zlacker

At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.).

Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could wear jeans instead of slacks (this was the distant past, when most professional workplaces still had real dress codes). This was an IT/Eng-wide thing, so we'd get an email reminder about this from an admin person in the department.

One time, I thought it would be funny to send my own email announcing pants-less Friday. So I took a copy of the email this admin sent and adjusted it accordingly. I did of course specify that you still had to wear underwear. I'm not a monster. Because I had programmer privileges in Notes, I was able to forge the sender so that it appeared to come from the department admin person, not me.

I _meant_ to send it to the small email group for just the other tech support folks (around 15 people or so). But I accidentally (?) sent it to all of IT/Eng, around 200-300 people, IIRC. Oops.

Needless to say, my boss's phone started ringing off the hook. I immediately went over to tell him what I'd done. He wasn't pleased, but I didn't get fired. I did have to write an apology email.

Of course, many folks in the department later told me it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen happen.

Soon after, I moved to programming at a different company. I think this was a good thing for many reasons, but one reason is that it was more challenging, so I wasn't bored with time on my hands to do stupid things like send prank emails to my coworkers.

>>autarc+(OP)
> We used Lotus Notes for email

My condolences.

>>autarc+(OP)
So... Did everyone wear pants on the designated pants-less Friday?

>>kspace+Qg
Sadly, yes.

>>autarc+(OP)
If you did this on April 1st it would have been hilarious.

>>oldgra+c2
To this day, 22 years after I have last used Lotus Notes, it remains the worst software product I have had to work with. It tried to be everything and ended up being bad at all of it.

>>oldgra+c2
Nah. It was amazing back then.

>>martin+hn
Yeah it was sort of cool. There were entire software products built on top of Notes and its forms and workflow.

I never had to program any of that, so can't speak to that side of it, but where I worked we used Notes to quickly build a lot of internal forms and workflows, and had some internal discussion forums and documentation in it, it all worked pretty well as I recall.

The one weird thing was we had to run it on OS/2. The only OS/2 machine in the server room.

We didn't use it for email though.

>>oldgra+c2
I had a client (a national company with multiple locations and call centers!) that was using Lotus Notes for email in 2022, and for all I know they could still be using it. They had to run parallel calendars to work with external event invites, and apparently one of the calendars was backed by a system with a clock that was 5 minutes off because everyone was always getting to virtual meetings at the wrong time.

>>romanh+dn
There are tons of things I miss about Notes email almost daily when I use Outlook. I supported Notes though, so I actually knew how to use search and agents and stuff that most of the people that whine about Notes never learned to use correctly. It's funny how all the companies that ditched Notes end up rewriting all the same applications in Sharepoint and then again in ServiceNow. The industry eats and regurgitates itself every couple of years without actually improving much.

>>martin+hn
My only experience with it was in 1999, I took a distance-learning class to learn C++. The teacher would send us mail about assignments, reading that we needed to do, quizzes at the end of a unit, etc. We submitted our projects through that system too.

Maybe I'd have a different opinion now, but I remember it working pretty well for that purpose back then.

>>Suppaf+4w
Switched from notes to Microsofts cloud thing and Lync, notes was better. We also had hundreds of not thousands of small apps in notes. Supposedly Microsofts solution was going to be much cheaper if everyone got off notes, but we were given to time, budget, framework or even guidance when it came to the apps. Several years later they still paid a lot for notes.

>>autarc+(OP)
> but one reason is that it was more challenging

I feel like that's the most relevant thing here. Bored people do ~stupid pranks. And under-challenge leads to boredom

>>romanh+dn
Still in use in many places for some ungodly reason.

At my previous job they had been using Notes since the company was founded in the early 90’s, meaning they lived through it being Lotus Notes, then IBM Notes and now HCL Notes.

Everything was deeply entrenched - email, warehouse inventory, ERP system, all documentation made in the entire company… just everything.

And this is for a scandinavian company manufacturing high tech devices for telecom and aviation, among other things.

It was… an interesting nightmare, constantly got in the way of any sort of productivity. Definitely contributed to me leaving early

>>romanh+dn
F5 to close Lotus Notes. On every app including MS Outlook, F5 was to refresh / fetch the new email, except in Lotus Notes. In Lotus Notes it just means “lose your work”. Can’t believe it didn’t start as an April Fools, like Gavin Belson’s Signature box.

>>enligh+At
That sounds both wholesome and horrifying. Like we are well into the digital age but sometimes people are just stubbornly analog.

>>hnacco+OT
Absolutely. I had the same problem through most of school until college.

>>Suppaf+4w
Totally agree.

I didn’t use notes much, but it was a platform ahead of its time, that thanks to IBM’s… IBM-ness was ignored and allowed to rot.