What I like about this solution is that you can use it for mailing, as a client for email, and you can also use it for workflows. So, you can easily develop applications. Even people who haven't got great IT skills can develop some basic applications to use in the company, especially a workflow application. So, it is for mailing and for applications, which is a great thing about HCL Notes.

It is very good for managing and sharing documents on the network or inside the company. It works very well for sharing documents.

It is one of the best products in the world for workflow applications. It works very well for workflows or decisional processes where a task needs to be first approved by someone. After that, the task moves to the next or final stage where another person approves it with some notes or attached documents.

People who are on the move outside the company but need to interact with the database of the company can do some tasks in the HCL Notes application offline. When they have connectivity, the information is updated or replicated in real-time. They can install the application on different devices. They can use it on mobile phones or iPad.

Its ongoing license cost is a fraction of its competition. 

Its security is absolutely stratospheric. In an application, you can lock down to field-level security. For example, I could log in and see a field in an HR database with salaries. When you log in, you see exactly the same database, but the field with the salary just isn't there. So, you can literally have field-level security on it, and you can also have secure encryption. For example, I could give you that database allowing you to see the salary, but a calculation that shows how much they get per month in another field is encrypted. So, you won't be able to see that because you don't have the encryption key. You can implement high-level security very simply. 

The security and performance of the solution are good even though our platform is variable, except for the mail services.

HCL Notes has fantastic built-in security. The email and personal communication components are excellent, but they are some applications provided by HCL that Notes previously provided when it was under IBM and Lotus. Everyone wants email, so that's just part of the product. However, more savvy users can build their own solutions for managing information, and that's the great thing about it.

It's a user-friendly tool for knowledge-sharing applications, and it has great backward compatibility. For example, I started using Notes in 1993. You can take an application from 1993, and it will run without alteration on the latest version of Notes in 2022. 

Some products from Microsoft and other vendors have to change every year. For example, the early Windows application was 16-bit and they increased that to 32 bits with Windows 95 in the mid-1990s. A decade later, they made 64-bit applications possible.

You have to get a brand-new of your application every time Microsoft changes the underlying architecture, but HCL Notes will let you install an application on the latest release, and runs without issue. You can enhance the application to make use of the new features in the latest release, but you can also run it the way it was built back in 1993. 

The most valuable feature is the access that it provides to documents. This offers us an easy way to make changes.

We are actually in process of shifting away from this software. I can not really think of any pros to talk about when it comes to this solution that make it better than something else. All I have to mention are cons because this is pretty outdated software. As proof of how outdated it is, even IBM — the creator of this email client — sold it to HCL to get rid of it.  

It is pretty much outdated and there are no not many pros of using it. Although, if you have to count, integrations are easy. My company has integrated a lot of different systems into HCL Notes. We have systems like leave (vacation) management, we have systems like resource management, and internal files and documents. All of these have been integrated with Notes. So it is a tightly knit tool. Really there are so many integrations that there are far too many.  

We have not done any comprehensive search to see if there are other email clients that allow this type of integration. For example, I would not know if even something like Microsoft Office allows users to build integrations or your own features into their email client. HCL Notes sure does allow integrations of many kinds and that is maybe the only pro that I currently find in this solution.  

It is easy to manage. We have experience with HCL Notes, that is why we prefer it. I personally have 20 years of experience using it. 

The solution is practical, good interface, and performs well.

The usability of the old applications to the new version of the client is very good. The migration is very good for some legacy applications.

The most valuable feature is the UI.

Lotus Domino is an excellent platform for making groupware applications that are natively integrated with email.

It gives you the flexibility to publish applications in the web with practically no effort if you use some of the templates provided.

The security (private key / public key) is very strong.

You have a lot of predesigned templates for doing workflow applications.

Security is the most valuable feature, better than you get in 365. It's a great system.