But Microsoft’s Exchange came to dominate, in part because it focussed on email and calendaring while Notes/Domino was pitched as an environment in which to build and run messaging-centric apps

It was also the peak of FUD at Microsoft which saw Microsoft squash many other software companies through dubious practises.

I don't think that's fair. Lotus Notes is horrible to use and Outlook is rather pleasant to use. Usability matters a LOT for software that everyone needs to interact with day in day out. Notes has a very thin veneer of modernity but scratch it just slightly and you're facing arcane, inscrutable, incomprehensible dialogs that haven't changed much in the last 30 years. That is not to say Microsoft's offerings are perfect and I find Sharepoint and Teams can be extremely trying at times, but nothing on the magnitude of using Notes & Domino. I'm just thankful that our company got rid of it after rebuilding infrastructure after a ransomware attack a blessing in disguise IMO.

What you said. I had the misfortune of having to use Notes when I was blue. It was pretty infuriating. I never understood how someone could send me a link to a Notes database, that didn't work, unless I also added a 'connection document' into my contacts. It just seemed poorly implemented.

My company tuped us to big blue, and we knew we were going to "go back" to Notes for email due to that. Was excited at first to see what they had done to the various templates, specifically mail as we had customised the shit out of ours and wanted to see what they, as the owners of the product had done.

Big Blue had left it as OOB - absolute crap.

I applied our template to my mail file as did everyone in my team which made is useful and almost Outlookish

I am not going to go down some of the problems we had with migration and that none of their support teams had a clue and refused to listen to us when we told them the problem and soluition (frequent, and in each case, when they did fix it, it was what we said)

The fact you still call it "Lotus", 20 years after the brand ceased to exist is telling.

Even now Microsoft are coming round to the idea that certificates are the way to go.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/18/microsoft_azure_system_authentication/

The main thing that won Microsoft a lot of migrations was integration, especially with AD but also to a lesser extent with Office. They used that to claim a lower TCO.

The Office integrations were merely niceties in Outlook, like re-using Word for email editing so it was a little more familiar, and having a few Send To type options in Office applications.

Integration with Active Directory was always touted as a significant lowering of TCO. And to some extent it was - by comparison Notes had ID files to distribute, and although IBM did fix that with the ID Vault it didn't arrive until version 7(?). By that time most companies had made their own arrangements, so it was a bit too little too late.

I've met plenty of people who have "managed an email system" on their CV because they created and deleted mailboxes on Exchange. They know nothing about mail routing, or the SMTP protocol, or email headers. They wouldn't know what SPF was if it tap danced on top of a piano whilst singing "SPF is here again" and waving a sign that says "I am SPF", but that AD integration is all they need to claim being an email administrator.

I can certainly make an argument that the day to day TCO of Exchange Server is lower than Lotus Notes. However, I also know what the cost of doing an upgrade for each is, and whilst Notes is easy to upgrade - it's a trivial install over the top of the existing server software, then a rollout of new mail templates at your leisure - Exchange Server is horrifically expensive to upgrade

You have to specify and purchase new hardware, and deploy it. Microsoft has almost always changed something in the storage layer that means research and training, and you effectively end up building a new infrastructure and then migrating your mailboxes and applications to use that infrastructure. This requires more knowledge than just creating/deleting mailboxes, so often organisations are ill equipped for the project.

You can upgrade to the latest version of Notes in an afternoon. Exchange will take you many, many months. So overall I'd say that the TCO is probably about the same, but it's distributed very differently for each product. Notes has a consistent but slightly higher TCO with an occasional mild increase for upgrades, whereas Exchange has a slightly lower TCO with mountainous increases at the start/end of each product lifecycle.

(This is why most on-prem Exchange instances are ancient, and why so many people are happy to move to O365 - why not let Microsoft do the mountaineering for you?)

Integration with AD, and its lower day to day TCO, were a definite factor. Combined with the FUD, it's what got Exchange into its dominant position.

Try to restore a Mailbox from exchange, compared the an NSF from domino (where the user can access the current one and original one at the same time)

When I used to do Notes and Exchange work, I always though Notes backend was far superior. It was the front end that let it down

Do the TCO calculations count the time of the victims endusers who use the software too?

"...an installed base that still relies on the software."

Poor bastards.

Crappy companies too lazy to move off it vs. just paying monkeys to keep the dance going and issue mediocre security patches to avoid moving to Office 365.

I can't wait!

I administered Notes/Domino for 15 years. No one in my team of 20 people wanted to move away from it. It wasn't awful to use - it was just different to the standard Windows interface which was effectively imposed by MS. But we as a technical team were overruled by our CTO - as far as I could see because he personally liked Outlook as an email client. I ran the migration project from Notes to Exchange for c. 30K people and as far as the email and calendaring side went we got it done in six months with relatively little disruption (although it was hard work and migrating people in e.g. Japan turned into a bit of a challenge because of character issues. I will never forget having to troubleshoot our migration server in Japan which involved setting up the Japanese language client in Outlook.)

However what no one considered at the time in spite of the fact that as the technical lead for the team I pointed out to them repeatedly - was that Domino was not just an email product. As a pharma company doing medical trials for drugs we were regulated by the FDA and we had thousands of databases with hundreds of different designs - many of which contained highly confidential data which was also medically important to the people taking part in the studies.

So guess what happened. The email went to Exchange. Without jumping through massively expensive hoops we couldn't move the databases. So they left the databases on Domino - and here comes the really funny/sad part - they never upgraded the Domino servers again so they went out of support.

By the time I left five years later - Domino was so hugely out of support that I doubt it could conceivably have been upgraded again.

I would guess that hackers who wanted to steal the massively valuable drug data we stored must have been delighted about that.

The only reason that list exists is because Notes is top of the "I can't believe people have been using that for 25 years" list.

IBM offloaded Domino to HCL in 2017. That the India company is still bothering to create updates bespeaks the stickiness of custom apps built on the platform, although HCL always says it manages to score the occasional new client

Is the database acid-compliant?

I believe so, it's a semistructured document store noSQL database designed for consistancy across multiple instances.

IBM kept Notes in being by including it with their enterprise license. I can't remember how many Notes/Domino migration projects I've planned and seen scrapped before completion. So long as HCL keep their license from being too onerous and allow backward compatibility then it should continue to have a long life.

Usual practice was to look at all the old "apps" on Notes, decide to move them so the licenses and (usually physical) hardware could be scrapped. Once any email and any data was moved there would be a few dozen Notes dbs holding a combination of UI design, business process workflow and unstructured data that no-one had documented requirements for and that were giving some business benefit but not a lot. Developers would say they could replicate it for maybe €15K and 2-3 months elapsed per application (it could be less, it really didn't matter what the actual numbers were) and the business case would collapse since it cost less than a few grand a year to keep. At best there'd be a P2V migration to let the servers be scrapped and a remote desktop accessing an isolated VLAN to reduce security risks.