I liked it (as a user, not IT/Admin) when my company used it in the 90s and early 00s. The easy integration between mail, calendar and ToDo was great and something I find missing from Apple's ecosystem - especially since Sonoma broke my scripts for turning mails into calender entries and Reminders. The first Word Processor I used on a PC was Lotus Manuscript in the late 80s, which also had some great features; the formating of outline sections in Manuscript was way ahead of anything I've used since.

From an user management perspective Notes was a pure horro, I supported a system which provisioned users to Notes and it was absolution a mess.

Then companies decided to drop Notes for Exchange and Sharepoint as Microsoft told them it would be better, well yes that was something everyone believe right.

Notes / Domino user management was pretty straightforward and easily scriptable / automated with LotusScript. I did a pretty simple AD GPO that triggered a LotusScript that kept AD users & groups synced with Notes. It even deleted users and archived off their mailboxes / databases

Back when I were a wee lad, an up and coming help desk technician, I was assigned the task of managing our Notes-based help desk software. It wasn't terrible, and Notes could do some cool things that put power into the hands of "gentleman developers" rather than dedicated programmers. If Lotus had stuck to their knitting and focused on those capabilities, especially as the Internet started to take off, things might have been okay. Unfortunately, Lotus perceived an imminent threat in the form of Outlook/Exchange, tried to compete in that space, and failed miserably. Notes as an email client and PIM was just woeful by comparison with Outlook/Exchange, in my opinion, even back in the 90s, and it never really got better.

An example I recall from my last organization before they threw in the Notes towel and went to Exchange (by popular revolt), was that I had hit Send on an email just before leaving our data center, shut down my laptop, and went home, only to find that my email had not, in fact, been sent. The reason for that was that I was running a local replica of my email database (because laptop), and unlike Outlook, which will just send an email as long as there's a connection to the Exchange server, Notes needed to wait for the entire email database to finish replicating back to the Domino server. And that's just one of many, many examples which left me aggravated. Switching back to Outlook was such a relief!

I hate to break it to you, but Outlook sometimes fails to send emails too. Just this week I was on site at a new office that's literally an empty shell right now, so my laptop was tethered to a mobile hotspot as I did some work. I had some consultants visiting to advise on AV and acoustics, and wanted to send them over some files whilst we were talking. For whatever reason Outlook just plonked the email in the Outbox and left it there. Maybe I'd strayed out of the hotspots range briefly and the send timed out? I only noticed when I went to Sent Items to check their email addresses a couple of hours later, and failed to see the email there. I had to manually force Outlook to do a send & receive cycle to actually send the mail.

I've always found Outlook to have enough foibles of its own when it comes to remote working and server access. Many of them due to its insistence on using a local cache for storage, because Exchange's database can't cope with high transaction levels very well. Every time I come back from a couple of weeks off, I have to just leave my machine as Outlook slowly download and index thousands of emails and makes everything sluggish. I never had that problem with Notes, as its replication engine and indexer were just far better than Outlook.

But the basic point to take away here is that offline working can be difficult to get right, and neither product does it brilliantly. Always on networks just mean that we see the problems a lot less these days.

As to "they shouldn't have focused on email" - well to be honest they were left with little choice. For a while we had the concept of "Groupware" - a category that Notes effectively defined when it arrived in the market, because there was nothing else that was as capable as Notes. Novell following with GroupWise, and Microsoft tried to compete with Exchange Server, but in Groupware Notes was still very much the king of the hill. Exchange may have done email well, but have you ever had to use Public Folders? Do you think that they made a good company directory, or workflow application? Because they didn't. They were, to be frank, rubbish. There's a very good reason most people have never heard of them these days...

But then Intranets came along and offered a lot of that functionality. Have you ever wondered why Sharepoint is a trainwreck of a product? Architecturally it looks like it was assembled in a hurry with things Microsoft had lying around. Operationally it seems to be held together with staples stolen from Satan's own stationary cupboard. It's not a product that is well architected, it was a hurried response to the market wanting something more than Exchange's Public Folders could deliver. And preferably to be delivered to a web browser.

The web browser and Intranets changed the market. Groupware as a category vanished, subsumed into a more general set of internet technologies. Management wasn't interested in spending money on Groupware solutions, but was happy to spend it on websites. Notes did add a webserver, but it didn't get huge traction (despite being quite good) and it rapidly it seemed that all Notes had left to sell was its mail functionality.

Markets change. In this case they didn't change in Notes' favour.

Disclaimer : I am a certified Notes Consultant and Developer since 1996

From a development perspective, Notes/Domino had and still holds everything I need. You want an app that can be consulted from a smartphone and validate/decline a document in a Notes database ? I know how to do that. You want a monthly export into Excel of helpdesk statistics ? I can do that. You want an invoice system that prints to PDF ? I can manage that.

And it all works in Notes, with a Domino server.

Fuck Sharepoint. Fuck Outlook. I don't need five different Borkzilla products to solve the problem. I just need a Domino server and a Notes client.

Back in the day, I had the privilege of being party to some discussions at a company that wanted to replace their mainframe. They tendered publicly, and Borkzilla was one of the companies that responded. You want to know Borkzilla's proposal ? No less than 40 NT servers. Because, obviously, Borkzilla was already taking into account the fact that there would never be 40 NT servers functional at the same time.

Guess what ? The company went with two Solaris servers with Notes/Domino. Because, at that time, Domino was one of the very rare solutions that could work with a synchronized backup. In other words, if the main server fell over, the secondary would pick up the slack without anyone noticing.

Sharepoint, eat your heart out.

The only real problem Notes ever had is that manglement kept confusing Notes with a mail client. Yes, if you only need mail, go for Outlook. Have fun with the Exchange server that can't manage more than 500 accounts.

But if you want an integrated document management system that can deal with almost anything you can throw at it and then some, you need Notes.

Because Notes is not just mail. Mail is a side effect, a bonus. Notes manages your company data like almost nothing else.

But Lotus, then IBM, were incapable of making the Fortune 1000 understand that. So now, HCL has the pieces (and it's not doing so bad).

I would blame IBM, but it has already sunk so low that that would just be flogging a dead horse.

I have a client using iRedMail. It’s built out of a bunch of open-source pieces, like Postfix for the MTA, OpenLDAP for the directory services, SOGo groupware+webmail etc, with some custom management layering on top (less with the free version, more with the paid version). It’s very much a low-maintenance product. And since it is built on industrial-strength components, that gives it high scalability.

I spent 15 years administering Lotus Notes, and am well aware of its capabilities. But a lot of people are going to judge it solely as a mail client, so I may as well meet them there...

Here are three things I miss from Lotus Notes as a mail client, in roughly descending order of my fondness for them.

1. Tabs

For crying out loud Microsoft, it's 2024. Give us tabs in Outlook, you lazy bastards.

Actually, this wouldn't be such a problem if switching between Mail and Calendar in Outlook wasn't such a bad experience. Switching contexts between Mail/Calendar/Tasks/Contacts/Notes is slow and prone to forgetting small aspects of what you were doing in a most frustrating way, so that when you switch back it's not quite what you remember leaving. (I know I can run another Outlook window and use the Windows Taskbar to switch between them, but that's also not a great experience.)

Just give us tabs. IBM did in Release 5 of Lotus Notes way back in 1999. That was 25 years ago! And yet Outlook is still forced to do context switching like it's a tranquillised sloth with a head injury. I've honestly been experimenting with using the web version just so I can have mail/calendar open in separate tabs there. As a user experience it's almost there but there are still some deal breakers for me. But I'm genuinely looking forward to switching to the web version just for this feature!

2. Copy Into New

Notes 5 or 6 (I don't quite recall which) added a great feature called Copy Into New. You could pick any email, calendar entry, or task, and copy it into a new one. It did it very well, and avoided clogging up the clipboard with crap. For example if you copied an email into a meeting it would add all of the recipients of the original email to the meeting invite. I would often find myself copying an email into an email, which sounds crazy but when you realise that it takes all the addressing, the subject, the text body and any attachments - well it saves so much time versus copy and paste manually from each field! Obviously we could try using email templates, but not everything needs a template, and Copy Into New is just a very quick and handy workflow.

I'm aware that you can drag and drop mails to create calendar entries in Outlook as a workaround, but see my previous note about tabs. It's not a pleasant experience, and we should accept that Notes just has a better solution.

3. Rich Text Sections

Notes Rich Text was one of those odd rich text variants, and has many more features in it. You could add buttons, links, and so forth quite easily. But my favourite feature was the Section, which was introduced all the way back in Notes 4. They're basically a demarcation for a bit of text, and were intended for use in Form Design. But you could specify how a section should behave in different contexts (reading, writing, printing) and it had sensible defaults for that. It meant I could write an email to people that had a summary for everyone in upper management, and then hide the gory technical details in a Section that was collapsed by default when reading. Quick, easy, the management is happy, my colleagues are happy because one click expands the section and gets them what they want.

Outlook's Rich Text - being effectively just a slightly constrained Word rich text - does some things better, like tables. But I still miss Sections, they were a nice feature.

So there we go - three things you may not know you're missing if you didn't use Lotus Notes. Because even software you don't like can have good ideas in it, and there is no such thing as the perfect mail client.