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by sk5t 3931 days ago
You might be thinking about the Office-like companion to Notes, Symphony. AFAIK (going from some Name/Location/BU-looking email addresses) IBM still uses Lotus Notes for email.

Lotus Notes is actually quite good when used properly and in moderation, but it really does not set a positive tone culturally.
1 comments
darkr 3931 days ago
Notes is _terrible_ from a UI perspective. The server side (domino) though was light-years ahead of anything in terms of ideas at least. Combining a CA, distributed, document-oriented database(think mongodb, couchdb), LDAP server, web server and mail server that supports IMAP, POP, SMTP as well as the proprietary encrypted notes protocol.
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jestar_jokin 3931 days ago
Agreed. I worked in Lotus Domino for a short while, and it was absolutely amazing for Rapid Application Development of anything that required e-mail and storing documents (or kinda "schemaless" data). It was even supported multiple languages (a declarative "Formula" language, a Visual Basic derived "LotusScipt", and Java(!)).

You could write a decent Lotus Domino app that served up web pages, so users wouldn't have to use the awful Lotus Notes client.

Amusingly, in I think Lotus Notes 8, they revitalised the GUI by replacing it with... Eclipse RCP. Hrmm.

I did witness some monstrosities, though...

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