[wkat4242]

Notes was pretty horrible for creating all sorts of legacy technical debt. Some handy Joe would create some database that would worm itself into critical business processes but be completely unmaintained.

Of course this could be solved by policies but I've seen this happen in many organizations.

It was also incredibly buggy. I'd be looking at a Java error dump several times a week. Especially once they integrated sametime into notes.

[tablespoon]

> Notes was pretty horrible for creating all sorts of legacy technical debt. Some handy Joe would create some database that would worm itself into critical business processes but be completely unmaintained.

And is the "better" alternative is to avoid that "legacy technical debt" by forcing that "handy Joe" to keep doing things by hand, by denying him the tools to solve his problem? Because if you don't have the connections to get budget to pay a professional developer, you shouldn't be able to solve your problem with software?

IMHO, it's better to think of those kinds of "handy Joe" apps as prototypes.

[wkat4242]

The problem is they often don't get beyond the protoype stage, the 'developer' leaves the company and whole business processes end up depending on something that is no longer maintained.

In our place it took a huge effort to move away from notes. Literally thousands of 'important' databases in the system over the years. Some were converted to web using low-code tech, some were simply archived or exported. But it was a huge mess.

I'm not against prototyping or efficiency at all. But the reality is that Notes had become a really stale platform, and even a prototype should have a continuous maintainer.

In the end we just had too many users using things that nobody knew anything about. This was really a huge risk.

> Because if you don't have the connections to get budget to pay a professional developer, you shouldn't be able to solve your problem with software?

This is a good point though, and we've now kept a whole team of low-code devs that take on things just like this for new projects that could offer efficiency, but they do it in a proper way with documentation and maintenance.