> I see you are not a fan. True. This is 15 years of frustration talking. I'm surprised you didn't have the stability problems. So so so many times have I be

> I see you are not a fan. True. This is 15 years of frustration talking. I'm surprised you didn't have the stability problems. So so so many times have I been looking at a standard Windows "OK" popup box with so much java traceback in it that it literally filled the entire screen. Some periods this happened literally every 2 days or so. What helped stability extremely was installing the separate Sametime client and disabling the sametime functionality in Notes itself. However our admins frowned on that for some reason (never found out why). So I always had to get it from dubious sources. > I see notes as a basically a NoSQL database attached to a primitive gui and a very bad scripting language (lotus script). You could make a little application and deploy it to a team pretty easily. Too easily, yes. It was too handy. I wonder if this was intentional because these little databases had a way of becoming indispensable over time. Leading to Notes being set in stone as a business requirement. > IBM had a bunch of little Notes databases/applications that could be used by the dept to track project and other things. I haven't seen much that replaces its sort of simplicity and ease of use. I guess the web, but it seems it takes more to stand up a custom app these days. Yep.. MS Access roughly had the same and it was actually structured as a decent relational database, not some unstructured mess. But file based, a bit like sqlite with a forms and scripting tool built in. So it was also easy to migrate to SQL Server once an app became so big that it needed a real server. MS even had (has?) a wizard for this. It was really piss-easy to make a little tool in it and its scripting language was easier and known by more people (being VBA which most Excel experts know). It was even quite possible to make decently performing fairly complex apps in it. Not sure how it stands now as I haven't used it in years, but from what I've seen with some quick looks throughout the years, Access has not really changed at all since 2005 or so. However, Access did not reach this ubiquity and the reason is that MS left it out of the cheapest office editions. Which meant most standard users never had it on their PC and they would have to request it and provide a business reason for the cost. Notes on the other hand was always there and available, ready for people to tinker with to their heart's desire and create a whole shadow IT world :) Very smart move from Lotus, I have to say. > I have no idea how you would export the unstructured data that lives in those databases.. Oh don't start... It was terrible. None of it was documented because said "handy Joe"s were usually not experienced developers and had almost always left the company years ago. Also, most of these had been unmaintained for many years and thus not really fitting business requirements anymore. So lots of ugly workarounds were used, and the business side tried to use the project to inject new business requirements. Which in some cases made sense but in other ways would derail the project completely. In the end most of them were converted to web using a low-code/zero-code platform.