[laythea]

Maybe I did not appreciate it properly, but I remember using Lotus Notes at my work a few years ago, and I can remember it being the most awful piece of software I have ever used. Admittingly I am not a specialist, more an employee trying to use it to do my job.

[forapurpose]

> I can remember it being the most awful piece of software I have ever used

Many people seem to say the same thing but the only problem I could ever see (in occasional use) was a non-standard UI which non-technical users had trouble grasping. What made it so awful?

[fian]

Using Lotus Notes at my current employer.

Notes itself has some great functionality. The UI feels a little clunky - but generally you can do what you need to do.

The main problems I encounter is the way our IT department have deployed it. Many functions are not enabled or only partially working. As far as I am aware, we have no Lotus/Domino expert in our country; head office (other side of the world) has quite a few though. Any requests made through our regional helpdesk for fixes/improvements mostly go nowhere.

I like the idea of the replicated databases for email and other business functions. It should mean staff could switch to a different machine and quickly and painlessly get access to all their email and other data. However, there is a considerable amount of convoluted configuration required (the way it is currently configured) that appears to require local admin access that makes it impossible without helpdesk assistance.

I suspect many companies deployed Lotus/Domino is similar semi-functional ways that made it less useful than it could be.

The reason many companies migrated away from Lotus/Domino though was the risk of vendor lock in. My employer is stuck with a vast amount of business process captured in Lotus/Domino. They have been slowly migrating core functionality out to other web or networked database applications over the last 12 years. Even so, I don't see any move away from Lotus Notes for email for many years to come.

[laythea]

Navigation, the UI, the way the databases where setup. I can remember that even basic things not working the way normal windows applications work (usability related things), but it was so long ago I can't remember the specific things, sorry. Just that it was awful.

[michaelcampbell]

Bloaty when I used it. Crappy ui. Crashed a lot. (Circa 2007 or so for me)

[ajlburke]

It was pretty awesome for enterprise software in the mid-90s, but the world caught up with it soon after.

[pjmorris]

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

In the mid-90's, I thought I was helping by bringing Notes in to the company I worked at, and people seemed to agree. A ticket tracking database we set up seemed to help. Many years later, after I left, I saw a presentation where Notes was cast as the problem, with a website proposed as the solution.

[EpicEng]

It is, you're not wrong