Since v7 we are also getting Symphony for FREE… but who is using it? nobody! Why? Compatibility issues and interoperability with our clients enforce us to keep on using MS Office. Ask the users what they use at home… MS Office, no such free tools because they learned Word- Spreadsheet tools at school or in “after hours class” with… yep, MS Office. Finally, be honest IBM, Symphony for FREE, it’s nothing more than OpenOffice which we all can download free from the web, don’t we?

Collaborationtools? NOT FREE! ‘some’ things are made free but what can we do with it? If you really want collaboration you need the full Sametime which, not only isn’t cheap, but you can only contact ‘Domino Notes’ users. IBM is using Notes, other big companies use Notes but our clients don’t. If we want to use instant messaging with a client, we can give him a choice between MSN or SKYPE. Both free downloadable, no such Notes tool is available.

Document management tools? Notes is offering Quickr which they compare with Sharepoint. No way! Yes you can move a message from Notes to Quickr but the message stay’s in Notes. When you remove it from Notes, you cannot load the saved message in Quickr! In stead of shrinking mailfiles by moving mails from Notes to Quickr, you end up needing more space. You get links inside Quickr but cannot remove the items from Notes. I cannot go into detail here but my comparison study Quicker/Sharepoint ended with a meeting with IBM guy’s who finally told us that we cannot use Quickr and that Sharepoint is a better option for us.

What about keeping Notes as a mailserver but using Outlook as a client? This was possible until version 8.0. Now that we’re investigating this option…. we are told by IBM that they do not continue to support it anymore…

Notes Developer: This is coming free of charge in next releases (as i was told) but i’m sure, as i have experienced with previous ‘free’ tools from IBM, it will become payable again! Why? It is Eclipsed based and i think this is a first step moving the tool to WDSCi (IBMS Developer studio) as a seperate (payable) module. And it is NOT CHEAP!

I’m using Outlook for many years now and i have never had any problem with my mailfile. Nor did i with MSN, Office, etc… We get the same message from our users, customers,… After many years of patience, our board of directors are asking us to investigate the cost for migration from Notes to Exchange and i have not many ‘real’ reasons to stick with Notes, are there?

Notes has many extra features but they are either not of any use (Symphony), not mature enough (quickr) or too limited (Instant Messaging) but it has 1 very big PRO: Running Domino on AS400 is cheap and rock solid! We are running 6 Notes server in an AS400 with another 6 servers on another AS400 in a cluster environment. We only have to pay 2 server licences (one for each AS400) and an x-user license fee, so it’s cheap. Running Notes on an AS400 gives you a very robust environment which results in (keeps fingers crossed) no unexpected system shutdowns. Yes, from time to time we need to restart a server because one of it’s files is damaged. But it is only the server-instance itself, all other servers and erp-system keeps active.

This finally gives me this hate/love relationship with Notes. I don’t like the GUI, it is not userfriendly, i miss the instant messaging with contacts outside, i miss the link to a descent document management system (although payable tools are available), i hate it when users call us that their mailfiles are corrupt or that transactionlogs are corrupt when we enter the office, but overall, the environment in which we run Domino is rock solid.

And what about Exchange? We have no experience with Exchange but i wonder if we will get rid of the problems we have now with Notes. No more damaged mailfiles anymore? No unexpected shutdowns? No Exchange stall’s? mmmh… keep on dreaming?

There are allot of things that are good in exchange… TLS per domain , advanced controls for user management out of the box. like message filters controls etc. This is possible with Domino but are not out of the box.

It does come down to the question : is it just mail you want…. if so GMail (joke) Exchange…. but if you want the rest that Domino has to offer then that is the choice taken for you.

I don’t think it’s biased when you’re just stating facts.

Like I said, people that claim a better ROI with Exchange are either lying or not taking all costs into account.

We are still maintaining our two Domino servers, because there are still many things that Lotus/Domino are doing for us that can’t be duplicate by Exchange/Sharepoint.

For the record, a single Domino Enterprise server runs mail, calendaring & scheduling, instant messaging, Webmail and Web services for Domino databases, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, and replication, in addition to the Domino database/application services.

Am I exposing any bias here?