What makes Notes good for collaboration....
I have been a Notes developer for the last 13 years. It's one of the fastest platforms for development - it was used in the first few hours of the 9/11 attacks so that relatives could come to Ground Zero and enter info on who was missing, where they were in the Twin Towers, etc. IBM did not publicise this.
It has an outstanding Replication engine. The US Navy uses it so ships can share info among themselves without use of radio. And since the design also replicates, when a ship once reported an error, the bug fix was pushed to all ships within a few hours - even the ones which were weeks away from a return to port. Few app environments can do this.
It has outstanding security. You control whether a record is visible, read-only or read-write. And within the record, you can lock down sections to specific users and roles. This is critical for real-world "groupware".
It has an Access Control List. This prevents code that hasn't been signed by a recognized ID from executing on your computer. When the "I Love You" virus was knocking out Exchange servers, our Email Admin went to see Star Wars because it didn't do anything to our environment.
As for the UI, well, that's a matter of taste. Apple's iTunes has copied much of the NotesView. I think that's quite a compliment. And as noted by others - you can change just about anything about the UI. More so in Notes8.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
