Notes does one thing that nothing else on the market does: custom workflow. Its calendar and email suck elephant balls, but the workflow stuff is pure gold to any kind of process-oriented business (ie most of them.) You can design a completely bespoke workflow with custom documents, forms, actions and events and have Notes manage everything for you. IT guys love it. Management loves it even more, at least until they try to report against the data it holds...

What you can do with it is really, truly impressive. Sure, the user experience utterly stinks: it's dog slow, primitive to look at, wilfully oblivious to any UX developments in the last 15 years and, worst of all, it actively prevents data sharing and extraction. The functionality, though, is second to none in the right hands. There is nothing else that allows a small to medium sized company to construct a tightly-integrated business operations system for so little money. Your alternatives are, what, SAP? Siebel? Expensive, doesn't do all the workflow. Salesforce? Great CRM but functions fall off pretty fast afterwards. Hiring Accenture to build something? Not if your revenues are in the 7-8 figure range.

I have worked at a couple of Notes shops. One was a software company where Notes did everything. Bug tracking, product backlog, development tasks, timesheets, vacations, sales CRM, you name it. We had a full-time staff of 5 Notes developers to keep it running. The business would have collapsed instantly without it. It was our entire lives.

The second was a surveying company which put up cellphone masts. They used Notes to manage the entire process from site search through to landlord negotiations, contracts and operator billing. Every step was a document with a status, every change of status triggered some action, all carefully worked out. The reporting problem bit us hard though. We had to hire people to suck data out of Notes' flat file structure into SQL so we could do management reports. Then we had to hire more consultants to implement new workflows as the business changed, as new cell operators came online (this was in the '90s mobile gold rush), as all the variables and data points associated with a fast-moving market changed around us. Eventually the consulting bill to extract data from Notes for management reporting bankrupted the company. Shortly afterwards the owner had a stroke and then died. It's the only example I've heard of a software system actually killing someone.

The problems with it are a function of its age. Back at the vendor, if I needed a report on, say, bugs submitted in the last week, I'd have to submit a ticket to the Notes gurus to have them create it for me. The data was right there on my screen, but if they hadn't previously conceived of exactly the 'view' into the data that I wanted then I was reliant on them to produce it for me.

I remember once complaining to my father about the madness of a system that captured every tiny detail of everyone's daily work but prevented managers from doing even the most basic reporting. He just laughed and told me stories about MIS people and his former company's Pick mainframe.

I really, really hate Notes. Like, personally hate. I respect it, I admire its vision and persistence, and I really liked my 5 Notes developers from India, but the software itself just has to go. If a business buys into the workflow aspects (rather than stupidly using it for email/calendar) then by the time you realise its limitations it's so deeply bedded in that you can't get rid of it without blowing up your company.

Anyway, I think I might just have had a startup idea...