>>Has anyone experience of linking a Lotus Notes system to VFP or indeed any relational database? I am being asked to look into this and the feedback received so far is that Notes is cumbersome, takes a long time to develop and is generally resource hungry.
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>Sorry for an off-topic post...
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>What exactly is Lotus Notes? The marketing literature has never made this clear to me.

Lotus Notes is a groupware/email application, though it includes calendaring, scheduling and internet email capabilities as well. Information is stored in databases and can be replicated extensively throughout a corporate Notes structure.
It's a great way to share information of any sort. It replicates quickly and overall LN is pretty powerful (especially when tied to Domino, the web server application) and is easy to administer. However, the client is getting large (feature creep) and, unless one needs a corporate messaging solution, I wouldn't recommend deploying it just for it's database/replication capabilities.