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LotusNotes

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Re: LotusNotes

#51

Post by jasondigitized »

dharmatech wrote: post #15
senectus1 wrote: post #2

I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT. Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all. Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.

What platform did you run Domino on? If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.

It was. I did some I.T. consulting in the Fortune 500 and a few ran Notes on the AS/400.

Re: LotusNotes

#52

Post by jasondigitized »

cake-rusk wrote: post #6

It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...

As a email client.

Re: LotusNotes

#53

Post by boilerupnc »

GMoromisato wrote: post #16
dundercoder wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?

It was basically NoSQL before NoSQL. Each note was just a record, but with no schema. Schemas were imposed at the UI layer by forms and at indexing time by views.

Related [0]

[0]. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/couchdb/

Re: LotusNotes

#54

Post by cess11 »

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…

Thanks for sharing. The demo linked below looked pretty cool, I think this might be a nice complement to Glamorous Toolkit in some of my personal and work flows.

Re: LotusNotes

#55

Post by _nhh »

I joined a company in 2025 an since then I am tasked with porting all Lotus Notes databases to the web (spa+restapi). Funny to see all the comments living in the past as its so present to me.

Re: LotusNotes

#56

Post by _nhh »

jasondigitized wrote: post #46
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.

100%

Re: LotusNotes

#57

Post by WillAdams »

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…

I am still convinced, that one way to foster professionalism in working e-mail and to facilitate collaboration would be to use e-mail as the interface for a content management system:

- incoming e-mails are categorized by organization sending/topic (until a project can be associated)

- all attachments are stripped off and stored on the server using a hierarchy which the recipient is prompted to update

- outgoing e-mails are treated in the same fashion in reverse, so a link to a file on a server is moved to the CMS and then included as a clickable link

(probably employees would have to have a separate company-sponsored e-mail for insurance correspondence)

Re: LotusNotes

#58

Post by adrian_b »

wolvoleo wrote: post #35
topspin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lotus Notes died because the web took over Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today. I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on ne…

M365 is proprietary and it is widely used by companies

M365 is used only because it is the continuation of MS Office, which had been entrenched in most companies for many decades.

In the beginning, the fact that MS Office was proprietary had nothing to do with communication protocols, but only with the file formats.

The need to convert between proprietary file formats had always existed in an enterprise setting, which is why all such products, including MS Office, had extensive support for importing the file formats of their competitors, so this was never a serious obstacle for adoption.

Re: LotusNotes

#59

Post by WillAdams »

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…

One noted science fiction author, C.J. Cherryh, notes, “It is perfectly okay to write garbage --- as long as you edit brilliantly.”[1] --- for a while I've been wondering if this adage was applicable to Vibe-coding, and your methodology would seem to be a reasonable approach/response to get the benefits of this and to shield against the detriments, and to ensure that a human developer understands the code before committing.

1 - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/398754-it-is-perfectly-okay...

Re: LotusNotes

#60

Post by nradov »

vsajip wrote: post #45

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 a…

Later versions of Domino also had full Java support, so you could write applications in that language and just use Domino as a back end database. But you still had to do semi-manual memory management, which made it tough for most Java programmers.
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