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LotusNotes

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Re: LotusNotes

#41

Post by dspillett »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #18
GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time. Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.

Another major issue was that the first implementation most people saw of it was the email side, and it could be a truly clunky and unpleasant email client. This soured opinions before people delved into the document management and programmability features that email handling were just one use of.

From a technical point of view one of the bonuses I saw was that it used PKI throughout for encryption and such, which very little other software did. Though this was also clunky at times especially for non-technical users (has anyone ever made the use of PKI a smooth process for those who don't care to know the details?). Proper ACL management too rather than more simplistic permissions, but again this could be very clunky.

Though I'm not sure why we are talking entirely in the past tense, while Domino & Notes are not widely used anymore, they are still out there and developed (under the name HLC Notes) with the last release (adding LLM based “AI” features, of course…) was Jun last year and a bugfix update a few months later. My experience with Domino/Notes was in the 00s and early 10s when I was the accidental admin (the only guy who really understood it left) of a mail and document server based on it, hopefully the clunkiness complaints at least have been addressed since then.

Re: LotusNotes

#43

Post by mathattack »

I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren’t the thing anymore.

When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.

Re: LotusNotes

#44

Post by skissane »

GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

Do you know, does anyone still have copies of Notes versions 1 and 2?

I’ve seen Notes 3 clients and servers on the usual abandonware sites, but never any pre-3.x version

Re: LotusNotes

#45

Post by vsajip »

In my experience working with Notes over many years, it was a neat architecture let down by client UI that did not meet the expectations of users who also used, for example, MS Office apps. Often, they were cosmetic things. But Notes enabled workflow applications like email on steroids; Microsoft leveraged all it could to displace Notes with Exchange and SharePoint, both IMO technically not as good as Notes in many areas, but the Outlook UI was much better than the Notes client for email, and together with the marketing push, client-side Notes was finished. Domino could perhaps have survived, but it needed more than the anaemic LotusScript and formula language to get support from developers, and that never happened.

Re: LotusNotes

#46

Post by jasondigitized »

GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

Cut my teeth in Lotus Notes development. The combination of forms, views, and agents with the Notes security model was really powerful. I look at products like Notion and Coda and see nothing but Notes forms and views and formulas everywhere. Ray Ozzie was way ahead of his time.

Re: LotusNotes

#47

Post by jasondigitized »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #18
GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time. Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.

This. A good Notes developer with decent UX chops could create really powerful, ROI driving applications but those guys where few and far between.

Re: LotusNotes

#48

Post by jasondigitized »

pscanf wrote: post #7

I'm building an app that is, in a way, a modern take on Lotus Notes ( https://github.com/superegodev/superego ), and I couldn't feel this more: > It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was. Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my t…

If you squint, Notion and Coda are childish versions of Lotus Notes.

Re: LotusNotes

#49

Post by cess11 »

GMoromisato wrote: post #3

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…

Notes isn't exactly dead. A couple of years ago I helped a swedish county extract social services data from a system built on it, which is still in use by quite a few other counties.

Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.

I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.

Re: LotusNotes

#50

Post by acomjean »

I ended up at IBM around the turn of the century. They bought Lotus and I was brought on to write lotus notes applications.

The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together.

We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custom Notes applications the department used regularly.

It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.

The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.

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