I miss notes - it was really a better way to organize companies than anything later. Historical valuable data, records of why decisions were made, ephemeral email like things but for groups, user programmable if it didn't quite match your needs, robust encryption, it had it all.
oh I always nust assumed Lotus Notes was just lesser Outlook. can you give examples - such has how did it capture why decisions were made - that sounds ... hard or just "someone wrote it down"
It was a low/nocode environment; anyone (with enough rights) could knock up a simple app with rules/workflows and share it with the company. It made collecting, distributing and organising information easy if you knew what you were doing. It also created complex monsters as it was both too easy and too hard to use. I liked it a lot; we moved from Notes to Exchange and Sharepoint back in the day and it was awful for effiency. We required so much more people to do the same things. Luckily I left shortly after.
For your company you have a lot of smart people other than coders. And Notes had a rich collaborative set of intrinsically that you could hip out work flow applications like an accountant with spreadsheets. And built in security and auditing and all that. And since you had the ability to craft tools to fit the exact situation, automation of processes went so fast and was done by people familiar with the business side of the process. We did have a Notes team that would do apps for teams that couldn’t but also had a rich ecosystem of business line apps that were so much better than spreadsheet apps or Access apps.
