It's funny, because when I first encountered Notes way back when, it was something the department installed without IT approval. Semi-technical users could easily build little tracking and document databases and publish them on the network. People actually liked using it!

(I've always suspected that Gmail was inspired by the old Notes mail interface, which had no 'inbox' and was based on conversation views and tagging.)

Once Notes turned into IT-managed 'groupware' and became a bad parody of MS Outlook, it became completely intolerable. End-users could no longer create databases (or even edit their inbox columns) as most systems were completely locked-down. My last two encounters with it, they didn't even use the DB/workflow side of it, it was only for mail.

Every IT person I know of who had to deal with administering it has hated "Bloated Goats", as some of them call it.

I've developed in Lotus Notes for about a year and I thought it was kind of interesting. The distributed databases were kinda cool, as was the Designer. Perhaps it reminded me a bit of HyperCard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

But that was like 6 or 7 years ago. Wouldn't want to develop in Lotus Notes anymore, but I don't have any bad memories of the software.

As far as I can tell Notes is designed to appeal to CIO's who write large checks --- it certainly doesn't appeal to the users or IT people.

I used Notes and Domino in 97-98 and quite liked it. We used it to develop in-house workflow and documenting tools and at the time it was really quite slick. Doing web interfaces to the tools was amazingly quick (relative to most other things at the time) and generating custom spreadsheet reports was quite quick and easy assuming you where also using Lotus 1-2-3.

Never really used the email functions though.

I don't know, it's kind of fun to use as a programmer too. I can redesign my personal email view to anything I want.

This. Designer access to your mailfile, and a full text index and it was a pretty good email client that you could tailor how you liked.

I think the Lotus Notes as a GUI platform is so horrid that it couldn't possibly be good at anything:

* It comes with a program "Zap Notes" which is supposed to kill it when it hangs (Wat?). A bit funny since "Zap Notes" doesn't even work for me, and I have to use a combination of greps and kills.

* The UI rendering is slow and visible. These guys haven't heard of double buffering. You see little GUI components being rendered slowly. This is extremely annoying and sluggish.

* Every little UI operation you do in this program can take seconds on relatively modern hardware. During these seconds, the UI is of course completely blocked.

* When someone at your corporate IT wants to move a Notes mail server or such -- they actually have to coordinate a reconfiguration of all the users' mail server addresses! You have to go dig in a huge, badly designed preferences dialog to make this change. This is nuts.

The list goes on and on, but I can't fathom anyone liking this software.

Run "nsd -kill" from your notes dir. ZapNotes is very 2005.

It has been disappointing IT people for a long time now as well. The eclipse based designer client in particular was a difficult transition. And the move to Java based Xpages hasn't been all sunshine and glory.

Just don't ask the guys that were/are doing Lotus Notes to SharePoint migrations ... we loathe it as much as its users.

Yeah, I'm sure your paychecks don't reflect that.