My wife would laugh hysterically at that. She despised Lotus Notes with every fiber of her being. Perhaps it was the way it was implemented, but among her many complaints about how awful Lotus Notes was, the biggest one was that searching her email always took her at least 10 minutes to get her the results. I'd say the real problem with your company is that they didn't commit. Either go all in with Google Apps (my preference), or go all Exchange. I have no idea why you would move from one solution of Lotus Notes (regardless of how good/bad it is), and go to a two-system solution. Perhaps the biggest IT problem in your company is not the technology but the decision makers
Years ago I was a certified developer in Lotus Notes so I’ve kind of got a bias. I was even published in a coupled magazines (OK no more bragging). If your mailbox is not indexed you are right, searching sucks. However if she goes into the properties and indexes the database (don’t know how in the newer versions) searching works great. If your company is stingy on HD space they might have this locked down. You can also do advanced searches and even save your search criteria. I least you could do all this in the past.
The company I worked for dropped Lotus Notes to save money. To save more money they put half the company on gmail. The reason only half the company went to gmail was that anyone that supported a government entity was not allowed to have gmail. This was definitely a bad decision and it’s a mess.
Yep, bad management!. We basically ran our company on Lotus Noyes since version 1.0. We got some new head of IT and he said we could save $ by switching to Exchange. Since LN was so ingrained in the company we lost millions switching over to Exchange and Sharepoint. He only lasted about a year. I think he got a kickback from MS because the prior three companies he worked for also switched to Exchange.