Yeah it was sort of cool. There were entire software products built on top of Notes and its forms and workflow.

I never had to program any of that, so can't speak to that side of it, but where I worked we used Notes to quickly build a lot of internal forms and workflows, and had some internal discussion forums and documentation in it, it all worked pretty well as I recall.

The one weird thing was we had to run it on OS/2. The only OS/2 machine in the server room.

We didn't use it for email though.

My only experience with it was in 1999, I took a distance-learning class to learn C++. The teacher would send us mail about assignments, reading that we needed to do, quizzes at the end of a unit, etc. We submitted our projects through that system too.

Maybe I'd have a different opinion now, but I remember it working pretty well for that purpose back then.