[HN Gopher] For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do every...
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For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company
needed
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-01-20 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| DazWilkin wrote:
| I worked on PC support at an investment bank in London in the
| early 90's and developed a Notes app to replace our paper-based
| tickets.
|
| It took me very little time to develop and really revolutionized
| our team's ability to manage the incoming flow of tickets for our
| nearly 1000 users.
|
| We soon gave access to the system to delegated principals in each
| of the departments who were then able to coordinate their
| department's tickets in real-time too. They loved it.
| mcny wrote:
| Using Lotus Notes was the only thing that finally convinced me
| how grateful I should be to use exchange and outlook at work.
|
| Edit: this was in 2013.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| In one of the big 3 auto manufacturers, this is still used today
| ;P
| tobinfricke wrote:
| I worked at an organization whose IT system was based around
| Lotus Notes, 2010-2014. It was clunky and awful at that time.
| zubairq wrote:
| Used lotus notes in late 1990s at a bank in London. It was pretty
| much all we needed for internal non trading apps. But I noticed
| that the intranet slowly started to creep in ...
| bberenberg wrote:
| Can you share what you mean by the intranet started to creep
| in?
| nradov wrote:
| The core of Notes/Domino was awesome and ahead of its time
| including a "NoSQL" document database with reliable multi-master
| replication and a public key security infrastructure.
| Unfortunately, after IBM acquired it they never realized the
| potential as an application development platform and failed to
| enhance it to keep pace with the competition. Just some really
| stupid decisions like keeping a 64GB database file size limit and
| failing to fully support XML.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| A company I worked for used Lotus Notes and Domino back in the
| day.
|
| One day we got a mail sent to everyone at the company from the
| CEO, with some rather lewd content. As you can imagine it caused
| quite the stir.
|
| As most here will know, SMTP by default doesn't verify sender.
| And the Domino mail gateway would happily match external
| addresses to internal accounts. The result was that it looked
| quite legit.
|
| Turned out someone who was fed up with their job[1] had used this
| to appear to be the CEO, we have a 3 month notice period here in
| Norway, and well he got let go immediately...
|
| Young me learned a lot about how mail worked thanks to that.
| chanandler_bong wrote:
| Back in the mid 90s, I spent a full year migrating my company and
| ~800 users across six sites from Exchange to Notes. I had no
| experience with Notes, and absolutely hated it when I started the
| project.
|
| After a year of hacking, learning from mistakes, and countless
| hours of RTFM, we got it done. Email, calendar, file shares all
| migrated, cross-site replication, and some really great new
| features added in with workflows. I was really proud of it.
|
| As soon as the last migration wave was complete, I called my
| manager to let him know that the long-awaited day had arrived.
| Exchange was dead, long live Lotus Notes! Literally, during that
| phone call he said "Ummm. Yeah. We are going to migrate back to
| Exchange because of some M&A coming up."
|
| I was not pleased.
| ant6n wrote:
| "...and I almost forgot ahh, I'm also gonna need you to go
| ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people
| this week and ah, we sorta need to play catch up."
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| It's all fine as long as you don't touch the stapler.
| hcayless wrote:
| I remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?)
| remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to
| and then away from Lotus Notes.
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| Notes and Domino peaked in 2000. It somehow managed to balance
| the many needs of a business, including the email stack,
| workflow, database, and configuration, into a distributed
| platform that was comprehensive and at the time, clearly superior
| to Exchange/Sharepoint. The architecture was elegant but required
| a major improvement in 2000 due to performance woes and a web
| server that had been grafted on. Unfortunately IBM attempted to
| migrate all Lotus and Domino users onto their Websphere platform,
| which, despite engendering a worthy IDE (Eclipse), was in no way
| a true replacement to Lotus Notes/Domino. Microsoft also mustered
| all their uncompetitive practices of the day to destroy this
| rising threat that at the time had more business email accounts
| than Exchange. A real shame, because Sharepoint was an absolute
| dumpster fire in comparison.
| vsskanth wrote:
| I worked for an F500 that was still using Lotus Notes as of late
| 2018. It was my first job so I didn't know how old that system
| was, but people used it to build all sorts of complex
| applications like ticketing systems, time tracking, product
| design docs etc.
|
| I guess Notion would be today's modern equivalent, will turn into
| tomorrow's legacy system.
|
| I sometimes wonder if people have done any research on these
| types of workflow abstractions and come up with fundamental data
| structures to work with them.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| Obligatory reference to Lotus Agenda which arguably was inspired
| by Notes and arguably (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code) inspired Chandler
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)
|
| .
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Way ahead of its time.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| This single-tool-usefulness thing is why, in a former life, I
| started out administering over 100 instances of Trac.
|
| When Trac came out, it did everything confluence, jira, and
| bitbucket do, in one open source, easy to use tool that had tons
| of community-developed plugins.
|
| The thing is, though, that it wasn't meant to be administered. It
| didn't lend itself to management. It was meant to be deployed,
| and then not managed, which is _fine_ if you have one or two of
| them, because they're pets, but in a world of cattle, you can't
| have 100+ special snowflake systems deployed like that.
|
| I spent years mowing down every Trac instance I could find,
| migrating them to the actually-centrally-managed Atlassian stack.
| After I left that team, I would incentivize other people to carry
| on in my footsteps by buying a bundt cake for anyone who led the
| charge to remove a Trac instance from the infrastructure.
|
| I gave away a lot of bundt cakes, but the infrastructure was
| better and more reliable because of it.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I remember this do everything program way back in the DOS days
| called Framework - it was like a spreadsheet/word
| processor/database and programming system in one in a language
| called Fred.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| We tried migrating to Notes from Exchange when IBM became our
| service provider after outsourcing and I.T was selected as guinea
| pigs.
|
| Needless to say, we hated the client interface and the exchange
| interchange was wonky - the feedback was extremely negative - "it
| is a pile of shit" was common and it was canned.
| goatlover wrote:
| If your company just using it for email, then migration wasn't
| worth it. But if you wanted to build complex workflows on top
| of email in-house, then it was very good at that. Today
| everyone uses a bunch of different web apps to do what Notes
| did.
| nunez wrote:
| > This writer worked for one publishing company that used Notes
| extensively, and I found it to be incredibly useful in its day.
| It provided not just your email, but an internal telephone
| directory, contact database, booking system for time off, company
| handbook, and more, all accessible via a single application and a
| single set of credentials, long before single sign-on became a
| thing
|
| Sounds like Workday but less complicated (because Workday also
| does payroll, and payroll sucks)
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Sounds like SharePoint in some ways (except the payroll stuff).
| Not a fan of SharePoint but it does offer opportunities to
| centralise stuff into one place.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Same goes for FileMaker every small town agency, newspaper and
| other media clients ran on it. Made good money as a 15 year old.
| orev wrote:
| When discussing Lotus Notes it's useful to have a good
| understanding of two perspectives. Some view it as an ugly
| version of Outlook/Exchange, but those functions were not really
| the point of it (so comparisons to Outlook/Exchange aren't really
| correct). It was really a development platform, and email,
| calendar, tasks, etc. would be better understood as "sample apps"
| that could be built on it.
|
| As mentioned in the article, this was a time when apps were built
| native to the OS, and deployment and updates were a full time job
| for the IT department. Notes encapsulated all these apps in a
| single app launcher in a standard way they could be deployed and
| managed.
|
| The best comparison today is not Outlook/Exchange, but the whole
| Web itself which addressed the same problem of apps in a more
| universal way. However Notes enabled this at least a decade
| before the Web was advanced enough to handle this.
| robocat wrote:
| > The best comparison today is not Outlook/Exchange, but the
| whole Web itself
|
| Data had bidirectional replication with the server. Apps ran
| from local NoSQL databases on your machine which you synced it
| up with the server including the App code. The Web runs apps on
| servers, Notes not so much.
| ithkuil wrote:
| A significant part of the web nowadays runs code in your
| browser and interacts with a thin layer in front of a
| database.
|
| A much part of the web uses a local in-browser db and syncs
| it up with a database on the server.
| randombits0 wrote:
| I agree. Had IBM FOSS'ed the client, there would have been no
| web, or at least not without a lot of alternate history.
| chx wrote:
| > But Notes is nowhere near holding the record for the oldest
| piece of software still being used. The US Defense Contract
| Management Agency (DCMA), which takes care of contracts for the
| Department of Defense (DoD), is said to have a program called
| Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), which
| was introduced in 1958, making it nearly twice as old.
|
| Certainly but I'd say the most important ancient software is just
| a few years younger: the IRS Master Files.
| https://www.governmentattic.org/5docs/IRS-HistoricalFactBook...
|
| > FEBRUARY 1962 The first master file, the Business Master File,
| was established at the National Computer Center
|
| Individual Master File operations began a few years later. Let
| that sink in: every tax transaction a company or an individual
| makes in the United States is handled by a piece of software
| written for the IBM 7074. These were using a CPU of about 27 000
| instructions per second and had 9900 words of core memory. It's
| hard to paint a picture of just how old we are talking about.
| While the Beatles already existed at the time, the Beatlemania is
| still a phenomena for the future. This
| https://i.imgur.com/dtmPy3a.jpg is a luxury car from that year.
| jimkoen wrote:
| Are you sure the IRS still uses the exact same data format that
| was used in the 1960's or would "Business Master File" rather
| be a name for a data exchange standard?
|
| Because the IBM 7074 is so old, it predates the 8 bit byte
| length.
| chx wrote:
| There are countless articles and various government agencies
| reporting on how this ancient system is still in use. Eg. htt
| ps://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/finance_r_lette...
| https://www.gao.gov/blog/irss-efforts-modernize-60-year-
| old-... https://www.cfodive.com/news/irs-relies-64-year-old-
| software... etc etc
| danielovichdk wrote:
| One of my favourite books is Dreaming In Code which really does a
| good job telling the story of mitch kapors "chandler" product;
|
| Dreaming in Code tells the story of the development of Chandler,
| an open source, cross-platform "personal information manager."
| This software was the brainchild of Mitch Kapor (of Lotus 1-2-3
| fame, and the founder of a short-lived non-profit called the Open
| Source Applications Foundation. While the OSAF was well-funded
| (to the tune of millions), and while Chandler was eventually
| built, it was marked by blown deadlines and cost overruns. And
| the project is now moribund.
|
| In other words, as Rosenberg wryly notes, Chandler is another in
| a long line of failed software projects. Unlike building bridges,
| he notes, software engineering is hard.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Forgot to cite the source
| https://fossacademic.tech/2020/12/06/Dreaming-In-Code.html
| mizzao wrote:
| Wow, this article makes it sound like a combination of Outlook,
| Google Workspace, a database, Jira/Monday/Notion, and HR tools
| all combined in one platform.
|
| Not bad before for a platform before we entered the world of
| Oauth and SaaS services.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The bane of my corporate existence during a decade. It turns any
| Outlook hater into an advocate.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I am an exception but I liked it and I really dislike outlook
| (and exchange). I was far more productive with Notes back in
| the day; it was easy just to automate whatever. I am happy I
| never will have to use either ever again, but thrown back in
| time, I would pick Notes over Outlook any time.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| See also DEC's All-In-1. These combined apps were for a while a
| pleasure to use.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1
| shashashasha___ wrote:
| just to get an understanding how the UI was...
|
| http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| There is in my head a vague concept of a minimal corporate API.
|
| Where there is a (global?) standard of data access - like
| For emp in biz.hr.employees.current: print emp.401K.contribution
|
| I mean something like this exists for SAP (probably), but I
| imagine there is some FOSS version waiting out there that is the
| POSIX of organisational APIs
|
| How it's implemented is almost irrelevant. But it's existence
| means management become software literate, means that companies
| won't waste half their software devs doing things like
| reinventing ETL tools
|
| It just seems a good idea
| kopirgan wrote:
| Wow didn't know Indian co HCL acquired this. My employer, a
| software company used this long long back. Had my email, internal
| support KB, Groups etc inside.
|
| Computer associates used to be the graveyard of dead software..
| Guess they're dead too.
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