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.