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by epc 440 days ago
I was a Notes user inside IBM in the months before the acquisition. It was so, so much better than anything IBM had on the desktop, either as a product or the many internal hacks. At the time IBM had OfficeVision/2 perennially under development to replace PROFS on Windows and OS/2.

I think that some of the changes in Notes 4 were good to make it more usable inside a large organization, but many things like adding a web server and IIRC some sort of Java subsystem? turned it into bloatware. And some of the changes were prompted by IBM’s disastrous internal rollout of Notes, which had more to do with IbM internal messaging culture and less to do with any flaws in Notes.
2 comments
nradov 440 days ago
The Java subsystem was necessary to keep Domino relevant as an application development platform. IBM couldn't continue to rely on the proprietary LotusScript language forever (it was similar to Visual Basic, but mostly worse).

The additional of web server features was well intentioned but never worked correctly. IBM had this fantasy that developers could build an application once, then deploy it automatically to both Lotus Notes native thick clients and web browsers. Of course, this completely fell apart for anything but the most trivial applications. It also created a lot of market confusion because it competed with IBM's own WebSphere Application Server product.

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jmclnx 440 days ago
There where many nice databases, some I remember:

* a USENET type dB

* News feeds

* classifieds

* a form of document routing with approval signatures

* many other cool databases

It was a whole new way of doing things, but IBM only pushed its email portion and eventually ruined the product.

V4 was good, but I liked v3 better. It never reached its potential :(

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codingdave 439 days ago
I feel that R5 was the peak for web dev - that brought in the actual Domino server, which is where it became possible to have a split between your front-end and back-end, delivering web apps with whatever front-end tech you wanted, and making calls to the server as needed, similarly to modern API endpoints.

They then kept trying to re-invent web development to be more tightly integrated, and it all went badly. R5 came out in 1999, and I rejected pretty much all their new front-end features after that point, but delivered a couple decades of web-based apps just using Domino as a back-end stack.

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