My company uses Lotus Notes, primarily to avoid the frequently distributed Outlook-oriented viruses. Aside from this incidental advantage, Lotus Notes is the most agonizingly frustrating application I have EVER used (IBM’s Visual Age comes a close second - does anyone else see a pattern here???)!!!

You will frequently see messages along the lines of ’’Document not found’’ or ’’Unknown error’’ whilst attempting the most mundane tasks - like opening your mailbox. Databases become corrupt and the Lotus support people (there’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one) will take ages to tell you they couldn’t fix the problem so they just had your database rebuilt from last week’s tape!

The most appealing thing is the amount of memory Lotus Notes sucks into its cavernous belly. 16Mb just to sit there doing nothing. When you’re running an NT system on a P133 with 64Mb or RAM because your IT company lives in the economic dark ages, 16Mb to have a glorified mail client open is a joke!

Software version:

Lotus Notes 5.0.5