

Post by kakuri »

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 provided an amazing platform. I think its fatal flaw was that it targeted unskilled developers. The result was a bunch of poorly made applications which were naturally hated by users. Also targeting unskilled developers resulted in a developer experience hostile to skilled software engineers so they went elsewhere.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#73

Post by mikepurvis »

fg137 wrote: post #40

> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.” I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wron…

> For most users who only use a single platform

Also depends if your "platform" extends beyond just the OS. If platform includes IDE/editor/terminal, then a lot of users are juggling multiple keyboard schemes from different eras (ctrl-C has entered the chat).

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#74

Post by rmu09 »

Ca. 2000. Converted a few companies (each around 20-30 mail / calendar users) from novell groupwise and ms exchange to notes/domino. Client OSes were windows 98, maybe even an occasional windows for workgroups. Not smooth sailing. Had to abort at least one conversion in the middle of the night because some "wizard" didn't work.

Users were trained in the new ways of email and some proprietary CRM app we developed, but IIRC at least half of the customers rolled back immediately because of user protest over user interface and missing/non-working functionality, one customer even went under.

In principle Lotus Notes was the best, but practically, it was horrible.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#76

Post by rmu09 »

kakuri wrote: post #72
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 provided an amazing platform. I think its fatal flaw was that it targeted unskilled developers. The result was a bunch of poorly made applications which were naturally hated by users. Also targeting unskilled developers resulted in a developer experience hostile to skilled software engineers so they went elsewhere.

25yrs ago, doing any kind of revision control or compare different "versions" of the same "database" was next to impossible IIRC. Then there were those "replication failures", sometimes trivial to fix, sometimes completely impossible to debug. And god forbid you did something to the default email template to make it more compatible with external IMAP clients...

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#77

Post by esafak »

baggachipz wrote: post #38

My first internship and job out of college was as a Notes developer. I spent most of my time trying to trick/strongarm Notes into doing what I wanted. Want to build a timekeeping system? Sure, I can do that. A website? No problem, Domino server made it easy(ish). The paradigm of everything being a database with documents was ahead of its time, but the real power was in LotusScript. It was basically just Javascript an…

> The paradigm of everything being a database with documents was ahead of its time, but the real power was in LotusScript. It was basically just Javascript and that allowed me to transition to a web dev role later on. I have mostly fond memories of Notes.

The modern iteration is Notion.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#79

Post by shadowtree »

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…

As a former Notes user (email, cal, plus apps for expense tracking, etc) - what did Notes in was the horrendous, non-Windows user interface. The second half of the article here is spot on, if anyone bothers to read it. Nice to see those old site ridiculing Notes, Jeff Atwood et al - a blast from the past!

As an end-user, I welcomed Notes demise.

And don't get me started on its god-awful local/offline sync behavior. Outlook ran circles around it. Hard to believe from todays perspective, sure, but yes, Lotus Notes was so much worse.

Re: Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

#80

Post by shadowtree »

fg137 wrote: post #40

> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.” I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wron…

It was an era when Windows had near total Desktop market share in businesses - and Notes violated all Windows UI conventions. Enter MS Office (pre-ribbon) and LN was toast.

MSFT was so dominant back then that Gates had to rescue Apple to keep up the appearance of a fair market!

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