My first exposure to Lotus Notes was to work on a migration project that was moving from Notes to "Exchange WebStorage System" (WebDAV) - which was an aborted "go-nowhere" server/service which ended-up being replaced by SharePoint ("Teams Services") - which we had to also re-target mid-project.

We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate, a small team and an extremely limited time. (and varying levels of complexity in each app)

What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities.

We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app).

However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".

Agree with that, I've used both Notes heavily in the past and SharePoint/Exchange as a software engineer exposed to them and Notes always felt more cohesive. Notes (and Oracle products) get dumped on in discussions on Reddit and sometimes on HN but Notes worked well and was very consistent, Oracle products too for that matter, in my experience.

Notes and Sametime also worked very well on Linux on my IBM work laptop, supported by support, official Linux distro inside IBM. That was mid-late 2000's when many companies hadn't even thought of trying to support both Windows and Linux (or Mac).

Notes provided an amazing platform. I think its fatal flaw was that it targeted unskilled developers. The result was a bunch of poorly made applications which were naturally hated by users. Also targeting unskilled developers resulted in a developer experience hostile to skilled software engineers so they went elsewhere.

As a former Notes user (email, cal, plus apps for expense tracking, etc) - what did Notes in was the horrendous, non-Windows user interface. The second half of the article here is spot on, if anyone bothers to read it. Nice to see those old site ridiculing Notes, Jeff Atwood et al - a blast from the past!

As an end-user, I welcomed Notes demise.

And don't get me started on its god-awful local/offline sync behavior. Outlook ran circles around it. Hard to believe from todays perspective, sure, but yes, Lotus Notes was so much worse.

Notes was legit. It was very featureful and cool but the amount of support and hardware required was quite high. A little ahead of its time.

100% my sentiment.