I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.
It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
My only interaction with outlook in the last 15+ years has been via web view, as I run linux. It does the job -- indeed I find it better than modern gmail.
> that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
Always fun when NLNOTES crashed but the Eclipse wrapper kept running so things like tabs still worked but couldn't show any Notes tabs however web based tabs kept working.
The sad thing for me is that Notes’ core data model was really solid. As a rapid internal app dev platform it was ahead of its time in many ways. E.g. Microsoft’s sharepoint and power apps still cannot compete in terms of capabilities. IBM just didn’t know what to do with it.
Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).
This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins.
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 retrospect - it certainly wasn't obvious at the time.
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.
On the other hand, anyone working on Notes would also be aware that its relationship with email is closer to today's Sharepoint than to today's Exchange. Email was one small aspect of a massive featureset; Notes was ahead of its time in terms of CRM/ERP/one-platform-for-everything that drives modern businesses like Oracle and Salesforce.
in 1990 the internet was something talked about on your BBS as a mystical place you couldn't get access to except as a student. Lots of places had email, but it was unusual for anyone to be connected to any other system. Sometimes a BBS was part of fidonet, but that was rare (and there were many many less known networks).
Even if your typical big company did have a gateway for their internal email to other companies, odds are very few people used that gateway for business. If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a different company you dialed the phone or sent a fax.
The Notes directory was based on X.500 - it had the same attributes etc. Notes didn't implement DAP, but then almost nobody did, which is why we got LDAP.
There was an add-on connector for X.400 mail. I remember installing it a couple of times. It was fine, if cumbersome due to the nature of X.400. ;-)
They also didn't ignore SMTP. There was a connector for it for Notes 4.0 and 4.1, and starting with Notes 4.5 that connector was bundled in the box. Starting with Release 5 they retired the connector and moved SMTP functionality to be native in the mail router process, and for security they provided a separate SMTP listener task. Both of these were configured in the Notes Directory via Server Documents and Configuration Documents, just like any other feature of the server. If a Domino server wasn't sending or receiving SMTP, it's because its administrator didn't want it to, not because it couldn't.
It wasn't a walled garden, or if it was the wall was very low. By comparison Microsoft's first attempt to dethrone Notes - Exchange Public Folders - was a completely walled garden. And a very well fertilised one which people avoided due to the smell.
But it's OK, Microsoft then gave us SharePoint. The fact that Microsoft's customers rushed to it tells you how bad Public Folders were. So your comment "That and, you know, Microsoft" is much closer to the truth than protocol support.
(Source: I was a Principle Certified Lotus Domino Administrator for multiple versions, and have used & administered Lotus Notes versions from version 3.33 through to 8.5. I worked at a consultancy and installed many, many implementations of Lotus Notes across a number of topologies. I also had an Exchange Server MCP and worked with multiple versions of that too.)
>Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something?
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
The IBM Lotus Notes mail client and cc:Mail were developed independently by separate teams in different locations. Both were originally built by independent companies that were later acquired. cc:Mail was killed in 2000. IBM might have added some Notes features to achieve functional parity with cc:Mail and make it easier for customers to migrate.
Usually, when someone talks about "starting from scratch" they mean "starting over from scratch," meaning throwing out something good enough in the hope of building something perfect.
This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one internal app or a hundred.
I am in the middle of it. We might do it till the end of 2026 with only two developers and about 50+ databases. Once we just _ported_ the databases instead of rethinking them, we increased speed by a order of magnitude. We can rethink later on the new platform
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
For what a great many people used it for on the other hand…
It was a great platform for making document and workflow control applications, and was ahead of its time in terms of a proper PKI system for authentication/access/verification and access control lists and such. But many people hit a poorly made application and that coloured their opinion for the rest, and in the list of terrible applications I'm including the standard email support, which was a royal PITA, and most custom versions for that function. The general UX wasn't great either, not so bad that you couldn't put up with it for a great application but if you are hating the rest of the application then the general UX issues grind your gears too.
In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI.
I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room.
Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn’t have permissions or something.
I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax.
The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand new market that had never existed before.
This led to the price for a movie on VHS/Beta ranging from $10 to over $100 because no one knew what the actual demand curve looked like.
I feel like the 1990s was a lot like this but with UI/UX. People had opinions on what consumers wanted but the market was expanding so quickly that no one knew for sure. Firms just tried things and, in hindsight, some firms seemed "smarter" because they picked the feature set that customers ended up liking.
I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs.
Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.
Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.
But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.
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 and that allowed me to transition to a web dev role later on. I have mostly fond memories of Notes.
> 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.
LotusScript was heavily modelled after Visual Basic. I thought it was an awful language to work with. :) But LN was generally a fun platform... as long as you kept things very, very simple.
You're right, it was VBScript that it mimicked. I then parlayed that into Active Server Pages, which could use VBScript or JScript. We pivoted into JScript and that's when the web dev world truly opened up for me.
> “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 wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.
This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.
The larger point - which they made poorly - seems to be that Notes made a lot of decisions that probably were fine alone. However nothing stands alone, and everybody else made a different decision.
Some of the different decisions everybody made were for good reason. I know Apple and [later] Microsoft spent a large amount of money on human factors engineers doing real experiments to figure out what worked. I have never seen evidence that Lotus spent the money to see what was a good idea - they just made it work.
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).
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!
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.
As a user of Notes in the mid-late 90s, I found it suuuper annoying. Also, do you want a horizontal scroll bar when the content is too wide for the window? No problem, just turn on the option in the menu. (And then it will be there all the time, whether it's needed or not.)
I was administering a small Domino server and using Notes for email. I think it was the worst thing I worked on at the time.
Nobody cares perhaps, but F5 as a refresh key came in the mid 80s (I was told it was a $1m of usability consulting). The midrange AS/400 got [CUA](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=actions-default-...) first. There were many more F1 for help, F12 for go-back-a-page, F3 for big-exit of app. Green screen stuff (3270 and 5250 where two common wire/frame protocols). The same keys made the jump to some windows apps. One by one they got whittled away until F5 for refresh was left. For that one it wasn't just Windows - as browser rollout took it wider. Has it gone yet? I'm on a Chromebook and it doesn't have F keys so I can't see for myself.
I think it's usually my IDE. I haven't seen it recently; not sure if I disabled it in a fit of pique, or if it just doesn't do that any more? (/me goes and tentatively pokes F1 on purpose for the first time in decades... yeah, it's the latter).
"Have you ever seen a keyboard where the F1 key is missing? Chances are that isn’t an accident. It’s a deliberate move to avoid accidentally launching the Excel Help menu [...]"
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. It had
serious problems traversing firewalls, and technically worked
over VPNs, but was nearly unusable as it required you to
either replicate your AD server or use AD over the VPN (I do
not recommend the latter option.)
d. Like JIRA, in order to do anything interesting with Lotus
Notes, you effectively had to have admin privileges. This
isn't strictly true, but it's effectively true. Both JIRA
and Lotus Notes were designed for organizations whose thinky
bits were managed centrally. Have a site or department
specific process? Better schedule time with your admin to
talk about how they're going to model your work-flow because
there's no way you're going to be able to build it yourself.
Groove was a little better, but it was disturbingly easy for
the brittle XML based DTDs used to model data to become out
of sync between users. Guess it's time to restore from
backup.
e. As much as I loved PLATO, it was a centralized / mainframe
type system. Of course it was easy to coordinate via a notes
file, it was a single file on a centrally shared,
non-replicated volume that (usually) had very loose write
permissions.
The reason notes (or it's bastard offspring Lotus Notes)
didn't take over the world was it put all the thinky bits in
one place, probably locked down by a BOFH. There's little we
learned from the micro-computer revolution from the 70s and
80s, but what we did seem to get is we all hated being
dependent on that one guy from accounting to write a few
COBOL programs for us so we could see what our sales figures
looked like this month.
It seems weird we're comparing PLATO NOTES with Lotus Notes
email. PNOTES (Personal Notes) was the equivalent of email.
NOTES was more the equivalent of Usenet News.
And Notes was an application environment w/ data replication
that had a shim layer on top of it that looked like an email
system. It was more like Hypercard with git-ish semantics.
(Which now that I think about it, wouldn't be that bad of a
product.)
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. I'm on the vanguard of the orange
catholic butlerian jihad. Not only do I seek a prohibition of
thinking machines, I'm also quite suspcious of richly formatted
text.
Maybe the reason (Lotus) Notes failed was that people kept
thinking of it as an email client. Raymond Lowey talked about
the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" principle. Meaning you can
push product design only so far before people no longer
understand how they're expected to integrate it into their
lives. Lotus Notes was the poster child for this concept.
> 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.
I worked with Notes for 15 years, and your point C baffles me. Could you please elaborate?
I still remember the Notes/Domino Server TCP port number - 1352. I've used it so often in firewall configurations or communications with customers and firewall teams.
I had servers hosting data for replication to customers over the internet. (Including patent data, very sensitive in both security and timeliness). We never had any issues connecting servers over the internet. It was easy, reliable and simple.
It was also very secure due to the PKI infrastructure built into Notes, the ability to require encrypted network traffic, and the various layers of security on the server.
Plus the NRPC protocol has its own proxying feature, called "Passthru Servers". That allows clients or servers to connect to other servers via an intermediate server - and that intermediate can actually blacklist or whitelist other clients/servers from using it. It's all very easy to implement, a core part of the product that any Notes administrator should know about.
But what really confuses me is you talking about AD. You can do some integration with AD and Lotus Notes, but out of the box it uses its own directory and PKI infrastructure. That's famously one of the things people held against it - that it didn't use AD or NDS. If you did turn on the AD integration then I guess you'd need access to AD, but that's your decision - and the downsides of it are much the same for any local client software you're trying to authenticate via your AD.
I simply can't reconcile what you've said with my experience. So I'm very interested to understand what you're getting at there.
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 comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.
At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).
It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.
A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.
The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.
Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”
Did I mention this was Retail?
Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.
At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.
Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.
Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.
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".
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 platform i guess.
I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8.
The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem.
For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting.
It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX.
In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running.
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.
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 varying levels of complexity in each app)
What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities.
We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app).
However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".
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).
Sametime had to work in Java Applets so portability was key. IIRC our biggest customer was the Australian navy.
I was briefly what is now called a developer-in-test on Sametime after Lotus Development bought them. I was untrained in C++ so my bug reports for that API were frequently closed with the comment "No".
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.
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.
I was part of the small team that added Exchange Offline mode very, very late in the product cycle specifically to counter the Notes Local Replication story.
We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.
The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.
What was so bad about the non-Windows interface other than it wasn't Windows? I didn't have problems with using Notes email or developing apps for Notes. It had incredible workflow and database replication features. Blew anything Microsoft had at the time out of the water. When I was forced to start using Outlook, didn't care for it. Still don't think it's all that great. I guess Sharepoint is decent enough now.
Sure I guess if all you cared about as an end-user was email and Windows-like UI, then I guess I understand. But you were missing a ton of other things.
Finally within the last 1-2 years, SharePoint Online in combination with the various other M365 services (and Azure) is "pretty good".
Low-code/no-code is available with SharePoint Lists (with some level of JSON customization), but mainly PowerPlatform.
But if you need to, you can develop extensions/webparts in JavaScript/TypeScript. While the ability to include arbitrary JS within Pages is mostly "gone" (except I guess for this latest CoPilot/HTML offering - although you are limited in how/what you can do with JavaScript), that means better structure - we will see how the replacement of VBA with "Office Scripts" goes.
Then you link in things like Teams, M365 Groups, Loop, "Forms", Planner, Purview and you can get quite the mix of capabilities.
It's "deprecated" now - service is disabled and you have to jump through hoops to get it working - and even then, it barely works with the latest SPO/M365 authentication rigamarole.
We migrated to office 365 around 2013 from notes, horrible to use compared to notes. The project was supposed to pay for itself with loweered license fees for notes users, then it turned out we had 2-3k apps in notes without any migration plan or budget, so most people still needed a lotus license for years.
Mostly CRUD-type data collection - or essentially what would be "Pages" in tools like SharePoint, a landing location with linked resources, text, etc.
"BA's" had been building them for years before we arrived.
We categorized them into complexity buckets:
Level 1 - simple CRUD, no "business logic" - we could convert those during a quick demo, 20m.
Level 2 - slightly complex, including "@Formulas" - each would take about an hour to convert/migrate with some minimal manual intervention.
Level 3 - even more complex - minor analysis/review.
Level 4 - complex, detailed requirements and review needed.
Initially the first rough estimate without our "conversion/migration framework" was about 10-years (1-person) to rebuild them all.
After our tooling came live, we were able to complete in about 6-months with a team of 4 people.
Of course - a few short years later - truly starting at about release of SharePoint 2010 - Microsoft was evangelizing it's own "low-code/no-code" capabilities for users to dig themselves into the same situation. (SharePoint Designer Workflows, InfoPath, "smart/connected" Documents, data-driven Visio diagrams, "easy" customization of Sites/Pages via JavaScript/CSS/HTML, etc.)
The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 9.4 ms ] threadIt was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
It's fine, email / photos app / texting apps are solved problems.
Keep upgrading the backends for compatibility / security / whatever, but you do not need to change the UX annually. We're done. Just stop.
Simply making your product worse is not normally a solution outside monopolies.. ah, I see.
I’m still searching for signs of 10x productivity in SWE showing up in actual consumer facing product improvements industry wide.
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.
That and, you know, Microsoft.
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 retrospect - it certainly wasn't obvious at the time.
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.
Plus just how much SMTP sucked compared to other systems and only got enough kludges barnacled onto it in semi-transparent way by late 1990s
Even if your typical big company did have a gateway for their internal email to other companies, odds are very few people used that gateway for business. If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a different company you dialed the phone or sent a fax.
The Notes directory was based on X.500 - it had the same attributes etc. Notes didn't implement DAP, but then almost nobody did, which is why we got LDAP.
There was an add-on connector for X.400 mail. I remember installing it a couple of times. It was fine, if cumbersome due to the nature of X.400. ;-)
They also didn't ignore SMTP. There was a connector for it for Notes 4.0 and 4.1, and starting with Notes 4.5 that connector was bundled in the box. Starting with Release 5 they retired the connector and moved SMTP functionality to be native in the mail router process, and for security they provided a separate SMTP listener task. Both of these were configured in the Notes Directory via Server Documents and Configuration Documents, just like any other feature of the server. If a Domino server wasn't sending or receiving SMTP, it's because its administrator didn't want it to, not because it couldn't.
It wasn't a walled garden, or if it was the wall was very low. By comparison Microsoft's first attempt to dethrone Notes - Exchange Public Folders - was a completely walled garden. And a very well fertilised one which people avoided due to the smell.
But it's OK, Microsoft then gave us SharePoint. The fact that Microsoft's customers rushed to it tells you how bad Public Folders were. So your comment "That and, you know, Microsoft" is much closer to the truth than protocol support.
(Source: I was a Principle Certified Lotus Domino Administrator for multiple versions, and have used & administered Lotus Notes versions from version 3.33 through to 8.5. I worked at a consultancy and installed many, many implementations of Lotus Notes across a number of topologies. I also had an Exchange Server MCP and worked with multiple versions of that too.)
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
I just forgot the name of the email utility IBM bought.
This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one internal app or a hundred.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
For what it was, yes.
For what a great many people used it for on the other hand…
It was a great platform for making document and workflow control applications, and was ahead of its time in terms of a proper PKI system for authentication/access/verification and access control lists and such. But many people hit a poorly made application and that coloured their opinion for the rest, and in the list of terrible applications I'm including the standard email support, which was a royal PITA, and most custom versions for that function. The general UX wasn't great either, not so bad that you couldn't put up with it for a great application but if you are hating the rest of the application then the general UX issues grind your gears too.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
Same thing with Google Wave, really.
I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand new market that had never existed before.
This led to the price for a movie on VHS/Beta ranging from $10 to over $100 because no one knew what the actual demand curve looked like.
I feel like the 1990s was a lot like this but with UI/UX. People had opinions on what consumers wanted but the market was expanding so quickly that no one knew for sure. Firms just tried things and, in hindsight, some firms seemed "smarter" because they picked the feature set that customers ended up liking.
Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.
Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.
But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.
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 equivalent would be Notion.
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 wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.
This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.
This article just reads weird to me.
Some of the different decisions everybody made were for good reason. I know Apple and [later] Microsoft spent a large amount of money on human factors engineers doing real experiments to figure out what worked. I have never seen evidence that Lotus spent the money to see what was a good idea - they just made it work.
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).
MSFT was so dominant back then that Gates had to rescue Apple to keep up the appearance of a fair market!
The web killed Notes, not Microsoft.
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.
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.
I was administering a small Domino server and using Notes for email. I think it was the worst thing I worked on at the time.
https://excelevate.co/wp/2025/06/11/save-the-f1-key/
view -> message body as -> plain text :)
In v153.2.0ESR, it's More --> message body as --> plain text
and it absolutely does work.
I still remember the Notes/Domino Server TCP port number - 1352. I've used it so often in firewall configurations or communications with customers and firewall teams.
I had servers hosting data for replication to customers over the internet. (Including patent data, very sensitive in both security and timeliness). We never had any issues connecting servers over the internet. It was easy, reliable and simple.
It was also very secure due to the PKI infrastructure built into Notes, the ability to require encrypted network traffic, and the various layers of security on the server.
Plus the NRPC protocol has its own proxying feature, called "Passthru Servers". That allows clients or servers to connect to other servers via an intermediate server - and that intermediate can actually blacklist or whitelist other clients/servers from using it. It's all very easy to implement, a core part of the product that any Notes administrator should know about.
But what really confuses me is you talking about AD. You can do some integration with AD and Lotus Notes, but out of the box it uses its own directory and PKI infrastructure. That's famously one of the things people held against it - that it didn't use AD or NDS. If you did turn on the AD integration then I guess you'd need access to AD, but that's your decision - and the downsides of it are much the same for any local client software you're trying to authenticate via your AD.
I simply can't reconcile what you've said with my experience. So I'm very interested to understand what you're getting at there.
Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.
At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).
It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.
A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.
The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.
Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”
Did I mention this was Retail?
Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.
At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.
Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.
Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.
The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem.
For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting.
It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX.
In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running.
So sad to see it go.
We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate, a small team and an extremely limited time. (and varying levels of complexity in each app)
What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities.
We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app).
However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".
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).
I was briefly what is now called a developer-in-test on Sametime after Lotus Development bought them. I was untrained in C++ so my bug reports for that API were frequently closed with the comment "No".
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.
We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.
The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.
Sure I guess if all you cared about as an end-user was email and Windows-like UI, then I guess I understand. But you were missing a ton of other things.
Low-code/no-code is available with SharePoint Lists (with some level of JSON customization), but mainly PowerPlatform.
But if you need to, you can develop extensions/webparts in JavaScript/TypeScript. While the ability to include arbitrary JS within Pages is mostly "gone" (except I guess for this latest CoPilot/HTML offering - although you are limited in how/what you can do with JavaScript), that means better structure - we will see how the replacement of VBA with "Office Scripts" goes.
Then you link in things like Teams, M365 Groups, Loop, "Forms", Planner, Purview and you can get quite the mix of capabilities.
???
"BA's" had been building them for years before we arrived.
We categorized them into complexity buckets: Level 1 - simple CRUD, no "business logic" - we could convert those during a quick demo, 20m. Level 2 - slightly complex, including "@Formulas" - each would take about an hour to convert/migrate with some minimal manual intervention. Level 3 - even more complex - minor analysis/review. Level 4 - complex, detailed requirements and review needed.
Initially the first rough estimate without our "conversion/migration framework" was about 10-years (1-person) to rebuild them all.
After our tooling came live, we were able to complete in about 6-months with a team of 4 people.
Of course - a few short years later - truly starting at about release of SharePoint 2010 - Microsoft was evangelizing it's own "low-code/no-code" capabilities for users to dig themselves into the same situation. (SharePoint Designer Workflows, InfoPath, "smart/connected" Documents, data-driven Visio diagrams, "easy" customization of Sites/Pages via JavaScript/CSS/HTML, etc.)
The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.