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IBM Challenges Microsoft With an Ad Campaign
Rytis writes "IBM is about to spend $300 Million dollars on a campaign to win customers and to convert them from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes and Domino under Linux. IBM is also said to offer resellers a bounty of $20,000 for switching customers to its Linux-based e-mail programs from Microsoft server software. It seems that the concurrence Microsoft Corp. is facing is getting tighter and tighter. The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had."
And even if they are dead on in their marketing campaign, I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable they piggyback so strongly on Linux. I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?
l inux/projects.jsp
Where have you been? If it was not for IBM sco would be suing other linux users for a scosource license. see: groklaw.org
They have only contributed to 94 linux projects... you can see the very small list here:http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/
Concurrence?
I imagine that competition was meant. You don't talk about "tight concurrence"--"tight" is usually used in conjunction with "competition" to describe particularly a particularly fierce and aggressive competitive environment. Of course, the sentence which immediately follows is also a fragment, adding grammatical insult to the vocabulary injury.
I know it's hard to moderate the thousands of user submitted articles we get here, but these are concepts taught in English classes at the elementary school level.
Having worked for IBM in the past and having been forced to use Notes as my desktop email client, it's difficult for me to comprehend why they'd make it the centerpiece of their assault on Microsoft. Powerful, yes, but also terrible to use as an end-user.
All I can say is.. STAY AWAY!!
Outlook may be pretty evil, what with sending RTF e-mails.. But then.. so does Lotus Notes! It manages to 'retain' formatting from other applications when copy-pasting when it's entirely inappropriate, even (like, pasting some text from a webpage, bam! different font). It doesn't download attachments when you get your mail, but when you do download it, it doesn't add it to its 'local mail database', but let's you save it somewhere. Get the attachment from e-mail again because you deleted it from your filesystem, you have to download again. Calendering, sure, nice. But buggy as hell. Rescheduling usually doesn't work, you can read invites from Outlook users, but (sometimes) not accept them, or when you accept them, they don't get notified. "Replicating" databases takes ages, and doesn't in fact allow you to work offline. The client isn't noticibly multithreaded, you have to wait for a download to finish before being able to do something else. The client is a huge bloated binary, and it writes huge ass 'database' files to your disk. When you kill the client (which you often have to do as some actions lock the client up completely, though you'd like to cancel them), you have to log off and login again to restart it. It comes with transparant encrypted connections to its server - but it's not on by default. There is no clear way to mark a message unread!! I had to endure a few weeks of "tip of the day" messages to find out the INSERT button marks messages read/unread. No context menu option for that. Making a todo note? Not by using a menu option in the To-Do part of your screen, but you have to focuse the ToDo canvas, and then go to the client's main menu and select "create Todo". It uses proprietary mail protocols that don't add the usual RFC 2822 headers, and RFC 2822 headers from internet mail are really hard to get at. It makes you confirm unicode (utf-8) encoding for a message TWICE, even though it selects it by default when you type an accented character. It's slow and unresponsive. Did I mention the address books don't work properly? And no auto-complete?
This might all be fixed in later and greater versions (i have no idea what version I'm on now, I think 6.5 or something).. But compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend!
Yeah. Compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend.. Just imagine how crappy Lotus Notes must be, for that comparison to hold!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I work for IBM and use Notes every single friggin day, all friggin day. Overly complex and bloated is an understatement. It's absolute crap. $300 million seems like enough to start from scratch and create something decent. If I didn't have to use it, I never would..
I imagine many Slashdotters will have little idea what Lotus Domino does that anyone would care about. The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate. So, for example, you can synch some subtree dealing with a topic you're interested in to your laptop, work with and edit it offline while (say) flying from Sydney to New York, and then resynch when you're next online. This is definitely useful, non-trivial functionality.
Domino does a bunch of other stuff but the offline/remerge functionality is the fundamentally cool thing it does that other products don't do. As, say, an email client and calendar, Domino is a pretty horrible.
I used Lotus Notes for several years while working for a big consulting firm. It was one of the worst designed, ugliest programs ever. It had groundbreaking functionality (see above) but even then it was easy to imagine something better, easier to use, and easier to administer.
Domino can still do some very useful things (again, see above) Exchange can't do, or does very poorly (indeed Exchange is worse than either IMAP or POP at dealing with offline clients -- and Notes is substantially better). It seems to me that there ought to be web-based tools that do everything EXCEPT the offline component far better than Domino or Exchange do, and more cheaply and simply, but I don't think Domino has a significant competitor in terms of its offline functionality (more's the pity).
The estimated TCO for a laptop PC back in 1997 was somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. The estimated TCO for a single Lotus Notes client was $9,000 -- Domino's functionality is great, but it ain't cheap. This would be of academic interest if Lotus Domino had improved substantially in usability or reliability in the nine years since, but by all accounts it is basically the same.
Sometimes I'm not sure what IBM is thinking. I don't "get" this campaign. IBM is spending $300M on a campaign to convince customers to switch from MS' propietary to their propietary message product?
Umm. What do you expect? They have a product. They're advertising it. This is shocking?
I find this invitation disingenuous, dishonest, and ethically bankrupt at best.
As far as proprietary is concerned, as far as I can see it plays nice with standards where standards exist for the things it does. It does not extend standards in a noncompatible way either. This seems reasonable for a proprietary program. I think it's clear that IBM is selling Domino, so I don't see what your beef is.
overloaded at least in the context of an e-mail/calendaring product..
Bingo. The problem is that it has always been more than email and calendar; trying to position it as a competitor to Exchange has only made the product confusing. The situation has only become more confusing as new product categories evolve that conver part of what Notes does, for example content management. Notes just isn't a clean fit into any of the product categories people are accustomed to.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lotus Notes is cool, but it can be a pain.
It would kind of interesting to see Notes take off again... Basically you can use it like outlook and then combine MS access in it for custom databases. However, somethings are still a big pain that make Outlook look good. (no pun intended)
If you need just email, setup an imap and use Thunderbird for your client.
If you just need email and calendering then Outlook might be what you want (or maybe Groupwise if you are old school).
If you need email, calenders, custom database development tied into your email, plus tons of other stuff... Then Notes is your program. Hey they even have a OS X client that is way better than MS's Entourage.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Lets get a few things straight given that I actually KNOW THE F'ing products involved:
/. it by linking it here).
/.'ers scream for, WHAT IS THE F'ING PROBLEM?
1. Notes has an odd UI with some challenges, we agree on that. Of course, that's because it was DESIGNED TO BE CROSS PLATFORM. In fact, the next rev includes a LINUX CLIENT.
2. Notes is VERY STABLE. I am personally aware of a major financial firm where 12,000 users are doing mail, calendaring, I.M., discussions, and workflow applications with the support of less than 15 people. They have had no outages. They have had no works.
3. Notes is inherently secure. It was doing public/private key encryption from day 1, back in the late 80's and is still doing so. It even supports PKI plug ins. Apparently, it was the only one because nobody else ever made any.
4. The notes CLIENT is inherently secure. It use execution control lists and design elements are signed. There are not worms or trojans that use Notes to replicate because THEY CAN'T.
5. Notes is OPEN. Yes, it uses a proprietary storage and transport format, but it also FULLY SUPPORTS XML for every design and and data element. It also includes Java (w/ IIOP and CORBA as well) object models, COM object models, and a published XML schema. It FULLY SUPPORTS MIME, SNMP, SMTP, LDAP (as client or server), NTP, HTTP, SSL, DIIOP, WEBDAV, WEB SERVICES (as client or server), ODBC.
6. Notes is PROGRAMABLE. Its objects are openly accessable and it includes full support for JAVA, Javascript, and its own Lotusscript and formula language.
7. Domino (the server) is MULTI-OS cross platform. It runs EQUALLY WELL on Linux, AIX, Solaris (in the past, and soon again) iSeries (OS400). I even know of one web accessible server running on Linux on XBOX! (no, I'm not going to
8. Notes owns roughly 50% of the corporate mail and calendaring marketing. No, not in small business or home use, but in major corporations.
9. Notes & Domino are backward compatible. No rip and replace upgrades. EVER. I can take a version 8 beta client and open a version 2 application (that I have) and it will WORK. Now. It is cheaper to upgrade to Domino 7 from Exchange 5.5 than to upgrade to Exchange 2000 or 2003 from the Exchange 5.5.
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So, given all these things -- every one of which is something in general
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I found you can force a refresh by clicking on another mail folder then clicking back on the Inbox.
I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?
I'm not sure the exact details of IBM's direct support of Linux, but they develop tools for it and on it. The ServeRAID Manager CD and other bootable tools run on Linux kernels, and the latest ServeRAID-8i adapter runs Linux onboard as well. The DSA tools will run on Red Hat, SUSE, and Novell server editions. Apparently an entire IBM division is considering switching to Linux. And of course, as mentioned in the article, their commercial software offerings run on Linux.
There are various ways of supporting things. Giving money is one way, and actually using and promoting the use of them is another.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
And how much productivity have you lost due to people having to call IS every time they want to change their password because it's hard-as-hell to figure out how to do it? What about the angry calls you get when Notes gets confused and deletes emails you didn't intend to? (Sometimes Notes makes 'shortcuts' to emails when you move them into folders instead of copying the mail; then you delete it from your inbox and the email in the folder disappears also.)
How much time is spent managing email folders and rules that other email clients do automatically? How much money wasted on training users to know what "replication" is and when to use it? Heck, how much time is wasted in a year from the 45-50 seconds it takes Notes to even *display* an email if it had the misfortune of being swapped out of RAM?
How many meetings are missed when Notes' calendars get corrupt and stop sending out reminders? Or if you get one of those fun meetings that actually ends *before* it begins, because Notes doesn't even do the most basic sanity-checking on incoming data? How about the extra cost to make your Palms, Blackberries, and PocketPCs work with Notes, and the lost time having to use "Force Full Synchroniztion" in EasySyncPro every week?
Sorry, Domino might be solid, but that doesn't excuse all the other flaws in the product. And if you add it all up, it's just not worth it. It's not worth the cost, it's not worth the stress.
Ask your users if they like using Notes. Seriously. You'll be surprised at all the colorful replies you receive.
Comment of the year
Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute).
/3GB switch. This means that Exchange wouldn't be able to take advantage of all of the memory available, and can lead to performance issues due to memory fragmentation. Also, are you aware that Microsoft recommends that you limit mailbox store databases to no more than 35 GB? So on your four servers you would have needed 14-15 mailbox stores to stay under that limit. What happens when the store goes over 35 GB? It slows down further.
I have. I had an implementation with approximately 50,000 users spread around the world at 20+ sites. And while it was expensive to license we didn't really have any performance problems. In my experience, many people run Exchange because it's easy to get installed and has GUI tools for the most common management tasks. People think that if they can install it and create accounts that they know how to manage Exchange. But generally speaking, most Exchange installations that I have seen do not follow Microsoft's recommendations, and so I am not suprised when they have problems.
I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding.
I'm not sure what IMAP server you would have been using, but I am confident that it doesn't support all of the features that Exchange supports, though it may support the more common functions (which may have been enough for your environment).
The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues).
Anti-spam doesn't have to be handled by a separate server running Postfix or whatever. Most large deployments will have a couple of Exchange servers set up as SMTP gateways that receive all incoming messages (for our 50,000 user implementation we had 4 of them spanning two sites). If you're running spam filtering at the gateways (and anyone sensible person would be) you can run any of a number of programs (I prefer XWall by Dataenter, because it is extrememly configurable and ridiculously cheap).
Regarding needing the 4 dual Xeon servers with 4GB of memory to manage your 5000 users, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Keep in mind that 5000 mailboxes at 100 MB each (the low end per your figures) results in approximtely 488 GB of mail databases, at the minimum. Considering the number of transactions that would need to be processed and the number of open connections, I'd say that sounds about right.
Even so, there are some steps for Exchange tuning that could help. For example, if you were running Win2K Server instead of Win2K Advanced Server, you can't boot the OS with the
Still, with an implementation of that size it seems likely that the largest limiting factor for performance will be I/O operations. The best solution for that is always going to be more spindles, so if you don't have a really big array it's time to do what anyone hosting a large, I/O intensive database would do: look into purchasing a SAN (assuming that all of your data is in one place).
That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server.
Again, I don't know what IMAP product you were using, but I can guarantee you that it's feature set doesn't compare to Exchange. Exchange uses a completely different set of protocols, integrates with AD, etc. So you are really talking about an apples to oranges comparison. And at any rate, Exchange runs circles around Lotus Notes.
What you're missing is that Lotus Notes works with Outlook.
/ product1.nsf/wdocs/accessmsoutlookhome
Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook.
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products
Keep the Outlook client, but use Domino as the back end, and you can scale up to hundreds of thousands of users on a single server, rather than crapping out at 3000 or so.
(Disclaimer: I work for IBM. Opinions mine, not IBM's.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak