[michaelbuckbee]

I like that you're bringing up Lotus, but I was thinking of a different product: Notes.

It's from another digital software age and from experience, hard not to think of the applications created with it as archaic monstrosities, yet there was something there.

In many ways it was what the OP is talking about: a networked formbuilder that allowed for people with technical skills roughly equivalent to that of an Excel superstar to build actual line of business apps.

For those same reasons, it had lots of issues. Often a spreadsheet is the right choice, maybe not when it gets to be 200MB and corrupts itself because multiple people are accessing the same file across the network.

Notes apps worked until they didn't, but are still kind of fascinating in their awfulness.

[Spooky23]

Apps like Lotus and Access get a bad rap that is unjustly deserved. People did a lot of amazing things with those applications.

The presence of zombie Notes apps that spew out of control is more a statement about IT than the platform. My mom, not a power user, was a public health nurse. She put together with a sophomore intern what grew into a good sized disease outbreak tracker after IT failed to deliver. All in Notes.

The IT idiots discovered it and got all puffy. They siphoned off funding and stuck its "enterprise" replacement into some portfolio process. 5 years later and $5-6M spent they launched a replacement that didn't quite do what it needed to do. She retired almost 10 years ago, and that little app still lives for a few use cases.

[hkmurakami]

I used Notes as recently as 2010 at a mega Corp. Another friend was using it in 2013 at a professional services firm.

Those apps were simultaneously powerful and broken. The sheer number of apps the company had was staggering. "There's an (notes) app for that", only 20 years prior.

[goatlover]

There was something there. What you say is definitely true. When I made Notes apps though, there was always some scripting involved in terms of LotusScript for the Notes client, or Javascript for the browser. There was a Java API as well in the late 90s that some people were using instead of LotusScript. It was a bit more powerful, obviously.

Of course, some people just used the @ formulas.

Anyway, I haven't come across anything that so naturally expressed document workflow with forms and email integration. People complain about Notes email, but it was nice to have it so tightly integrated with the Notes capabilities.