Before Outlook there were many, many options, which is kind of the point. You might be intrigued by something like All-In-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1
My own first email client was VMS Mail at uni in 1988, then pine when I started to use SunOS and Solaris every day for work. Lotus Notes was very big for a while too before the web killed it off.
> Lotus Notes was very big for a while too before the web killed it off.
I think the architecture of Notes/Domino was technically very interesting - a rapid application development environment incorporating a replicated document-oriented database, cross-platform GUI forms designer, and scripting language.
And then that environment was used to build an email and calendaring application. Some customers bought it just for email and calendar, and ignored its potential as a platform for custom applications. Others used its application development features heavily.
But I think part of its decline was that its potential as an application development environment/platform never received enough emphasis from IBM. IBM bought it for the email and calendaring - their mainframe-based groupware line (OfficeVision, PROFS, DISOSS, SNADS, etc) was really showing its age, and buying Lotus was their answer to that business problem. And that’s how they positioned it in the market, and that became the focus of their R&D investment.
I remember people used to complain about how the Notes email UI was confusing - due to its cross-platform heritage, it didn’t use the same keyboard shortcuts as Microsoft apps, for example. (Something I believe they improved in newer versions.) Yet underneath that email client lay something powerful that its competitors (primarily Exchange and GroupWise) completely lacked
I wonder what might have been, if IBM had positioned it more heavily as a platform for applications rather than just email+calendar - or if it had ended up with someone other than IBM? IBM didn’t really need an application platform because they already owned plenty (WebSphere, CICS, IMS, TPF, AS/400, VisualAge, Informix-4GL, Rational, SAA ADCycle, Cross System Product, UniData/UniVerse, EGL, PowerHouse 4GL, etc). Maybe it would have gone better with a company for whom it was their sole or primary application platform instead of just one among many?
I’ve heard some suggestions that now HCL has bought it, they have a renewed interest in using it as an application platform compared to what IBM had. Even if that’s true, probably too late to make much of a difference-there are so many other options nowadays, arguably better.
What you've said is pretty much what I always say about Notes, it was much more than Outlook and when Outlook took over I often wondered what folks did for all the things that Notes did that weren't just email and calendar. I wonder what is comparable now in the ability for someone not very technical to be able to knock up, say a simple change approval system? It sometimes seems with the loss of such things as Notes, Foxpro and Hypercard that it has become less easy for non-dev folks to create simple apps rather than more easy.
> I think the architecture of Notes/Domino was technically very interesting - a rapid application development environment incorporating a replicated document-oriented database, cross-platform GUI forms designer, and scripting language.
And so ahead of its time I understand it's been used to kill patents, as a demonstration of prior art.
I think I read an article once about a patent case that featured someone tracking down a still-shrink wrapped copy of Lotus notes, then having a developer use it to demonstrate it had the features that had been erroneously been patented by someone later.
Notes was pretty horrible for creating all sorts of legacy technical debt. Some handy Joe would create some database that would worm itself into critical business processes but be completely unmaintained.
Of course this could be solved by policies but I've seen this happen in many organizations.
It was also incredibly buggy. I'd be looking at a Java error dump several times a week. Especially once they integrated sametime into notes.
> Notes was pretty horrible for creating all sorts of legacy technical debt. Some handy Joe would create some database that would worm itself into critical business processes but be completely unmaintained.
And is the "better" alternative is to avoid that "legacy technical debt" by forcing that "handy Joe" to keep doing things by hand, by denying him the tools to solve his problem? Because if you don't have the connections to get budget to pay a professional developer, you shouldn't be able to solve your problem with software?
IMHO, it's better to think of those kinds of "handy Joe" apps as prototypes.
The problem is they often don't get beyond the protoype stage, the 'developer' leaves the company and whole business processes end up depending on something that is no longer maintained.
In our place it took a huge effort to move away from notes. Literally thousands of 'important' databases in the system over the years. Some were converted to web using low-code tech, some were simply archived or exported. But it was a huge mess.
I'm not against prototyping or efficiency at all. But the reality is that Notes had become a really stale platform, and even a prototype should have a continuous maintainer.
In the end we just had too many users using things that nobody knew anything about. This was really a huge risk.
> Because if you don't have the connections to get budget to pay a professional developer, you shouldn't be able to solve your problem with software?
This is a good point though, and we've now kept a whole team of low-code devs that take on things just like this for new projects that could offer efficiency, but they do it in a proper way with documentation and maintenance.
I hated using Lotus Notes for emailing and calendering! But, when someone showed me the application develoopment aspects, it was then i came to the conclusion that it was an amazing app-building platform, and a mediocre email/calendar app!
Maybe something like Pine? Even into Web 1.0 days, it was still pretty common for people to use. Everyone in my high school accessed their school-provided email account by telnetting into a Unix server and accessing Pine via a menu system.
WordPerfect had email too. Novell bought GroupWise from WordPerfect. Before the Novell acquisition, it was called WordPerfect Office, and before that WordPerfect Library. It was available for DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX (SCO Xenix, AT&T 3B2, NCR TOWER), OS/2, VAX/VMS, and Data General minicomputers.
Confusingly, Corel now sells "WordPerfect Office" which is nothing to do with the original WordPerfect Office. The current "WordPerfect Office" is an office suite composed of WordPerfect (word processor), Quattro Pro (spreadsheet, acquired from Borland), and a few other apps. The original "WordPerfect Office" was not an office suite, it was a groupware suite, with email, calendaring, document management, etc.
And GroupWise is still around, but now called Micro Focus GroupWise, since Attachmate bought Novell and then Micro Focus bought Attachmate. And more recently, Micro Focus has been bought by OpenText. I wonder how many people still use it though. I remember when everybody was jumping ship from GroupWise – 15+ years ago. If everyone was abandoning something 15 years ago, who is left today?
Addendum: Someone on Reddit claims [0] there is only one large GroupWise customer remaining – US Federal Bureau of Prisons. If true, makes sense – where else but some government agency would something like this survive?
> If everyone was abandoning something 15 years ago, who is left today?
Those that were and are still afraid of such a migration I guess.
I remember using groupwise in the early 2000's at work, it didn't felt much worse than the outlook/exchange and Lotus Notes I have been using later. I think the one particularly worse was Lotus Notes. I think it received some instant messaging just after I left that company but most teams were using rogue jabber/xmpp servers everywhere even on companies that provided Microsoft Lync because the xmpp clients were superior,the experience more reliable and people didn't want to be spied by their bosses/HR teams. It is funny how people have surrendered in most places while nothing prevent them technically to discuss on other instant messaging platforms.
Had I been the one tasked to be admin it may have been quite different. I have no idea about groupwise but I remember Lotus Notes admins had some headaches (but they weren't especially smart or knowledgeable people so it may just be that team and not the product).
Besides I don't think that email and calendaring are technologies where a particular product makes a huge difference. We don't send and receive emails, manage contacts or schedule meetings much differently than 20y ago. The Outlook/exchange combo is popular because of microsoft enterprise licenses and its integration with active directory (and now Azure). It is really Active Directory that is the product that tightly bind every Microsoft Product together and make them so ubiquitous and competitive against alternatives. I don't know how much Micro Focus sell its solution vs on premise exchange + outlook clients licensing and or office 365 (remember that some company still don't want to go cloud).
> Those that were and are still afraid of such a migration I guess.
You can guess how the process occurs.
Some manager: "We need to get rid of GroupWise, so we will create a project"
a while later
Gordonjcp: "This looks much harder than it seems, let's just keep it going a couple more years, here's a plan for getting rid of it, you can put that into action when I retire and in the meantime let's work on reducing our dependence on it"
a while later
prmoustache: "Right, that's that beardy old twat gone, let's get rid of this sodding GroupWise nonsense once and for all. Oh actually, it's tied into quite a lot of other things, according to this plan, let's make a plan to replace all that"
a while later
prmoustache's apprentice: "Right, that's that prmoustache numpty gone, can't believe they never got round to getting rid of GroupWise, let's look at this dusty old plan to - oh, there's really quite a lot of work in that, let's get a contractor in..."
In the case of US Federal Bureau of Prisons, I suspect the actual reason is this: they have over 36,000 employees. When you have that many employees, an email migration project is not going to be cheap. Even at private sector prices, you are looking at a multi-million dollar project; then you have to add the usual federal contracting overhead. But, many other US government agencies used GroupWise too, and they all migrated off it–so very achievable if you have the budget.
Which is probably the real problem – does Congress want to appropriate US$X million so federal prison guards can have a better email system? They did that for heaps of other federal agencies, because those agencies made arguments "our staff will be so much more efficient at catching terrorists/reviewing licensing applications/whatever if we had better IT", and that convinced Congress to appropriate the money, and then the email migration funding came out of that. By contrast, BOP argues "better IT will make us more efficient at rehabilitating prisoners" and Congress goes "yawn, you think we really care about that?..."
> Besides I don't think that email and calendaring are technologies where a particular product makes a huge difference.
It might not be a huge difference, but slower email clients like Outlook and even GMail these days, increase the overhead of communications and make communication less likely. Maybe it's me, but when corporate email is fast, I'll at least open each mail for a quick scan once a day. When corporate email is slow, I'm only going to maybe scan titles.
Also, if Outlook still does things like drain my battery to death if I forget to quit before sleeping, and not work without a restart after a brief sleep with a network change, long startup time means it's unlikely to get started at all. Once that's common, corporate email is no longer a reliable communications method, and that's not great.
I could rant about email products that hide email addresses, as if nobody ever worked with two people with the same first name and last name before, or as if spams and scams didn't routinely use good sounding names when they send from someone's unintentional web to email gateway.
I really doubt that vendor lock-in is the reason in their case. Heaps of other organisations - including many not particularly competent public sector ones - managed to do it. Back when everyone was doing it (15-20 years ago), there was a whole cottage industry of consulting firms specialising in Novell-to-Microsoft migrations. So long as you were willing to spend sufficient $$$, and had sufficient executive buy-in, you really couldn’t go wrong. I suspect in their case the real answer must be either (1) unwilling to spend enough to successfully pull it off; or (2) never made it a priority at a sufficiently senior level (or both)
Lotus Notes came with a comprehensive development environment for custom applications - much easier to get locked-in there. GroupWise was much more spartan in its feature set, just email and calendar. It had an API but few customers ever wrote code against it - it was primarily used by third-party vendors for integration with document management systems, anti-spam/anti-virus, email archival, eDiscovery, identity management, etc - back in the day, most of the big enterprise offerings in those spaces had plugins for GroupWise. But sooner or later they almost all had plugins for Exchange too - so very rarely would that be a blocker on migrating GroupWise to Exchange
And being hooked on Microsoft might not be the best place to be-but still better than stranded on a dying platform. At least Microsoft has a clear roadmap to move to cloud (if that’s what you want to do), By the time cloud became a thing, GroupWise’s remaining install base was too small to support that
Groupwise was considered a miracle at a law firm I worked for in the 1990s. We managed to link three offices together, the main office dialing up each of the branches once an hour to exchange email and documents over 9600k modems.
