Ledlincoln   1195 pts.  |   Apr 17 2009  8:40PM GMT

You’re asking a question that has been raising fervent debate for years. You’ll find arguments on this all over the Web.

You should keep in mind that Lotus Notes/Domino is much, much more than an email platform. If you’re looking for only mail and calendaring, your users are going to wonder why they’re on Notes when it seems like the rest of the world uses Outlook. It’s pretty hard to defend Notes to them. If you plan to go further and take advantage of the power of Notes, you have to plan on making a strong case with management and with your users, and then on investing in user training and in application development for your organization.

If it were up to me, my company would drop practically all other enterprise platforms including Active Directory, and use Notes/Domino for almost everything. A single Domino server can really do it all, and you simply add servers and cluster or replicate them as the size and distribution of your user base requires.. There is just so much pain and expense to licensing, installing, and maintaining all the required Microsoft servers and workstations, and Notes in comparison is simple and cheap (and much more secure and powerful). Sadly this ain’t gonna happen until I’m Emperor of the Universe.

Dvnobles   225 pts.  |   Apr 20 2009  8:21PM GMT

Yes, I would agree with Ledlincoln. You can compare the Lotus Notes e-mail client with Outlook/Exchange somewhat, but that’s where the comparison ends. Notes/Domino is groupware - in an entirely different class of software than Outlook/Exchange. It is comparing apples and oranges.
//dan

Daveip1966   95 pts.  |   Apr 21 2009  4:46AM GMT

I’d add to Ledlincoln’s part about your users that you could always have DOmino on the backend and let your users continue through Domino Access for Outlook. Presence awareness with Sametime (IM) works with Outlook as well as the Notes client.

Then you could start infiltrating the notes client as you see fit.