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)
Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Microsoft discloses 14,000 pages of coding secrets [channelregister.co.uk]
"Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007."
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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-lice
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"tly on Slashdotâ€"the "
That did -not- show up in the AJAX preview. (The typographic errors in paragraph two I take all credit for.)
What I had typed was the em-dash (alt-0151) and it appeared correctly, or at least I thought it did. Bug with the ajax?
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i'd guess that for companies migrating to linux and other opensource software vendor independence is taken quite seriously, at least in larger companies.
aren't there really viable solutions already available in opensource land ?
i've heard that http://www.kolab.org/ [kolab.org] is something to consider, especially the latest version - but i hav
Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Problem is I don't know how integrated it is with the other features (calendars, meetings etc), all I've used it for so far is synchronising mail folders when companies I've worked for switched system.
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Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's a lot better now, much more usable. Doesn't randomly die and leave child processes littering the machine, doesn't refuse to restart etc. It's pretty good now, and the built in IM client in 8 is actually pretty good as well.
I wouldn't highly recommend either notes or outlook, but I'm not so sure I'd have a preference fo outlook any more.
Also, google apps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Rely on them to keep your mail running, to not shut down the service or start charging?
Google are not some part of the net infrastructure, they are a company, and what don't we do? Trust other companies with corporate data, trade secrets, sales and marketing communications, anything really.
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Re:Also, google apps? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Overall software costs are fairly minimal compared to the other factors however if a busin
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Screenshots of Notes 8 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Screenshots of Notes 8 (Score:5, Informative)
Expensive, bloated, and unfriendly... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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What always mystified me about the product is that it was never given a makeover by a team of competent UI
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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.
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.
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You haven't really got the point of this whole open source thing yet, have you?
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.
A step in the right direction (Score:2)
It would be very interesting to see something like Notes 8 specifically customized for Ubuntu 8. I theorize such a setup could drastically reduce IT costs. Suddenly hardware is "good enough" for several more years, the OS is free and the groupware and office suite are cheap, and all of it is self updating. If only the users were comparable!
Roy, "Hello, IT. Yes, have you tried turning it off [wikipedia.org]
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Always interested in new options (Score:2)
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.
It isnt enough to be comparable to Outlook (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Vista.
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.
Re:Written in Eclipse? (Score:4, Informative)
At the end of the day though it means that its written in Java.
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No, it really is written in Eclipse [eclipse.org] (although not necessarily using Eclipse).
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Eclipse started out as an IDE, now it provides rich client frameworks so that you can quickly create an application for any of the supported platforms with the same widgets and look and feel that Eclipse provides.
I am using Notes 8.0.1. After taking a look-they've essentially wrapped an Eclipse framework around the same old client as Notes 7. While it does add on some pretty features, it is just a ven
Re:Written in Eclipse? (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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<kneejerk>You mean they've wrenched control of the platform from the original developers?!!! [eclipse.org]</kneejerk>
"Consultant" should do more homework (Score:2)
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+++...
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I can easily justify using Java software if it really does save me time and effort compared to native code counterparts. Eclipse is vastly more useful than other open IDEs like KDevelop and Anjuta, and portabl
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Even so the spec you mentioned is for the "Standard client". You can run the notes client in basic mode which uses a lot less memory but you loose a lot of the new features like Compapps, widgets, etc.
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Still don't see what the big deal is about outlook (Score:2)
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Re:Still don't see what the big deal is about outl (Score:2, Informative)
here's some of my pet peeves -
-memory hog (350 megs of ram gone no matter what you do)
- No context sensitive menus. you get the same fucked up 'database' options no matter where you click. why can't i rightclick a mail and mark it read/unread, FFS?
-cannot run your mail rules on existing mails in the inbox or subfolders.
-Single threaded network access, which means clicking on a link to a remote database will freeze up the application
Re:Still don't see what the big deal is about outl (Score:2)
I (have to) use it fairly often these days, and I can't say I see what the big deal is about it besides it's unintuitive, but integrated and collaborative calendaring system. Any one care to clue me in?
The big deal is that no matter how unintuitive you consider the collaborative calendaring system, there isn't an alternative on the market that's any better.
With one exception, all the OSS "alternatives" either:
- Require a plugin which sucks donkey balls, costs money and is hard to manage across many desktops to integrate with Outlook.
OR
- Are purely web based and don't offer any Outlook integration at all - which doesn't sound like a big deal until you've got a senior manager wanting to be able to read ema
Re:Still don't see what the big deal is about outl (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, the calendaring system *is* Outlook.
Secondly, what do you consider unintuitive? Notes? When I used Notes version 6, you could easily create an calendar item that ended before it started-- really intuitive there! Of course, it completely bombed out all of the sync software (also from IBM) we had
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.
Lotus Bloat vs. Outlook Bloat (Score:3, Informative)
Eh. (Score:2)
I don't see how Domino really has a place anymore with all the new standards that have evolved and the importance of interoperability. I thought Domino already was put on the shelf next to Token Ring.
If you're a large business Domino may still ma
Mail client and Groupware client ubiquitous (Score:2)
Actally, there is collaboration wares that compete with Outlook and Exchange.
Couple things. eGroupware can talk XML-RPC to Kontact and synchronize Calendar, Addressbook, transparently. Just one problem. No Kerberos. No Kerberos means I have to hand configure each user's login name and password for every user. This is bad.
Secondly. I need to be able to configure Kontact settings and FireFox's settings with OpenLDAP Schemas. Why? Because I have no other way of standardizing trusted Kerberos URIs
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have you tried opengroupware.org? I wasn't very happy last time I tried it but maybe it's advanced since. they apparently have an ldap+kerberos authentication scheme.
As for competing with sharepoint, you might consider Drupal. Drupal has LDAP/Kerberos auth, which I have personally set up and tested. And it worked. It was a horrible pain to get set up, but not in a hacking kind of way, just in a bad documentation kind of way. Drupal is a PHP-based CMS which stores to MySQL or Postgres (mostly) and which in
This looks promising (Score:2)
GCALDaemon [sourceforge.net]
I hate to say it, but you are missing the point. (Score:2)
I'd almost rather use Vista.... (Score:2)
Well almost.
Surely there are other alternatives?
What about support? (Score:2)
Hooray (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It's more than that (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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if you add up what Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint costs and multiply it with your users you can have a tailormade solution adapted to your companys needs instead of trying to turn your organization around on a dime and start working the MS way (tm).
Are you an MCSE? (Score:2)
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
There are two different false items:
1. Calling Outlook a Fine product with Exchange is like saying having Hepatitis C is better than HIV.
2. Impossible to match? Dude, Notes is waaay far ahead of outlook. Banks rely on Notes for security, keeping out the pesky worms that seem to infect the weakling outlook. Secondly, on linux there are other email clients far better than outlook.
You seem to be an MCSE saying IBM's decision to compete on price is due to inferior quality. Like saying Microsoft reduced prices
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).
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.
I hate Outlook, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Google Apps (Score:2)
In most companies email and collaboration is managed by a central team (no matter how small), so shifting it into a SaaS model is just a small step away. That is the competition for MS, not old school hosted solutions.
Kerio Mailserver (Score:2)
All in all it works as advertised and as far as the W
Not impossible to match? Open Xchange? (Score:2)
Have you looked at Open Xchange? it even has an Outlook connector for those who still want to run Windows desktops.
http://www.open-xchange.com/ [open-xchange.com]
Of course the Outlook connector isn't free, but the community version can be free if you use Linux or free email clients.
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Lotus Symphony = OpenOffice 1.1.4 extended (Score:4, Interesting)
How about MS Open Protocol Specifications release? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now that MS has released a bunch of documents for their APIs and other proprietary protocols, including for MS Exchange Server, maybe will we see open source / free solutions for MS Outlook replacement.
Mozilla Fondation? Plugins for Thunderbird? Extensions to Lightning?...
While this wouldn't be a MS Exchange Server replacement, it would at least free MS workstations fr
Still bloated (Score:2)
Big gap? (Score:3, Informative)
Floss alternatives (Score:2)
i believe that it is not true, that floss sw is behind in this regard, the problem is, that the communication lacks.
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.
What gap? (Score:3, Informative)
What about Groupwise? (Score:3, Informative)
Novell Groupwise is another contender and is actually far cheaper. The Open Workgroup suite from Novell is $110 a seat with a yearly maintenance of $75 (http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/howtobuy.html), includes groupwise, openserver, Netware (edirectory included), and groupwise mobile for windows and palm mobile handhelds (also works with blackberry). I fail to see how notes is even slightly competitive in this area.
Not only does Novell give you a complete single sign-on solution that is equal to microsoft in ease of setup and user use, but they give you an exchange server replacement, Server licenses with no limit to accommodate the users you have AND support. Most small businesses show easily be able to afford $75 a seat when the equivalent MS solution is close to $300.
I disagree. (Score:4, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Informative)
(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...
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We have Exchange 2003 running on 5 year old hardware, with about 200 mailboxes. I have seen SBS with almost 100 mailboxes and everything else on that server. I have no doubt that a brand new server, maybe with a SAN or something, could handle 2000 mailboxes with no problem. And since I know for a fact it does serve many more than that, I just don't know where the GP gets the idea Exchange isn't for a mid-large sized biz.
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We got an educational discount on the licenses though.
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Re:I disagree. (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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For shame. Of course they do, and there should be no debate about this in 2008. GMail's capabilities have proven to millions of users the benefits of having a large, centralized mail store that is accessible (and searchable) from any device.
I haven't run an Exchange server since the days when Outlook would silently(!)
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BTW, the Outlook web access client looks and works like the first generation 'Pong'... very crude design and barely usable
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You couldn't pay me enough to touch an Exchange server.
I know exactly what you mean! I'd worked with most of the earlier versions - 4.0, 5.5, 2000 - but never, ever enjoyed it.
I'd seen 2003, briefly, but I strangely seem in no sudden rush to poke at the 2003/2007 versions. It's probably an effect similar to aversion therapy...
To be fair, I'm seeing good things about the latest version when I look at reviews and various blogs. There seem to have been lots of improvements.
But it still has an awful architecture, and I'm still hearing horror stories from people
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Re: (Score:2)
This study (from Microsoft, even) suggests that open source rules, based on the numbers of "others" mail boxes and the lack of revenue for others..
http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/8/a/e8a154bf-cc35-4340-bd26-6265cdb06b6e/market_share_March06.pdf [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure what more they could do...
Actually, I am sure. I think that the Notes APIs are Windows only, so making them available on Linux/Mac might be nice. Otherwise, though, just pushing to polish the HTTP se