Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

Outlook 2003 was a major killer of Notes. Office 2003 on Win2k/XP was a killer offering, MSFT at its height of dominance.

Office 2007 introduced the ribbon and got under pressure by the web (GSuite).

But the early aughts? Office 2003 with XML and Sharepoint just wiped out all other stacks, especially Exchange steamrolling Domino and GroupWise.

I was part of a consulting team back then, the transformation projects were all going in one direction. That stack is dominant to this day.

This is my recollection as well. Microsoft was basically the savior back then, when Lotus was viewed as old and hard to maintain. It wasn't unusual hear from colleagues suffering a multi day Notes outage due to sync issues or the bridge being broken. "Hip" companies moved to Outlook and Exchange.

I administered messaging and groupware systems for over 15 years. It was a large chunk of my career. I worked with both Exchange Server/Outlook and Lotus Domino/Notes, and generally preferred Lotus Domino - but both had their issues.

This article doesn't feel like it was written by someone who was using these platforms, nor like anyone was there at the time was consulted.

For example, focusing on F5 is odd. F5 is not the Office refresh key. F9 is. Excel uses it to recalculate. Word uses it to refresh fields. Outlook should have used it to fetch/refresh mail, but for some reason they went with the Windows/IE platform teams' choice of F5. Microsoft did actually switch back to using F9 in Outlook, and there was a significant outcry from their users. None of this is mentioned.

Similarly there's a screenshot of a messagebox stating that there are too many windows. No context given, but I'd bet it's from Loutus Notes 4.6 or earlier, which used MDI. MDI is limited to 9 windows. I hit that limit in a lot of applications back in the late WIndows 3.1/early Windows 95 days, at the peak of MDI. Notes Release 5 moved away from MDI, and gave the user a tabbed interface. The Exchange Mail and Outlook clients never used MDI, opening a new window for each mail - which may or may not be a better solution, given that Windows didn't have task stacking on the taskbar at the time. Nine tabs in Notes was just one taskbar entry, nine windows with Outlook was heading towards a serious usability problem...

I'd like to note that the Notes client didn't benefit from the network effects that Outlook did. At the time many of the complaints in the article were being made software packaging and deployment was in its infancy. Many environments made Notes and Outlook/Office part of their base build making updates a difficult thing to accomplish. Not to mention that the installers were quite large, taxing many networks of the time. But Outlook had the benefit of being part of Office - sometimes people wanted the latest features in Word or Excel, so the effort was made to update the installation. Notes had no such advantage. A similar network effect arrives when it comes to licensing, given that larger organisations will have volume licensing deals.

By contrast on the server side Exchange Server was a complete PITA to upgrade. You don't merely install new software, you build an entire new infrastructure and migrate mailboxes over to it. Very expensive, especially in the days of physical hardware. Whereas Lotus Notes Server/Domino was very easy to upgrade or extend.

As a result many Notes installations were up to date on their backend but not the frontend, whereas many Outlook installations were the other way around.

Anyway, I've gone on for too long - much like all the products we're discussing here. ;-)

This. Microsoft was very aggressive in courting CIOs and senior management, and had a great sales team.

I remember hearing that they had a storage calculator spreadsheet that would allow you to calculate how many IOPS you'd need from your storage to deploy Exchange.

Everyone I knew working with Notes or other products was gobsmacked. Why would you need that? Just buy decent storage. Nobody outside of the Exchange world cared about IOPS, unless you were dealing with of high thousands of users on one machine/cluster.

But the Exchange Server storage layer was a total dog's breakfast. (And not a healthy dog, either.) So disk performance was much more important for them.

And that spreadsheet was like crack for the senior management layer. They suddenly got to play with the numbers of users, mails per hour, mailbox quotas - then feel like they had involvement. They had input. They could go to their storage vendors with those figures and speak authoratitively about their requirements.

Those vendors would humour them, and sell them the exact same array that everyone else was buying for that capacity requirement and budget.

But Microsoft had turned a weakness into a strength, by making the managers feel like they had real input into the process.

Honestly, that spreadsheet was a genius move that it took me years to understand.

WebView Outlook predates AI agents getting good.