IBM's Inexpensive Notes/Domino Push Against MS

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?"

Screenshots of Notes 8

A review with many screenshots of the new Notes 8 interface - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019476/ [computerworld.com]

Re:Screenshots of Notes 8

I'm using the beta of Notes 8 (I work at the big blue), and I can say that it's significantly improved from a UI perspective, and even a bit from a response perspective (which has always been my gripe with Notes)

Expensive, bloated, and unfriendly...

...and now with the lower price it's just bloated and unfriendly ?

Seriously though, I have used Lotus Notes in a global corporation which made extensive use of custom forms, applications, groups and the whole shebang in addition to relying heavily on the calendar for scheduling. It was a terribly counter-intuitive and unresponsive piece of software, and I'd rather pay for Exchange than having a Lotus Notes installation for free, despite being known as the anti-Microsoft advocate in my company.

Re:Expensive, bloated, and unfriendly...

I use Notes every day ... indeed, I develop in Notes. So, mea culpa.

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.

Zimbra

I definitely like the chances of a hybrid OSS solution like Zimbra, above that of Notes. The reality still is that holding one's business hostage to either IBM or Microsoft is just sketchy, and by the time the need comes around for a Notes/Exchange platform pretty much the entire IT needs to be scrapped for a small company.

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.

Re:Zimbra

Big thumbs up for Zimbra. It's not perfect, but no platform designed to handle the imperfect Exchange server could be. However, I've been an end-user of the product for several months now, and we've seen zero issues with the server compared to several with a "real" Exchange server.

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.

Re:Zimbra

Well there is this clause in the yahoo public license that Yahoo (Microsoft) gets to invalidate your license and then you can sue to get your license reinstated.

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.

Don't do it

Don't do it; the pricing just says they want to have a few extra sells. But IBM is used to supporting big clients, not small ones. I have the feeling they're not really committed to this market.

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.

It isnt enough to be comparable to Outlook

Not likely, in order to unseat Outlook/exchange at this point you would have to give users a set of damn good reasons why its worth their time to switch. As much as everyone loves to hate MS, there isnt anything major another product is capable of that you cant get from Office. Even if MS does lag a year or two in adding a feature that its competitors have already shipped (think opera and firefox shipping tabbed browsing first) ultimately it wont matter much unless MS waits an extremely long time to ship that feature. They may not be first with everything but they know better than to let their rivals get too far ahead of them.

In any industry it isnt enough to be as good as the market leader, you have to be better in order to survive. Its their game to lose and they have been playing it long enough that they probably wont make a mistake big enough to give a competitor an opening.

Written in Eclipse?

Am I missing something here? What the heck does that mean? I haven't seen any "Written with XCode" or "Written with Emacs" stated for other products.

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.

Re:Written in Eclipse?

You can use the base code from Eclipse as the starting point for any gui-type application - be that a word processor or graphics program or in this case an email client. Both the Netbeans and Eclipse IDE's allow you to extend them to create other applications outside of programming applications. The difference between the two is mainly do you want your application to use SWT (IBM) or Swing/AWT (SUN) for your GUI controls.

At the end of the day though it means that its written in Java.

Re:Written in Eclipse?

It's a really bad bit of phrasing.

What they mean is that it's now using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.

Most of the core code is still C/C++, and was already somewhat cross-platform. For instance, the database code already runs on Windows, AIX, Solaris, Linux, OS/400 and the z-Series mainframe. This is because IBM tend to use the same code on the client as they do on the server - it reduces maintenance, and increases reliability.

However, over the past few versions of Notes (R5 to R7), the Notes client had become more Windows-centric as it put in place or improved various features that IBM's clients were asking for - such as Dial-Up Networking support, better OLE support, etc.

In fact, those versions didn't ship Unix clients, and the Mac client often lagged behind in terms of both shipping and functionality.

IBM's solution has been to rework the Notes client so that it uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. It's given them a common UI and OS abstraction layer across their three target platforms - Windows, Mac, and now Linux too.

With a common platform and common libraries, IBM should be able to support multiple operating systems without crippling development costs - and it's benefiting the Eclipse project, because a lot of the work that IBM has done to get it working properly on the Mac platform (for example) is going straight back into that project.

(In fact, IBM's commitment to Eclipse is so strong of late that some people feel they've become dominant in the project, which is a bit of a sticky political situation for them.)

Eclipse isn't perfect, and it's a bit heavy on the system resources at present. But as with most heavy applications, what's large and slow now will be small and svelte on the latest machines in a year or two's time.

Meanwhile, the ability to mix Eclipse plugins with traditonal Notes functionality - especially in workflow applications - is something that's extending Notes in some rather interesting directions...

A different view

Most small businesses I deal with don't really need or want Exchange/Notes/Zimbra, but what they do need is an Outlook type app that can get to whatever email system they want. The big problem is and always has been that most third party hardware won't sync with much else besides outlook. Take a look at Blackberries which most every small business owner is using. You can sync to Outlook, Yahoo, Groupwise or Notes. Since most users are familiar with Outlook that is what they want. The could care less what is running on the backend.

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.

Hooray

So that's enterprise software eh? A choice between sucks and sucks more? I'm always happy when an IBM contract ends because it means I don't have to use goddamn Notes anymore. And Outlook/Exchange only look good by comparison.

But it's not just a problem with the commercial software. I've never met a mail program I really liked. Mail software seems to be a vast wasteland of sucktude. I like to single out Notes and Exchange because if you work in IT you're pretty much forced to use them, but I've used and not liked pine, mutt, the emacs lisp based web client, the Apple mail client, Thunderbird and Evolution. Of the lot, at LEAST the emacs client combined with the remembrance agent offers functionality that you won't find in any other email client, but they all pretty much suck to one degree or another.

It's more than that

Outlook is one of the most user-acceptance tested applications in the world. Really, it is.

Outlook just happens to work really well with Exchange.

Exchange/Outlook just happens to plug really well with SharePoint/MOSS (for document sharing, workspaces, etc).

The both just happen to use SQL Server, and of course the whole security model just happens to be based in AD, which in turn just happens to be a Windows Server only technology.

It's all very integrated, and actually works very well with not too much knowledge. Seriously, I think 99% of the people on this site could setup the system above I just outlined in a day.

Why? Well, you start with Outlook and before you know it, you've got the whole ecosystem. It's designed to plug in as easily as possible to enable you to give cash as easily as possible to Microsoft.

Clever eh?

GMail will be hard to beat

As a small business user of GMail, I find the service hard to beat. After all, it's still free, and free is really hard to beat. GMail is by far the best component of the Google Apps business suite, but their other components (calendar comes to mind, for example) are slowly and surely maturing, also.

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.

Lotus Symphony = OpenOffice 1.1.4 extended

For those that don't know and don't feel like using Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], it's basically OpenOffice 1.1.4 at the core with some extended features, most noticeably that it uses a tabbed toolbar in the manner of MS Office 07's "Ribbon" but instead of randomly putting menu items onto tabs, each existing toolbar has been turned into a tab...

Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz

I don't see that at all, but the problem isn't just the MS 'stack' from client application to server, but the fact that MS is pushing all sorts of integration and features that competitors don't have.

Everyone else (StarOffice, Lotus Notes) is so busy playing catch-up to compete on features, and once Microsoft hooks these businesses on things like SharePoint and what-not, well, suddenly switching to the competition means you lose functionality, and productivity in doing things "the old way" again.

It's a bad deal all around and I really would like to see Microsoft open up things like SharePoint for interoperability, but if you honestly think that'll happen in short order, you're living in Candy Land.

Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz

This is exactly right. Everything ties together so tightly that once you get one piece you might as well take the whole. You buy Office, which runs only on Windows and which comes with Outlook. You want to use that for email so that means Exchange. Exchange depends on MS Active Directory so that means storing all your user accounts on the MS server and authenticating against that. As long as you have these MS servers for authentication you might as well do your file/print sharing there. As long as you are doing your file sharing there you might as well use DFS replication and put another server in the branch office. Once you are running Exchange you might as well run Outlook Web Access and that means IIS. Once you are already hosting that on IIS you might as well host your other web pages there. Since you are hosting your web pages there you might as well use MS SQL as the backend as well as Sharepoint for the intranet page - etc etc.

They even are nice enough to bundle all of this into one (relatively by MS standards) inexpensive product called SBS Premium. The big catch is that you have to run all of it on one server. As the buisiness expands, and they have already got you depending on it all, they really sting you with the licensing increases involved in buying the full versions of all the various software and their associated Client Access Licenes (CALs) so that you can seperate into multiple servers. When you get bigger still and need clustering and redundancy you need to throw still more servers and more licensing fees at the problem (usually for "Enterprise" products then as well) and that is when they really get you.

I am an RHCE as well as having the full spread of MS certifications - I love Linux and run that and a Mac on the desktop at home. I rarely get to use my Linux knowledge/certifications these days because of all the MS lockin/ubiquity. There are a few places that I would have liked to use CentOS or RHEL for some things but was forced to use the MS product by their insistance on Exchange - and once you have the infrastructure for that there then is no place/need for Linux any more. That is why I submitted this story and have been looking for this solution - the hope that I might actually have something I could sell a buisiness on that would allow me to actually get some Linux out there!

Trust me though when I say that Office/Outlook/Exchange is the #1 reason for half of MS's dominance in the server space. We need something to counter it. I am just really hoping that IBM, with all of its resources and its relative presence in this space, can give it to me...

Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz

The problem with not being reliant on one vendor is that interoperability seldom works quite as well.

The latest Office/Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint work together absolutely amazingly if your sysadmin has actually sat down and configured them correctly instead of relying on the installer or 3rd party hacks. I've not yet seen a similar ecosystem for businesses from any set of independent vendors due to the tendancy to 'do things their own way'.

Open Source should be able to do this with ease if there was a clearly agreed on method and format for exchanging information between applications, rather than (as I've seen in several places) a collection of hacked together scripts to do things like extract email attachments and put them into the document share, or move calendar appointments from the shared diary to a personal one.

Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz

Erm, the Microsoft equivelent costs more than that in Client Access Licences alone. Add in all the other licencing costs and this is far cheaper.

Re:Also, google apps?

"I assume you're one of those people who thinks they need their own IT department as well then."

Well, I'm a software engineer and have worked for various software firms. Yes, we need IT departments. People who are there, on premesis, keeping systems up, doing custom configs, supporting our work in general.

"Unless you're a large company, doing IT in house is a huge waste of money."

I know some large ones that contract out and some smaller ones that don't. I really can't comment on the costs, I have no experience there.

"then somebody to twiddle their thumbs while they wait for something to break?"

Is that the sound of millions of pissed-off-at-how-their-job-is-being-portrayed IT guys I hear? I think there's a spot more to it than that.

"Google are probably more trustworthy then anything you can do in house for a reasonable price"

I can do something with postfix and dovecot for free, on my own servers, if I have my own guys or contractors.

"and honestly, do you think they even *care* about your data?"

Yes. There are two reasons for google to offer the free service - Embedded apps and data mining. Embedded ads are bad for me as a business owner, I don't want my guys clicking them in work hours. Data mining makes me uncomfortable because, however abstract it is for now, google are using my data for market analysis and advertising.

I disagree.

"Baloney. (MS Outlook with Exchange) is a terrible product. It just happens to be ubiquitous in the corporate world because of Mcrosoft's monopolistic practices combined with a lack of good competition."

I don't habitually defend Microsoft, but I completely disagree with you here. At work we're migrating away from Notes (thank the maker), and I happily volunteered to be one of the first users during the beta stage. I live my programming life on Solaris, and in G2, and I'm a fan of UNIX in general. I've run umpteen versions of linux in my life. I've used a dozen or more email clients with some regularity, and a number of calendars. And over the years I've realized this:

Outlook and Exchange Server make me happy.

Have you seen the Web Acess client? There's NOTHING out there that compares. The ridiculous bag of inconsistent behaviour and busted UI design that is Lotus Notes is something I'll be glad to see the tail end of.

Re:I disagree.

So you're eager to move away from Notes.

(Although you don't say which version of the client you're using, so it may not be a fair comparison. The R8 client is a major upgrade, especially in interface terms.)

However, your eagerness to move to the client tells only half the story.

The server side - well, frankly, Exchange is a pit. A big money pit. It's fine for 100 users in a small business. Past that, its storage systems show the strain.

It's not as scalable, it's not as robust, and it gives far less functionality than a Domino server. It's a mail system that was designed to beat cc:Mail in 1995, and is still straining at the architectural limitations that brief imposed upon it.

And your response will no doubt be "I don't care, I only see the client" - fair enough. But the quote was "MS Outlook with Exchange" - so you're already replying out of context.

Oh, and speaking of web access clients, the Domino Web Access client (formerly known as iNotes) is no slouch either...

Re:I disagree.

It's possible, yes. If you limit your service.

As an example, Exchange uses shared mail by default - but only within the storage group for that one mailbox.

Up until very recently, the maximum size per storage group in the Information Store was 16Gb. I believe it's now either 75Gb or 16Tb, depending on the license for the server. 16Tb is fine, but even 75Gb - for a shared store - is a bit constrained. It doesn't need a huge number of large mailboxes to start giving you serious problems, and in a large enterprise that will happen very quickly.

The way you work around that is simple - you either spend a lot of time monitoring your information stores and doing capacity management, or you set hard quotas at low values.

Anecdotally, most of the people I know that have very low quotas on their work mail systems are on Exchange Servers, whereas most of the people I know with gigabytes of mail aren't.

Now contrast this situation with Domino, which has a shared mail system which is switched off by default. Nobody uses it because they know it introduces these kinds of scaling issues. (By the way, even Microsoft recommends that you should ignore shared mail when capacity planning.)

Everyone gets their own database, which means that monitoring, moving, replicating and generally managing users is much easier.

That's just the start of it. Uptime? In my experience, the shared storage system that Microsoft's clustering solution requires reduces uptime, not increases it. Domino servers fail over faster because they have no shared resources.

Exchange's architecture does show strain. If you're a Microosft Gold Partner and can call on them to advise you, then fine - otherwise, good luck to you!