Lotus Notes is an application suite that includes the following components:

• e-mail
• calendaring and scheduling
• address book
• database
• web server
• programming.

Unlike other application suites (like Microsoft Office) that split these pieces of functionality into separate products (like Outlook, Access, Front Page, etc.), Lotus Notes presents all of these components using a single front-end.

Notes was Salesforce before Salesforce. It was Dropbox before Dropbox. It was SharePoint before SharePoint. It was Atlassian before Atlassian. It was Zendesk before Zendesk. It was ServiceNow before ServiceNow. It was Workday before Workday. In some implementations, it was even Github before Github.

It had web-like forms before there was a web, server apps before there were much in the way of servers, and shared distributed databases before such things had even been heard of by most IT folk. Plus, it had an intrinsic, built-in, automatic security level that protected data enterprise wide with a deep level of granularity.