After 20 years: What is Lotus Notes?
by Volker Weber
Found an interesting post by Mary Beth Raven tonight: What is Lotus Notes?
It's always been a challenge to describe what Notes really is. IBM sells it as email with calendar. Which is true, but also undersells the potential. Customers write their own software for the platform, and there are also some ISVs who try to sell their solutions. But by and large, most people do not understand where Notes shines. If you have to say "it's complicated", you aren't really happy, or are you?
Source: Julian Robichaux
MBR has a second question that is easily overlooked: What is Lotus iNotes? Which is even more difficult to answer, ever since IBM mixed up Notes/Domino-based iNotes with Outblaze-based iNotes.
Comments
Twitter reactions:
@ingotee: dead and it's been sick for all those twenty years.
@readyState: One word: Irrelevant.
Even the mighty Google failed to adequately describe advanced collaboration, and hence the failure of Wave. This is not just a Notes/IBM issue.
Darren, that's not the answer, or is it?
I don't know the answer but describing the basic Lotus Live offering as collaboration doesn't help - collaboration != email
@Sean. Of course email is collaborative. If there is a person at either end then it is collaboration. I see email as being like the TCP/IP of collaboration. It is at the bottom of the collaboration stack - but it is still pretty important.
Q: "After 20 years: What is Lotus Notes?"
A: "The best and most succsessful enterprise eCollaboration solution / framework on the market"
I am afraid, definitions work best without leading enterprise-strength blabla.
What is Lotus Notes? Well, Notes crashed on me as I was reading your post.
Hopefully this isn't prophetic...
Lotus Notes (and Domino) has allowed us to rapidly develop and sell a suite of social software applications that are easy to install, setup and configure.
