Email would eventually catch up to most of the features Lotus Notes pioneered, rebuilding those features one RFC at a time. It was a glimpse of the future, like Xerox Alto before it. Anyone who used it knew that this was how we’d work in the future. Yet it was too much, when all people really needed was an easier way to communicate.
This has to be the best writing about Lotus Notes that I have read in quite a while. Whether you loved it or loathed it, this is a must-read.
[Thx for the heads-up, Christian]
In 1991/2, I was involved in a consultancy for a UK charity – the UK branch of an international development agency. They wanted a comms system combined with a data store, and needed some quick decisions.
The Director at the time was already a great fan of Notes, and wanted us to go in that direction, but we pushed back on that – expensive and complex for their needs, lack of compatibility with their wider network, problems with deployment to branches in the developing world, etc. I seem to remember that we built them something in VB that served them adequately for a couple of years, until a directive from the network sent them down another road entirely.
Nevertheless for a long time, I felt a measure of regret and even guilt at pushing them away from Notes – I was a great fan of what I saw of it, and that was a big factor in my enthusiasm for Ray Ozzie’s other big project, Groove, which I engaged with a year later.
Great piece. Interesting that they call out that email is what did Notes in & their explanation why. When I was recruited by Microsoft to work on Notes compete, that group was within the Exchange organization. It was really hard to get people at Microsoft to understand the simplicity and value of the non-email aspects of Notes. But eventually, Microsoft won I guess. Notes definitely lost. I am so glad I had an opportunity to get involved with Notes so early on and to experience that ride. (And it got me into the door at Microsoft, which ended up being really great for me).
a really inspiring blog!
It is still striking how long the Notes paradigm survived.
It was there before everything else and that is why F9 is the new F5 because that is what Iris determined it to be in the back in the 80s.
And as the author writes, you need a combination of other tools today, be it Slack, Teams, Airtable, Notion, etc. to build use case Notes was able to cover 20 years ago with replicated NSF databases open for any developer.
And yes, the last quote is as simple as it is true: the web would evolve faster than you can ever keep developing Notes.
I wrote down my recollection how we trained Lotus Notes in the 1990ties
https://wissel.net/blog/2026/09/how-we-trained-lotus-notes.html
Participant reported a better understanding of “Zusammenarbeit (collaboration)” and “Benachrichtigung (notification)” which made them appreciate the shiny new tool.
I had the pleasure of being one of the people driving the introduction of Notes in a large German bank. Wolfgang might remember our first meetings. There was a lot of pushback internally, but I’m still convinced that, at that time, it was the right decision.
It took the bank on a journey from a mainframe-based office system to a client-server architecture and standardized the way people communicated worldwide. Every piece of information, including email, was replicated to every branch, even when they were connected via painfully slow 56 kb/s lines. Oh yes, and it supported every OS including OS/2. Lotusphere ’95, ’96 was the place to be :D.
It also helped move the bank from X.400-based external email to internet email.
And when the first viruses started showing up and there was a risk of them spreading via email, we simply changed the email template so users couldn’t easily open the attachment and pushed the change to every branch overnight. Installing virus scanners would have taken way too long.
Luckily, I wasn’t at the bank anymore when the decision was made to phase Notes out.
Looking back, it was quite an interesting journey.
Hallo Jens, das waren noch Zeiten mit db-Intranet … Lang, lang ist‘s her. Weiß nicht mal mehr, ob du mich noch kennst 😊
Hi Michael,
ei logo erinnere ich mich. Schön von dir zu hören.
Viele Grüße
Jens,
I found those early days in the 90s the most exciting times in my career. Your bank took the decision to move to Notes a year prior to the IBM acquisition and it took me a lot of efforts to sync with Notes PM in that era to align the enterprise rollout requirements of a large bank with the product management directions, I guess we were looking at R4 back then. I agree with your Loutsphere 95/96 vibes, and Volker can confirm !
It would not be until 15 years later when the bank decided to phase Notes out.
And it wasn’t a mere product question, a lot depended on the commercials and the dependencies of having it all outsourced to GTS.
Hi Wolfgang,
yes – it was a great collaboration. Thanks again for your support. Would be interesting to meet the players again.
Best Jens
Memory lane, here we come…
When I helped rolling out Notes in a regional bank we had a brainstorming session with the board how to create interest. It was decided to rollout two apps: The SOP handbook and a leave approval system. So I asked the chairman: are your leave dates a secret? He replied: no, everybody in the bank knows when I’m not around. So we build a feature “absentee calendar”. Once shown in the training it became the talk of the office and everbody rushed to signup for the training.
The true value was the SOP handbook, beating any paper or office file format based solution