Were you really left alone, though? As in, not even forced to use Lotus Notes? Because even that kind of small-bore enterprisation can destroy the culture of a small tech-focused company.
About your point about Lotus Notes: I interned at IBM 3 times, and was never forced to use Lotus Notes. No one whom I worked with at IBM used Lotus Notes either. We used either Open Office or MS Office.
The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.
Just as a counterpoint: when I interned at IBM, we were forced to use various Lotus products including Notes. Lotus Symphony was especially painful, and we begged to be allowed to just use Powerpoint (and were told, emphatically, "No.")
You might be thinking about the Office-like companion to Notes, Symphony. AFAIK (going from some Name/Location/BU-looking email addresses) IBM still uses Lotus Notes for email.
Lotus Notes is actually quite good when used properly and in moderation, but it really does not set a positive tone culturally.
Notes is _terrible_ from a UI perspective. The server side (domino) though was light-years ahead of anything in terms of ideas at least. Combining a CA, distributed, document-oriented database(think mongodb, couchdb), LDAP server, web server and mail server that supports IMAP, POP, SMTP as well as the proprietary encrypted notes protocol.
Agreed. I worked in Lotus Domino for a short while, and it was absolutely amazing for Rapid Application Development of anything that required e-mail and storing documents (or kinda "schemaless" data). It was even supported multiple languages (a declarative "Formula" language, a Visual Basic derived "LotusScipt", and Java(!)).
You could write a decent Lotus Domino app that served up web pages, so users wouldn't have to use the awful Lotus Notes client.
Amusingly, in I think Lotus Notes 8, they revitalised the GUI by replacing it with... Eclipse RCP. Hrmm.
painful flashback! or, I guess, "trigger" in the parlance of today.
I worked for a biotech software company some years ago that wasn't even bought by IBM but as part of becoming an "IBM Business Partner" agreed to use Lotus Notes to replace a bunch of existing stuff we were using for email/collaboration/etc.
Notes isn't even bad or anything but it was no better than the tools we were already using for the tasks we were using them for, and because it is (or was? haven't used it since) a big all-encompassing "enterprise" system it took like a half-year migration period to get everyone to the point where we could do the same sorts of things we could before, not really any better or worse, just different and incredibly disruptive during the transition.
(also, is this mkozlows from qt3? haven't posted there in a long time, used to use the handle Coca Cola Zero).
