E-mail is widely regarded as the greatest success story in groupware to date. It is wide spread, easy to use and with its advanced features like distribution lists, aliases and multiple folders allow e-mail to be a very versatile and functional system. Many people don't realize that E-mail is groupware, but it fulfills all of the requirements, allowing people to communicate and share information and data via the computer.
Lotus Notes is one of the major commercial groupware systems available. The foundation of Notes is the CC:Mail e-mail system, which is the most used commercial mail program in the world. This is integrated with shared databases that may be stored on multiple servers to provide faster access. One of the greatest strengths of Notes is the inclusion of an application develpoment system, allowing customization and expansion of the notes program
Because Notes supports multiple servers, users can access a local server to retrieve data, which will generally be faster than retrieving information from a remote site. Consistency is maintained through all of the servers through a process called Replication. It is basically dynamic updating of all servers as soon as changes are made to a database stored on any server.
Expandability is another key selling point of Lotus Notes. Specialized applications may be quickly and easily crafted for specific uses using the Notes Application Development Language. Also, there is a set of .VBXs available called Lotus Notes Hi Test, which allows programmers to access Notes, and Notes databases using Visual Basic.