When discussing Lotus Notes it’s useful to have a good understanding of two perspectives. Some view it as an ugly version of Outlook/Exchange, but those functio

When discussing Lotus Notes it’s useful to have a good understanding of two perspectives. Some view it as an ugly version of Outlook/Exchange, but those functions were not really the point of it (so comparisons to Outlook/Exchange aren’t really correct). It was really a development platform, and email, calendar, tasks, etc. would be better understood as “sample apps” that could be built on it. As mentioned in the article, this was a time when apps were built native to the OS, and deployment and updates were a full time job for the IT department. Notes encapsulated all these apps in a single app launcher in a standard way they could be deployed and managed. The best comparison today is not Outlook/Exchange, but the whole Web itself which addressed the same problem of apps in a more universal way. However Notes enabled this at least a decade before the Web was advanced enough to handle this.