As the year 2024 draws to a close, it seems like a natural time to look back. Not just over the past 12 months, which seem to have flown by even faster than usual, but further than that. Just this month, on December 7, was the 35th birthday of Lotus Notes, and the 40th anniversary of the founding of Iris Associates, the startup that created it.
Teamstudio itself was founded a few years later, in January 1996 (yes, Lotusphere ‘96 was our inaugural conference!) So 13 months from now, we’ll be celebrating our 30th anniversary, a milestone that hardly seems possible. Back then, we operated out of a 500 square foot office above a greeting card store in Marblehead, MA. Our neighbor was Dondo the magic clown, a children’s entertainer. In that little space, we would call our customers, process their orders for CIAO! and Analyzer, pack up CDs in their jewel cases and the friendly FedEx guy would pick them up to be shipped all over the country.
From those humble beginnings, we expanded to the UK and later Japan, while quickly outgrowing our space in Marblehead and moving to the Cummings Center in Beverly, MA, our home to this day. These days, of course, most of us work remotely although we see each other regularly on video calls.
As you know, the Lotus Notes marketplace has changed a lot too, in 30 years. Teamstudio CIAO! and Analyzer were our first tools, and believe it or not, they are still popular today. We’ve introduced many other tools since then, of course, most of which are still available today. What we have seen in the last 10 years or so, is an increased interest in archiving and exporting Notes data to other formats. That, of course, resulted in the release of Teamstudio Export in 2018.
As of now, we are on version 5.0 of Export, which supports the creation of not just HTML web site representations of your Lotus Notes data, but also PDF and most recently CSV and direct upload to SharePoint lists. For a rundown of the latest features in Export, have a look at the explainer video below.
While it’s nice to be able to look back on almost 30 years in business, none of this would be possible without you, our customers. Which brings me to the reason for writing this post in the first place: thank you! We really, really appreciate your business, your support, sometimes your patience as we work around a 35-year-old platform’s idiosyncrasies.
We are grateful. And, at this special time of year, we send not only our gratitude, but also our very best wishes and season’s greetings to you.
PS: Yes, we know it’s not called Lotus Notes any more. I guess (very) old habits die hard.