I joined a company using Notes back in '00. Performed the 4 to 5 upgrade, skipped 6 and went to 7.

We had our "email blast" code in the founder of the companies mail database. When we launched new features or had various announcements, you would log on to Mark's email database and run those features in the drop down. Of course there were various permissions in check that only certain people could do (or view) certain things in the database, but that's where it ended up...

I always thought the data/design replication was cool as well. I had to bake in what I called "relational fields" into the documents to be able to perform some standard relational database type of work, but it was really easy to work with overall. Maybe too easy - as one person mentioned in the thread, there were hundreds of little custom apps built by anyone/everyone in the company, because it was just that easy.