Lotus Notes - Its that email thing right...

Whenever I talk to IT folks on the 'other' side, they usually have that little smirk and ask "you develop applications with Lotus Notes? Is it not just email??'. I have heard similar remarks from IT veterans with more 10 years in the industry? I wonder Why this is so?

I guess, one of the main reasons is that Lotus Notes is unique compared to other products/languages/applications in the IT World. For example, if you understand MS SQL Server , you already have some idea about the capabilities of Oracle , MySQL etc. Lotus Notes seems to be very unique in this aspect, there is no other product that can be compared to it directly. Its hard for software developers to understand Lotus Notes if they have never been exposed to it!

Notes has also been more of a corporate tool , not within the reach of regular developers. Lotus Notes also does not seem to play a huge role in schools like VB etc.

Even companies which have Lotus Notes do not take utilize it to the maximum.
For example they might invest in creating a big online forum when they could accomplish the same with a discussion database! Some of these decisions are not based on technical requirements but are due to lack of knowledge about Lotus Notes and its features.

In the next coming days/weeks I will try to give an overview of what Lotus Notes is and what can it can do for your business.