How I started with Lotus Notes

Well, looks like everyone is posting about how they got started with Notes. I already posted most of the details weeks ago... but what the heck.

When I came to the gas company in 1993 PC's were rare, networks almost non-existant and the mainframe was king. I worked as the IS liason to the engineering department on a GIS project - boy they loved me, they didn't trust IS to do anyting, were running their own thin net Netware 2 LAN and a proprietary thick-net LAN for GIS workstations. The only other networks in the building were a hand full of IS systems running OS/2 on token ring and a 3 user Netware 3 network for HR.

A couple of years later the decision was made to move the accounting system off of the mainframe. We bought three little IBM RS/6000 C10 servers - one to run Lawson, one to handle NFS file systems and one to act as print server and handle other administrative issues. This led to the creation of a corporate wide network .... though it actually took several years to peal the Engineers off their own network.

With the new network in place my boss brought up the subject of email. We discussed a POP/SMTP set up, and cc:Mail and other options but I had read about Lotus Notes
and mentioned it as an option. Our first server was on an OS/2 workstation and most clients were on Windows 3.11. Within a few months we had our mail server running on one of the C10s with the OS/2 server relegated to other Notes databases. We wrote tons of small applications for IS department use one of my favorites - because I designed it and also because of it's name was the UFO's database.... this due to my boss's sick sense of humor.... we had a standard IS department form for Unplanned Failures in Operation.... so my first major notes development experience was the program bugs database.... we used it to track any user issues - that program stayed in operation through 2000.

The RAD capabilities of Notes were GREAT! In our place there were the mainframe programmers and us strange network / PC people but all of a sudden we could quickly write quick little databases to fix user problems.

Looking back now the hardest thing to believe is that from late 1995 through late 1999 we ran our mail server on a box with less than 4GB of disk space... I've got a couple of users who would fill that by themselves now.