IBM's Inexpensive Notes/Domino Push Against MS 415
Deviant writes "Speaking as an IT consultant, the one big gap in the Linux stack is in messaging / collaboration. MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product on which many businesses truly rely, and it is almost impossible to match on Linux — server or desktop. The one competitor to MS in this space has been IBM's Lotus Notes / Domino, which has always had the general reputation of being expensive, bloated, and unfriendly. I certainly wouldn't have considered it for the small businesses that we usually sell on MS's SBS server product. That is why I was truly surprised to hear about the new Domino Express Licensing and Notes 8. This is a product that has native server and client versions for both Mac and Linux. Notes 8, now written in Eclipse, also includes an integrated office suite, Lotus Symphony. This could conceivably let a user do all of their work in one application. And you can now license the server and client components together for as low as $100/user. It's packaged for companies of 1,000 seats or fewer. Is this the silver bullet to take out the entire MS stack — server, client, and Office? Or will IBM drop the ball yet again?"
$100/user is still pretty high for small biz (Score:2, Interesting)
Zimbra (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead, Look at Zimbra. Start with OSS, go sponsored if you need it, and the company can pay for it. Plus no IBM or Microsoft hanging over your head.
Blatant advertising (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't do it (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen the same with Oracle. Some nifty pricing got an Oracle database within reach of small businesses. Is it affordable? Yes. Do you need all those fancy features? No. Will it give headaches later on? Yes. Will you need expensive consultants? Yes.
Re:Zimbra (Score:5, Interesting)
Notes is dead as dead. Microsoft has won the email collaboration space, but Zimbra has cleverly outdone MS at their own game. Give it a look if you're building out an Exchange environment. I expect you'll be pleased with the results.
Written in Eclipse? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it mean that it's written in Java perhaps? Because Notes 8 is not only a total horror in terms of usability, it's real slow as well. In fact, Lotus notes is something I do my best to avoid, it's crap.
Comedy gold... (Score:3, Interesting)
TFA refers to its 'Robust' hardware requirements, and says you shouldn't try to run it with less than a gig of RAM.
Seriously, at some point, do you just have too much stack? OS+Java+Eclipse+++...
A different view (Score:4, Interesting)
I've taken a look at Zimbra for some clients but the issue there is price yet again. For a small company (5 users) you're looking at over $1000 for licensing that can be used with the Blackberry and outlook plus the cost of outlook. At that price you might as well put them on Exchange SBS and not worry about the BES connecter for Zimbra. Plus, now with MS looking at Yahoo who knows what is coming down the road for Zimbra (Owned by Yahoo). Since MS has started offering Outlook as a seperate license I have been offering that as an options to clients with OpenOffice, but most choose to just get Office since the OEM license is about $250 and the Outlook license is $100.
I really think Zimbra would be a great app if they would just rethink the pricing structure for <10 users. Maybe allow the Network Edition for a fixed cost under a certain user count.
Lotus (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably not a silver bullet (Score:3, Interesting)
So I wouldn't look at new newer aggressive pricing as a sign to look further into it, more as an act of desperation to make a bloated program seem more accessible.
While I am on the subject, most enterprise software these days has become overly bloated with features added without considering the disadvantages, usually in speed and memory usage. Until businesses start considering these aspects though, it isn't a trend that is likely to stop anytime soon.
Re:Expensive, bloated, and unfriendly... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz (Score:4, Interesting)
One quote (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder what the true percentage of users who do not require anything but an office suite to do all their work?
Why do people get the impression that most of the working people are lawyers or secretaries (the only type of workers that could arguably do all their work with on an office suite)?
Even accountants use software other than a spreadsheet...
I for one, didn't have any use for a "complete" office suite for years... and the parts that I did use, were mostly for viewing "administrative" documents that were sent to me (obviously, by the only true users of these office applications).
Re:Expensive, bloated, and unfriendly... (Score:5, Interesting)
I do see two main problems with Notes:
(1) It's unconventional, especially the user interface.
(2) It's easy to develop stuff in Notes
The main root cause for (1) is that it was very early if not first at quite a few things. For example the "brackets" (top left, bottom right) that denote a text-entry field. No-one else uses these, but NO-ONE. But at the time they were invented, you couldn't just look at HTML forms and make it look the same, because they didn't exist yet. So they came up with something on their own, and it wasn't good enough to be copied by everyone else - but they were stuck with it.
The main problem with (2) is that since it's so easy, everyone is a Notes developer. Take for example the spectrum of web pages. It's wide: everything from "weee-I-just-discovered-Frontpage-OMG-background-images!", to super clean XHTML-with-CSS that take into account that some users want to use Lynx or screen readers. The spectrum in Notes is wider. So if some Notes apps are bad - blame the IT department for hosting them, much like a bad intranet page - but don't blame the platform.
GMail will be hard to beat (Score:4, Interesting)
The web-based solution to the common IT needs of small and medium sized organizations, in my mind, is a no brainer. And so far, Google is offering the best value in this space.
Why a no brainer? Because managing computing resources yourself (i.e. in-house IT) is a waste of money. Forget about the cost of proprietary software: suppose you go all open source. You'll still have to manage this stuff and that cost money.
And from a privacy angle, it's also a no brainer to use a web based service for a small or medium sized organization. Correspondence in an organization is not all that *private* any way. Quite the contrary, the more transparent (with appropriate user access control mechanisms), the better for the organization.
So these factors and my own very favorable experience with GMail suggest to me that this would-be Office competitor is missing the point: the battleground for productivity suites will occur on the web, not on shrink wrapped software.
Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz (Score:3, Interesting)
That's great for open source where you can claim you're only distributing it from Europe and don't intend to make 'sales' of any kind in the US. This is how it is possible to acquire free implementations of non-free codecs in the US for Ubuntu, in my experience. But for an actual business it's a problem., especially for startup that lacks the ability to engage in cross-licensing that makes the problem disappear. It's no doubt to me that IBM could do this with Microsoft, the IBM patent warchest is a license to print money/contracts when dealing with other software companies. So what does a startup do? They lack the ability to sell an actual product in the US without vulnerabilities to patents and frivolous patent lawsuits that eat up gobs of money and allow their competition (Microsoft, namely) to bury them, and open source vendors stand on shaky ground and have significantly fewer options for distribution.
It's a bad situation for everyone, I'm normally defending Microsoft's products recently on Slashdotâ€"the Ribbon is a fantastic UI innovation that I hope to see use in other ridiculously overcomplicated applications that have submenus that have submenus that have... It's menus all the way down, or so I've heard philosophers and UI designers say. But in this area, I don't see a lot of positive. The US desperately needs patent reform to fix this problem, and until that's done, a huge market is closed off for people seeking to use those "coding secrets."
Re:It isnt enough to be comparable to Outlook (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista.
I hate Outlook, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Lotus Symphony = OpenOffice 1.1.4 extended (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It isnt enough to be comparable to Outlook (Score:1, Interesting)
Fortunatelly things are changing and people see gmail and google calendar - and sudedenly realize thet Exchange is not thing given by God, and there are better things - lightweight, faster, easier to use. And You doen't have to pay $100/Year MS for every single stupid e-mail account You've created.
From my perception MS software is really viral. Usually when company starts, someone somewhere asks for e-mail server. And there always some guy around who, having zero knowledge in the topic - istalls Exchange as it is easy - just few clicks. And if You have excahnge some other dull guy advices to use Outlook as the best solution. People start to use this crap - start to send those invitations and other stupid Outlook specific things - and You are in deep sheet. Welcome to Hell. You are locked. You cannot change the client, You cannot get rid of this stupid server. And if You business goes well - You have few more emploees - suddenly You relize that You have to pay $100/year per single stupid mailbox.
There is nothing in above soloution that cannot be done on linux with totally free solution. Nothing.
Re:Zimbra (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why zimbra is not in debian. (well that and the clause mandating all disputes be resolved in Sunnyvale, California)
Invalidation a la the GPL and limiting the jurisdictional issues to disputes involving Yahoo would help zimbra adoption. apt-get install zimbra would drive installations, I don't know about revenues.
Kolab KDE (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever heard of Kolab KDE? Nothing is missing.And this is not the only one. Especially if you just use web-based solutions like everyone else.