I read an interview with an IBM technical guy once who claimed that Lotus Notes was first and foremost a synchronization platform (desktop and server) and email was just kind of built on top of that..
I use IBM Lotus Domino server software (Notes is the client side piece) as the underlying platform for some healthcare web applications. It would be more accurate to describe Domino as a loosely-structured document database with multi-master replication and a public-key security infrastructure. There is a whole application development layer on top of that, plus additional native features for messaging and workflow. Lotus (and later IBM) then built e-mail, calendar, and groupware applications using those basic building blocks. Those applications ship as part of the product, but you can build your own custom apps that operate on an equal footing. It works extremely well for certain classes of applications.
Usually when someone has a bad opinion of Notes/Domino it's because he used an old version of the e-mail application at some previous company, and it did have a sucky user interface. But the current version is on par with anything else out there.
"The product was very far ahead of its time. It was the first commercial client/server product."
"During this time, the developers at Iris used Lotus Notes to communicate remotely with people at Lotus. Halvorsen said, "Simply using the product every day helped us develop key functionality." For example, the developers needed to synchronize data between the two different locations, so they invented replication. "This wasn't in the original plan, but the problem arose and we solved it," said Halvorsen."
Simply using the product every day helped us develop key functionality.
The feedback loop of eating your own dog food is one of the greatest benefits a software project can have. Here the programmers weren't only users of the product, they were using it as an essential part of the development work itself. That's like putting steroids into your dog food and then eating it.
