In a lot of ways Notes was ahead of its time. You could easily have encrypted replicated databases with offline work, which was very handy for traveling users back before high bandwidth connections were widely available, and you could build quite complex apps on top of those databases.

I saw at least one large company that migrated from Notes to exchange and they got the email/calendaring bit done quite easily and were still running notes servers for line of business applications years later.

Notes was pretty decent as a groupware/ nosql platform. Lotus script wasn’t great. I might be biased because my first CS job was to write applications with it.

It felt like they basically tacked on the email functionality to to Notes to sell it, but it always seemed kinda ok to me.

That's because your comment is only 3 levels deep.

Let's revisit this when it's Reply to Reply to Reply to Reply :)