I’ll admit to just being a front end user of the platform only so I am sure it framed my opinion—the UX was dreadful. The other thing that set the bad taste it was brought in as the corporate email platform by a company that acquired us and since I lead IT for our org (now a division) and corporate IT was across country and 3 hours behind, we caught the brunt of all the user complaints and support for the first half of the day until the help desk opened up.

Lotus Notes is criminally underrated. I don't think folks gave credit to the replication engine. I was so stoked when Ray O was going to MS and thought he'd just kill it there, and I prayed bring Lotus like replication to sharepoint. I was not a huge notes fan early on as the UI was off-putting (I didn't know the UI was written to be cross platform - now it makes sense). But the functionality it provided and the millions of notes DBs written, is truly amazing and it has a huge place of respect in my book. Ray is tops in my book.