Happy Birthday Lotus Notes!

Lotus Notes turns 15 years this year. It has been an incredible journey for the first and original groupware (Interestingly Groupware term was coined by Lotus).

From being a bug report tool started way back in 1973 to the start of development of Lotus Notes in 1984 by Ray Ozzie, funded by Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and the purchase of Notes by Lotus in 1987 to the first release of Lotus Notes in 1989, Notes has travelled a long journey and is kind of been there done that and seen that. 15 years may not seem too long. But in a industry where standards evolve and change every 3 months, 15 months is a awfully long to be and still maintain the market leadership.

Lotus was the first collaboration software and still remains the best just for the range of capabilities it brings with it for collaboration, communication and cooperation. One of the best feature that Notes brings with it is the workflow which enables organizations to build workflow applications and automate processes very easily with little or no integration effort with the ubiquitious email.

Lotus Notes has survived and overcome the aggresive marketing blitz from the MS Exchange from Microsoft. From my personal experience, I can say that Lotus Notes beats MS Exchange and Outlook hands down, be it from the user perspective or the administrator perspetive.

A very interesting history of Lotus Notes can be read here.