Lotus vs. SharePoint

daria42 writes "An article at ZDNet pits the software collaboration kings against each other. IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino 7 goes head to head against Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003. 'If you don't have the resources dedicated to developing collaborative applications, don't have complex application or integration requirements or if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat,' the review concludes."

Comments

Haven't RTFA yet, but...

[Qui-Gon Jinn]

I've used both apps, as a user, not a developer. I can say this with certitude: if I want something fast with reasonable workflow capabilities, I can get it out of Sharepoint. Aside from my corporation's resource constraints, development on Lotus is way over my head and thus useless to me. /Begin flamewar

Re:Haven't RTFA yet, but...

[charleste]

I find the Notes/Domino solution confusing - the learning curve is quite steep and requires actual training it seems. BUT my coworkers find it very flexible and useful. On the otherhand, I've had difficulties getting sharepoint to work properly in a large distributed developer group.

Re:Haven't RTFA yet, but...

[Elvis Parsley]

the learning curve is quite steep and requires actual training it seems

FWIW, I've made a career as a Domino developer with precious little formal training. It probably helps that I started with Notes before I got more heavily involved with relational databases, so I didn't have so many preconceived notions about how databases should work that I had to throw out the window.

Re:Haven't RTFA yet, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

From the looks of it I'd have to say that most of you Notes user interface developers have had precious little formal training.

Re:Haven't RTFA yet, but...

[IAmNotVince]

I recently setup Sharepoint Services (not portal) for my company and my biggest dislike has to be the discussion board. Users would often mistakenly reply to the wrong post, which makes it all a mess. It appears to me that Microsoft took every measure possible to differentiate their product from more common discussion boards. I know that it does more than a discussion board, but it should at least do that part well. I recommend everyone to install the Macaw discussion board template. It's not the best, but at least it's an improvement over the default template.

Re:Haven't RTFA yet, but...

[SPJ911]

As a Notes Admin for the past 10 years, but piror to that a software devleoper (not on Notes/Domino) with considerable formal software/systems dev training, I really do see this every day. I'm not trying to overlook the point the tools are easier to use and are designed for folks that don't have a BS in CS. Unfortunetly, a LOT of people who are developing code these days have learned it by the seat of thier pants and they don't even know(dating myself) are falling into the visicalc/123 trap from the 80's. The computer said it so it must be right! Some/many just don't seem to understand the entire software dev life cycle, don't know how to test, and think the way to code is to write a few lines and see if it works. Again this is not exclusive to Notes/Domino.

Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that I spent the last four weeks designing and implementing a Plone intranet site because SharePoint turned out to be an unworkable solution for a 80 developer team that is distributed over 4 locations in the US, Japan and Europe, this "review" cracked me up.

Re:Irony

[sodul]

I have to use Share-point where I work and I truly deeply hate it.

Sure it kind of works in an All Windows/IE, purely M$ environment, but as soon as you add an alternative browser, or even worse OS, then it's damn painful.

It's also quite difficult to update data automatically (it might actually be possible, but I doubt it's trivial to get data from a non M$ machine).

I guess something like sharepoint works for 'Management', but for developers I think it's hard to beat a good Wiki. And good ones have history, WYSIWYG, and work with most if not all browsers and OSs.

Re: Irony

[i am kman]

Why was Sharepoint unworkable?

We're using it across a 250+ person project distributed across 7 US location through multiple firewalls and it works GREAT! It not only works well within our company, but we use it extensively to 'publish' project deliverables and status to our clients and selectively share information with subcontractors.

It's also very easy to setup new Sharepoint sites for new projects.

I also used Lotus 2-3 years ago and it was far more difficult to use and setup new areas. Sharepoint beats Lotus hands-down.

For what it does, it does very well and is easy to use. For developers, it's not a CM tool and doesn't seem particularly oriented towards them, so perhaps you were just looking for something else?

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

so Sharepoint sucks because your company is incompetent, interesting.

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Plone doesn't do the same thing as Sharepoint AT ALL. It sounds like your problem wwas that Sharepoint was an inapropriate solution, rather than that it's a bad product.

Re:Irony

[jmorris42]

> Given that I spent the last four weeks designing and implementing a Plone intranet site

No, no, no. If it doesn't have per seat and per server licensing it isn't a solution. I also loved the way they mentioned the existence of other products (because they knew readers would know about them and wonder) then promply blew them off to concentrate on the two most expensive and infexible offerings on their way to a conclusion that was a no brainer.

One paragraph summary of the review:

If you are already in bed with IBM, stay there for now and if you are a Microsoft Slave(tm) buy their stuff without question. If you haven't picked yet you should probably buy Microsoft because IBM costs more (it does) and trained monkeys can operate it (the stock excuse for buying any of Microsoft's junk) and anyway, we all know Microsoft always crushes all opponents so skilled Lotus people are going to be rare exotic creatures (read expensive) in the future. But whatever you do, DO NOT look over at those free offerings, they will only lead you from the One True Path, paying out the ass for licenses and consultants.

Re: Irony

[popeyethesailor]

It's very good for what it does out of the box, but the extension capabilities suck.
Three different programming models(Web parts,CAML,Sharepoint object model) for extensions, wacky directory structure, SQL server dependence, windows authentication, a stupid markup language with no designer support, and a whole lot of inadeuqately documented features.

Working across firewalls? Do you use the whole gamut of office integration features? Such as MS Project publishing, Outlook sync, and document storage for Office documents. I suppose there's always a way(reverse ISA proxies and all), but the bang-for-the-buck factor seemed to be pretty low, for such requirements. I'd be interested in knowing what kind of hacks/duct-tape you had to apply.

Next version promises to change all, as do all MS products. Let's see...

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, why can't it be both? Inappropriate an bad.

Re:Irony

[jsnipy]

"so skilled Lotus people are going to be rare exotic creatures " Don't confused skilled with "doing the same thing thier entire carreer". Like most things there are level .. .monkey's should be able to publish thier own content, create site's etc. .. the ability to infopath+biztalk aspect of it rocks and can be stood up a releatively short amount of time.

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it *could* be both, but just because it's inapropriate is no reason to assume it's bad - the assumption the grnadparent post has leapt to.

In my opinion it's actually poretty good at what it does, whatever that's worth.

Re:Irony

[mcmonkey]

If you are already in bed with IBM, stay there for now and if you are a Microsoft Slave(tm) buy their stuff without question. If you haven't picked yet you should probably buy Microsoft because IBM costs more (it does) and trained monkeys can operate it (the stock excuse for buying any of Microsoft's junk) and anyway, we all know Microsoft always crushes all opponents so skilled Lotus people are going to be rare exotic creatures (read expensive) in the future. But whatever you do, DO NOT look over at those free offerings, they will only lead you from the One True Path, paying out the ass for licenses and consultants.

What if I cut the monkey training budget so my stock would go up one quarter of one percent?

Re: Irony

[Chazmyrr]

It's nice for small shops. In a large corporation with 250,000+ employees, Sharepoint doesn't work so well.

Re: Irony

[nuzak]

> I also used Lotus 2-3 years ago and it was far more difficult to use and setup new areas.

Am I the only one that first read that as "I also used Lotus 1-2-3 years ago"?

Re:Irony

[kubasa]

The place I work at just jumped off the SharePoint cliff. Lot of money. It has potential but I'm just not sure how to justify the $$ if only 10% of it will ever even be used. It was interesting to see your post about Plone. Just played with it this morning. Pretty cool and incredibly easy to setup. Any ideas of how to pull user accounts out of AD instead of manually entering accounts into Plone?

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

sure wikis work great for developers, but they're the only ones who can use them effectivly(they work like they think) its not just management that things like sharepoint work for, its everyone but the developers. Most people in companies are still super amazingly computer illiterate, which most people on slashdot just can't seem to grasp.

Re:Irony

[notaprguy]

POSP (plain old sharepoint) is probably not the right solution for managing a complex software development team/project. I'm no fan-boy but Microsoft's new "Team System" product includes a collaboration server for source control, team management, requirements management etc. that I think is based on Sharepoint and has rec'd good reviews. I'm sure there are better products out there but I bet there a hell of a lot more expensive.

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

The panda says no...

Re:Irony

[gbjbaanb]

No, I don't. But I know a documentation site that does:

http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/ldap-in-wind ows

Re:Irony

[kubasa]

Cool - thanks!! They have a lot of really good documentation at their site.

Re:Irony

[frank_adrian314159]

What if I cut the monkey training budget so my stock would go up one quarter of one percent?

Then you will have to hire trained monkeys and you will wonder why your current monkeys get cranky and while about working too hard when you can't find ones that will work for the relatively few peanuts you provide.

Easy win for MS

[darth_MALL]

MS has the advantage in that EVERYONE knows (more or less) how the office products work - Sharepoint is the same. No need to start from the ground up to learn the product. Market saturation has it's advantage - Get's me to thinking - is there a point of no hope in competing with Microsoft?

Sharepoint vs WebSphere

[blantonl]

Wouldn't a more appropriate comparison be between WebSphere Portal v6.0 and Sharepoint?

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere

[crosstalk]

Or lotus workplace which are the real collaborating software. comparing notes to portal server, is like comparing outlook to sharepoint.

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere

[Monster_Juice]

Or lotus workplace This would be a better comparison.

The article should compare Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook OR Lotus Domino to Microsoft Exchange.

Maybe ZD can compare apples and oranges next for citrus content and determine apples are the true winner if you have an apple orchard.

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere

[supremebob]

Yes, comparing Lotus Domino to SharePoint doesn't make a lot of sense. SharePoint was designed with just one purpose in mind, whereas Lotus Domino was designed to be a Web Server, a Mail Server, an Application Server, AND a Collaboration Server. It's like comparing a machette to a swiss army knife... The machette cuts down bushes better, but that's all it was designed to do.

If you wanted to make this a fair comparison, you should really include Microsoft Exchange and IIS to this collection.

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere

[Anonymous Coward]

If you include exchange and IIS in it is just to embarressing for the IBM products as IBM are so far behind it isn't funny.

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere

[Anonymous Coward]

embarrassing that you can't spell

infinity

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not try infinity

The key phrase

[crummyname]

"SharePoint on the other hand is the relatively new kid on the block, and while it doesn't have the complete feature set that Lotus Notes offers, it does have a leg up in terms of Microsoft Office integration and ease-of-use."

Re:The key phrase

[Serapth]

Sharepoint is actually a pretty damned impressive product now that it hit 2003. 2001 and the origonal werent near as impressive. Sharepoint is pretty damned close to a disruptive technology if your company uses it correctly. It pretty much blows away the concept of organizing via shared network file system aswell as sharing documents internally with attachments. If you can train yourself off both those practices, the productivity gain is pretty damned impressive.

That said, Workflow is the biggest weakness of 2003. My understanding is 2007 will have workflow built in which will make a huge difference. Otherwise, you will probrably end up buying a BPM ( Business Process Management ) package from a company like K2, Ultima or Captaris. Once you start organizing documents in a portal, your quickly going to want workflow on top like approvals and routing, or tiered publishing. Out of the box, Sharepoint supports all of those things pretty poorly.

Kollaberation Kombat?

[saboola]

Sharepoint Wins...

FATALITY!

Too little too late

[$RANDOMLUSER]

While I'm often the first to make fun of "Slowest Notes", It's a helluva a full-featured package, and the companies that are interested in this sort of functionality have already been using Notes for a long, long time. Microsoft is just too late to the party.

Re:Too little too late

[COMON$]

(rant)

which is the goofy part, as Notes has been around for soooo long it still is as buggy as beta. I have been using and supporting notes for almost 4 years and there is no end to the crashes, bugs, missing dic files, random unread docs, replication conflicts, and dont get me started on trying to migrate from version 5-6, let alone from 6-7. Every day I fear turning on the sametime server or using the more advanced features, often waking up in a cold sweat seeing the Red Box of death from the old days.

I believe that notes is a prime example of what happens when you get a large corporation that gets fat and lazy in the dev of their products, bring on the competiton I say, maybe we will see some stablility rise from notes and some actual useful database structure.

(end rant)

Re:Too little too late

[Billly Gates]

I remember when the same could be said with Novell and their NDS ( now Edirectory) services.

Look where they are now?

Its amazing how much integration gives phb's a woody. Active directory is a pos or was when I was in IT in 1999 when someone told me its bloated 70x over NDS and would require a whole lan upgrade!

I think most linux users who love to bash Microsoft never understand why their os is not king of the desktop. Articles like this mentioning Office2k7 integration and windows integration is what MS uses to lock people in.

OBviously this wont change anytime soon. I expect this to take over unless Notes does something totally revolutionary that Sharepoint can't match. Hell if ms can beat Netware and NDS then it can surely do the same with this.

Re:Too little too late

[Belial6]

While I can say that I have found a bug or two, crashes are very rare. Missing dic files means that something is screwed up at the os level. You can get missing files with any application if you start deleting stuff at the os level. Random unread docs is usually only a problem if the user is sometimes reading from the web interface, and sometimes reading from the client interface. Of course sometimes it is because the document HAS been updated, and the database is set to flag updates to unread.

I can tell you this about Replication Errors. They work flawlessly. If you are getting replication conflicts, it is because you have different data on different Replicas, and the data was changed on each replica since the last replication. Save/Replication conflicts are not a failure of Notes/Domino. They are the proper handling of conflicting data. Most other platforms just pick one copy and indiscriminatly over write the other. This is general done by date, and is a very poor way to handle things. Of course if you want your data handled poorly, you can set Notes/Domino to just overwrite the older data.

The biggest curse of Notes/Domino is that for years, the Designer was the same application as the Developer. Given how easy it is to produce robust applications on this platform, many companies assigned the first user to be the developer. Now, I'm not saying that a secratary cannot be a good developer, but being a secratery certainly doesn't mean that you ARE a good developer.

Re:Too little too late

[GWTPict]

I've been working with Notes for the past 4 or 5 years, the problem as I see it is with a little bit of knowledge you can get something up and running, then you build on top of what you've got, a little more functionality here, a funky new screen there......

You can code absolute crap and Notes will run, yeah it'll pop the red box up or piss off and think about things for 20 minutes before giving you control back but it will run.

Currently for my sins I'm maintaining and extending a Notes system written by someone with no programming training what so ever, just enthusiasm and the Designer client. It's horrible, it's a classic example of how not to program, but it runs, I suspect that wouldn't be the case if developed in with another tool. You can make your own mind up if that's a positive or a negative.

Oh yes, you won't see much of a database structure because it isn't a traditional database, it's a document store, two different things. If that upsets you don't worry, you can point a Notes front end at a DB2 backend and get all the relational goodness that you need.

HTH

Re:Too little too late

[wed128]

In the next month or so my work will be migrating from 5-7. I too wake up in a cold sweat.

Re:Too little too late

[tmasssey]

Don't.

I've been impressed with 7's reliability. The client is virtually indistinguishable from 6.5, but it is a little faster and mroe stable. Now, we're grading on a a *bit* of a curve here, but it's probably the best Notes client I've used, ever.

Yes, Outlook 3003 is prettier. It will *always* be prettier. But Notes 7 is extremely usable.

Re:Too little too late

[COMON$]

As for the rest the problems I am aware of are just that problems, I can fix them just fine, the misterious unread documents are still that, a mistery as the users who are experiencing it do not use the web interfact let alone know what something like that would be, they are rather simple folk. Nah this is something completely separate, I have seen the web gui issue, this is different in that it is almost always 1 unread, misteriouly appearing during the working day, even had it happen a couple times for me.

As for the first user to be dev, you are spot on, the two devs we have were secretaries basically made dev due to a lack of options.

Re:Too little too late

[jedimaud]

here, here

Re:Too little too late

[bob_herrick]

My firm began a Lotus Notes client service related system that included project managment, contact managment, correspondence management, and document storage for worldwide clients (we are an insurance broker) with our first accounts going live in 1996. Some of those accounts have been on the system ever since, with files easily in the gigabyte range by now. I still use the system (or its current incarnation) every day for the projects that I manage, and I have to say it has been extremely reliable (effectively no down time I can ever recall) and few if any crashes of any kind. Since I was the business sponsor in 1996 I may be biased, but for sercurity and durability this system beats the hell out of any of the other approaches we have taken including web based apps & LAN based document storage (don't get me started on that!).

Re:Too little too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry... that is the only problem with Lotus Notes? You have got to be kidding me! Let's see what problems Notes has:

1. Single threaded. You can only do one thing at a time with a Notes client. If you try and hack it so that you do things in background threads, Notes dies. Even on the Domino server you are limited in the number of Notes Agents that you can run at once.

2. Interoperability?! I can't believe Notes got 3 stars for interop in the article. It is virtually impossible to get access to the data that Notes stores. When it is not impossible it is highly impracticle and suffers from poor performance. Accessing Notes from Java uses a highly flakey CORBA implementation that is slow and when it breaks hangs the DIIOP Domino server process until you bounce the whole server. Using .NET you are pretty much forced to buy Proposion N2N http://www.proposion.com/site/proposion.nsf/pages/ N2N because using COM is impracticle (you can only have one user connecting to Domino per machine) and using the C API would just replicate N2N.

3. Client-Server. Notes is a client server application and that is it. It expects a user at the end of the Notes client doing one thing at a time and when you try and use Notes in a server environment that requires multiple systems to access a Domino server from the same machine with different accounts Notes refuses.

4. It is 1980s technology. Have you never come up against the 64k text limit? Once you hit more than 32 000 characters, Notes has a spasm and refuses to work with your field. Have you not noticed how Notes decides, randomly, no the user really does want a line break after these 50 lines or so and inserts them? Have you ever tried to search for something in Notes?

I haven't used Sharepoint, but Notes is a shockingly poor technology. If you have the choice, go with a free/open source option. If that is not available, go with Sharepoint. At all costs, do not buy into Notes - IBM only release new versions of it to meet the requirements of existing users. Just look at the fuss caused when IBM wanted to drop Notes, existing users kicked up a stink and threatened to walk away and so IBM agreed to keep supporting it.

Re:Too little too late

[COMON$]

Maybe it all comes down to who you have developing your system. Well trained experts or a couple of people who just had a crash course in Notes development. I can speak from experience, rarely can you make up for a well trained developer with a boot camp.

Re:Too little too late

[MigrationDick]

How true! I've been working for a company in Notes environment, see notes apps sucks! Mostly because these people (including secretaries) were not trained for application designing to which results to huge single notes database (because they did not plan for database sizing).

Re:Too little too late

[aevans]

A form that takes 20 minutes to run would be better off written and filed by hand.

Re:Too little too late

[GWTPict]

It's not forms that are the problem, it's rebuilding view indexes that can take the time, however I agree 20 minutes is a no no, the point I was trying to make was that Notes can be remarkably forgiving of bad programming, again, whether that's a good thing or not is left as an exercise for the student........

Notes blows chunks

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that willing chooses Notes is asking for a world of pain. Notes blows and probably always will blow. IBM needs to throw that away and use GMail.

GroupWise??

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Me thinks they forgot about Novell's Groupwise too.

Re:GroupWise??

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably just wisely ignored it...

Re:GroupWise??

[malraid]

GroupWise is something completely different. It's comparable with Exchange/Outlook

Re:GroupWise??

[Serapth]

I can say as a company we are moving away from Novell to a sharepoint solution. ( By the way, Groupwise is closer to Exchange, so far as products go ). Right now we make fairly extensive use of iFolder for our Extranet and hands down Sharepoint has it beat. First of, the stability of Novell is something horrid compared to Windows 2003 ( never though id say that... ). Yet, since about Netware 6, its brutal the number of critical crashes that occur.

On top of that, Novell just can't compete feature wise. Versioning? Nope. Easy self service? Nope. Office Integration? Nope. On top of that the Sharepoint searching and meta data aspects just trounce Novell hands down. Frankly I would figure within 3 years we will be Novell free ( its File & Print now, used to be much more ). Im not going to lose any sleep over that either.

The biggest flaw to date with Sharepoint 2003, is that lack of workflow. You end up buying something like Captaris Teamplate, or K2 Workflow within months of a purchase. There is basic document approval built into Sharepoint, but its almost useless.

Re:GroupWise??

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of workflows . . .

I've been dumped into a SharePoint environment that is used almost exclusively for workflows. The workflows are done in BizTalk. The documents are InfoPath. I think BizTalk sucks for this use. Maybe it's good for a non-human workflow. But, not for human workflows.

I've heard of Capteras and have been evaluating K2 and AgilePoint on my box. I am far more impressed with AgilePoint than anything else that I've seen.

Re:GroupWise??

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear jackass,

I have one question: what does GroupWise have to do with Sharepoint and Lotus?

Sincerely,
Annoyed Slacker

Re:GroupWise??

[killjoe]

Try Plone.

Office integration, DAV support, FTP support, workflow, permissions (with delegation), internalization, all out of the box, all with one click install.

You can't really go wrong. If you really want to pay get Z4I from zope corp.

Re:GroupWise??

[malraid]

Crashes in NetWare? I've seen two or three of those, and completely related to hardware. I'm just comming off the phone with someone that wants me to do some NetWare (6.5) consulting, and tells me that they have been without a NetWare support person for years, because it's zero maintenance. Sure, it's a dying platform, but not because of lack of stability.

Reminds me...

[free space]

I wonder how the "enterprise" companies like IBM and Oracle sell their software in the first place. My experinece with a lot of their ( very expensive) products is that they are difficult to install, use and develop with. As if they're following a "Making customers hate your product HOWTO". Microsoft's products are like 5 or 6 times more usable, always.

I understand that products of IBM and co are more capable and powerful, but in 70% of the cases the MS product would do fine..how come then the 'enterprise guys' sell much more than they are expected to?

Re:Reminds me...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

My experinece[sic] with a lot of their ( very expensive) products is that they are difficult to install, use and develop with. As if they're following a "Making customers hate your product HOWTO". Microsoft's products are like 5 or 6 times more usable, always.

It has been my experience that if are already an all MS shop, MS products are less expensive, but only if you are an all MS shop and may the gods have mercy upon you if you ever need to integrate with other platforms or do anything beyond those limited capabilities because it will truly be a hellish experience.

The MS motto should be, "you're already locked in, so suck it up and pay a little more, cuz we're usually 'good enough.'"

50% of their sales would be gone tomorrow if there was such a thing as a free/open source sales guy or if people doing the purchasing evaluated free alternatives.

Re:Reminds me...

[free space]

It has been my experience that if [you] are already an all MS shop, MS products are less expensive, but only if you are an all MS shop

The Oracle products I used (in 1999 I admit) were hard to install, used a nonstandard GUI and were programmed with PL/SQL, a crappy nonstandard language that I despise to this day.
So while MS products are friendly when you're an MS shop and hard otherwise, it's a step ahead of the competition, which is hard on any platform. I hear Oracle improved the quality of the database and replaced PL/SQL with Java, but I still hear complaints from time to time. And IBM/Lotus products seem to be no better.

and may the gods have mercy upon you if you ever need to integrate with other platforms or do anything beyond those limited capabilities because it will truly be a hellish experience.

While that's true with their desktop applications, Microsoft's server software is built on open standards like everyone else. They use TCP/IP, and XML everywhere. Also, MS's products are very programmable and If you know a bit of C++ and COM you can make the software work with almost anything.

The MS motto should be, "you're already locked in, so suck it up and pay a little more, cuz we're usually 'good enough.'"
Their motto is, unfortunately: "If you already use one of our products, using any other product we make will be easier than using our competitors' stuff". Yes, it leads to MS automatically gaining market share in their new products by exploting familiarity with old products, but that's not neccessarily "cheating" since other vendors can work a bit harder and make their software as easy to use as Microsoft's offerings.

Re:Reminds me...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

While that's true with their desktop applications, Microsoft's server software is built on open standards like everyone else. They use TCP/IP, and XML everywhere. Also, MS's products are very programmable and If you know a bit of C++ and COM you can make the software work with almost anything.

Disclaimer: I haven't administrated and Windows servers for several years, just used them and listened to gripes

You must mean open standards like Exchange, Active Directory, FAT, .doc, .wmd and the like? They only use TCP'/IP because they were desperately playing catch-up on having internet access at all and because they haven't grabbed enough of the server market. They abuse XML more than use it, using patents and embedded binary data to describe structure to remove all of the main advantages, like interoperability and tool reuse. As for programming, everything is closed source and as such cannot be truly customized. Using MS products is an exercise in work-arounds and trying to jump over roadblocks they intentionally constructed to lock you into only their products.

Doing something as simple as running a mail server using MS tools becomes a huge pain in the ass. Try serving mail to Windows, Linux, and OS X clients and still allowing all users to use all the features available to that client. Then try implementing ClamAV to filter the viruses. You're better off skipping AD and Exchange and implementing all open source and standards. Otherwise you'll spend all your time fighting the fact that MS products won't play nice and can't remain stable serving POP, IMAP, and Exchange.

This is what I experienced and the same story I've heard from admin after admin who runs a mixed environment. How you got a different impression is my question. Have you ever administered a mixed environment with MS server products and other servers?

Yes, it leads to MS automatically gaining market share in their new products by exploting familiarity with old products, but that's not neccessarily "cheating" since other vendors can work a bit harder and make their software as easy to use as Microsoft's offerings.

It is cheating if they use secret or undocumented protocols and formats, which they do. It is also illegal if you're a monopoly, which is why MS was convicted of it in the EU.

Re:Reminds me...

[free space]

This is what I experienced and the same story I've heard from admin after admin who runs a mixed environment. How you got a different impression is my question. Have you ever administered a mixed environment with MS server products and other servers?

Well, I'm not an administrator but a developer. So I don't have firsthand experience with running MS Exchange in a multi-platform environment but I've seen fellow developers who are capable of doing almost everything with the Exchange API.
That API has been used to integrate with Notes and Groupwise and there nothing to prevent useing it to build a bridge to integrate with your OSS tool of choice if enough OSS developers see it as an itch to scratch. The same can be said about Sql Server, IIS with ISAPI and other products.

As for your ClamAV example I've seen a colleague integrate her custom antivirus tools with Exchange in a matter of weeks. Again the ClamAV guys should find no problem with Exchange integration if they want to do it.

Myself, I much prefer the freedom of having the source code/open formats but the 'normal programmers' who just want to get the job done will be more than happy with the API+tons of documentation that Microsoft provides. Freedom may be better but convenience sells :(

Re:Reminds me...

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] Microsoft's server software is built on open standards like everyone else. They use TCP/IP, and XML everywhere.

[troll]
Open standards lik Active X, Kerberos (with binary PAC), SMB (and SMB2 in Vista), Exchange. And they're using XML openly as well
[/troll]

I'm not slamming SharePoint here, I've never used it, but your claim is dubious at best.

Re:Reminds me...

[Thundersnatch]

Otherwise you'll spend all your time fighting the fact that MS products won't play nice and can't remain stable serving POP, IMAP, and Exchange

I call BS. I have never, ever had an Exchange server fail to interoperate with any non-MS client via SMTP, POP3, or IMAP. It just works, plain and simple, and it is certainly "stable". Most of our Exchange 2003 boxes have 40-50GB databases, yet perform well. The only time Exchagne ever goes down is when we reboot for an OS-level security patch.

We've been using Exchange since v5.5 in a geographically distributed enterprise, and have always allowed non-Windows users to use the POP3/IMAP client of their choice. We've had basically no issues whatsoever with POP3/IMAP interoperability in nearly 8 years.

Re:Reminds me...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I call BS. I have never, ever had an Exchange server fail to interoperate with any non-MS client via SMTP, POP3, or IMAP. It just works, plain and simple, and it is certainly "stable". Most of our Exchange 2003 boxes have 40-50GB databases, yet perform well. The only time Exchagne ever goes down is when we reboot for an OS-level security patch.

Do you allow the clients to use their mail from Exchange/POP/SMTP/IMAP and synch them all so that all the inboxes contain the same data or do you just let each user use one or the other? Because in the former case, several years back, I was unable to keep the server stable with complete re-installs and different hardware. I ended up installing two separate servers, one on Windows one on Linux and synching them. It was a huge pain. The sysadmin at another company I worked at, independently came to the same conclusion, and several other sysadmins have mentioned the same issue over the years. Where I work now, the sysadmin had the same problem, with regular outages until, without any input from me, engineering installed their own servers and only exchange was run on the "official" server. I'd say that is some pretty strong anecdotal evidence, unless you know some secret everyone else I know doesn't.

Re:Reminds me...

[Thundersnatch]

My people use native Exchange RPC protocols via Outlook, and then use IMAP or POP3 from PDAs/phones/non-Windows boxes. They even use WEBDAV over HTTP from newer Windows Mobile clients. And yes, everything stays in synchronization, and nothing has ever crashed.

I have no idea what you're talking about with running "only" Exchange. IMAP & POP3 are just protocol stacks that run as part of a functioning Exchange server. From what you say, it sounds like you're trying to sync two mail servers using IMAP... WTF? Neither IMAP or POP3 as protocols were designed for that at all.

Why not just connect directly to the Exchange server via IMAP? Store everything there (clustering if you want/need to deal with those hassles).

It sounds like kown a bunch of *NIX admins who try to run an Exchange server with little or no training, and don't understand at all how Exchange is architected.

Re:Reminds me...

[Thundersnatch]

Err... that last bit should be:

"It sounds like you know a bunch of *NIX admins who try to run an Exchange server with little or no training, and don't understand at all how Exchange is architected."

Re:Reminds me...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I have no idea what you're talking about with running "only" Exchange. IMAP & POP3 are just protocol stacks that run as part of a functioning Exchange server.

I mean running an exchange server without POP and IMAP enabled.

From what you say, it sounds like you're trying to sync two mail servers using IMAP... WTF? Neither IMAP or POP3 as protocols were designed for that at all.

Not at all, older versions of the exchange server used to have separate mailboxes for users connecting via exchange and POP.

Why not just connect directly to the Exchange server via IMAP? Store everything there (clustering if you want/need to deal with those hassles).

This is, indeed, what we tried, but no one can seem to keep the server stable in this configuration. Thus, in multiple enterprises with multiple admins the end solution turns out to be running separate servers for Windows and non-Windows clients.

It sounds like kown a bunch of *NIX admins who try to run an Exchange server with little or no training, and don't understand at all how Exchange is architected.

This has been with quite a few different admins. Right now we have a bunch of Windows only guys who don't seem to understand anything else. Since most of us in engineering (75% of the whole company) don't use Windows and need tools unavailable in Windows they end up trying to hack together solutions or we just end up running our own servers while they manage a few dozen Windows workstations for the corporate headquarters.

I guess you experience just does not jive with that of mine or of people I know. "Exchange server pop problems" yields about 7 million hits in Google, so I don't think I'm alone.

Re:Reminds me...

[Thundersnatch]

Not at all, older versions of the exchange server used to have separate mailboxes for users connecting via exchange and POP.

The above statement is totally and completely false. I have been administering Exchange servers since version 5.0 in the mid-90s, and there has only ever been one kind of mailbox. See my previous statements about the pssibilty that the people you reference may not have any understanding the archicture of Exchange Server.

This is, indeed, what we tried, but no one can seem to keep the server stable in this configuration.

Tens of thousands of geographically dispersed enterprises that run Exchange in mixed environments would disagree with you. I know admins at plenty of Exchange server shops besides mine, and none of them have ever experienced "instability" due to serving mail via POP and IMAP. By the way, if you could describe the nature of the instability, I would perhaps be more inclined to believe your reports. What happens, exactly?

"Exchange server pop problems" yields about 7 million hits in Google, so I don't think I'm alone.

Nice straw man. A Google for "linux pop problems" yields more than 13 million hits. By your logic, we must conclude that Linux can't be made into a functioning POP Server, no matter what POP daemon you use.

Re:Reminds me...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The above statement is totally and completely false.

I'm just stating what I recall as a user of the above. I don't know how it was configured or why, but it certainly was.

Tens of thousands of geographically dispersed enterprises that run Exchange in mixed environments would disagree with you. I know admins at plenty of Exchange server shops besides mine, and none of them have ever experienced "instability" due to serving mail via POP and IMAP. By the way, if you could describe the nature of the instability, I would perhaps be more inclined to believe your reports. What happens, exactly?

The machine is still up, but it serves no mail. Mail is silently dropped into nowhere. A reboot is the only fix that seems to work.

Nice straw man.

I don't think you know what a "straw man argument" is. It is a weak argument proposed and attributed to one's opponent, and then discredited. For example, I might write, "many proponents of Microsoft will argue that Microsoft was innovative when they created DOS, but those people are wrong since MS bought DOS from another company." It is putting words in your opponents mouth and then discrediting those words.

A Google for "linux pop problems" yields more than 13 million hits.

Hmm, actually given that MS has about 30% share by servers numbers, I suspect that would suggest the opposite what you intended it to support. Not that such a loose count is really meaningful, but you can certainly find plenty of people asking about similar problems with a more refined search.

Just for serendipity, the exchange server here dies again today. It just locked up for no real reason with no config changes. It is unrelated to the configuration we were discussing, but still an interesting coincidence.

Speaking as a Scarepoint user

[Limburgher]

I've not user the newest Lotus Notes, but I use Scarepoint daily. I hate it. God forbid anyone use something other than IE. And if you want to view a document quickly, forget it. My department mandated that all our documentation get migrated from a fairly vanilla but searchable PHP site I built into Scarepoint. Since Scarepoint doesn't support html with linked images, I had to convert everything into Word docs. Now viewing frequently used information takes upwards of a minute where it used to be nearly instantaneous. Thanks a friggin lot.

Re:Speaking as a Scarepoint user

[ednopantz]

key phrase: "from a ...site I built"

Re:Speaking as a Scarepoint user

[awkScooby]

God forbid anyone use something other than IE.

It's pretty much not usable with anything other than IE on Windows. IE on OS X (when they Microsoft provided such a thing) was unusable. Fortunately I had my laptop with me when the Microsoft folks were pimping Sharepoint to management. They said things like, "oh, yeah, it will work as long as it's IE. No problem." So I asked them to show me how since I was having problems with their Sharepoint site using IE on OS X.

Needless to say, we're not running Sharepoint.

Re:Speaking as a Scarepoint user

[tuxette]

God forbid anyone use something other than IE.

I've used it with Mozilla without any problems, and when there are problems, the same problems also show up in IE...

Re:Speaking as a Scarepoint user

[rehtonAesoohC]

No offense, but that comment reeked of, "They stopped using my uber wicked cool PHP website that I spent hours and hours making. Wahhh."

At the very least, it's a biased opinion, not objective...

Re:Speaking as a Scarepoint user

[IANAAC]

At the very least, it's a biased opinion, not objective...

Instead of saying "You must be new here", I'll simply say "Welcome"!

WSS v3 & MOSS 2007

[iacyclone]

I was just at a Microsoft SharePoint conference last wek in Seattle and I have to say I came away very impressed with the new features they will be releasing soon. The integration with the office suite is very impressive. I think this next release will put SharePoint over the top. The 2003 version is good, but this next version looks much, much better.

Re:WSS v3 & MOSS 2007

[sceptre1067]

Curious... how much Groove has affected the new version. I know that since buying Groove MS is incorperating it into office 2007. Just wondering how much of that expertise they're using in sharepoint.

Re:WSS v3 & MOSS 2007

[iacyclone]

They had a few sessions on Groove but it is not tightly integrated with Sp. You can connect Groove to a SharePoint site and work on documents, etc. Other than that it didn't appear that there was a real tight integration with Groove.

Grrrr

[neonprimetime]

As a developer at a large bank which requires us not only to use Lotus Notes, but to have it open at all times so we can be sametimed and be alerted of new emails ... I have to say it blows. If it wasn't for me being a developer and getting a P4 2.5ghz 1.2gb ram pc ... I would shoot myself now. I view my co-workers (non-developers) pc's occasionally and they're chugging along on their P3 256mb ram pc ... ouch.

Re:Grrrr

[Elvis Parsley]

which requires us not only to use Lotus Notes, but to have it open at all times so we can be sametimed and be alerted of new emails

You know you don't have to do that, right? Sametime will work whether or not Notes is running, and you can have Notesminder keeping you alert to emails and alarms. It's entirely possible that your admins have screwed things up in such a way that that's not possible, but the tools to keep chat and email up with a small footprint are right there in the box.

Re:Grrrr

[Quince alPillan]

Two applications:

Lotus Sametime Client

Notes Minder

Sametime client lets me have Sametime without having Lotus Notes open all the time.

Notes Minder alerts me whenever there's a meeting or email without having Notes open. Unfortunately, Notes Minder seems to have a small bug in it. It keeps saying "Ignoring Pre-Cutoff Unread Replication Activities" after running it for a few months and even though I've been able to get rid of it temporarily, I've never been able to get rid of it permanently.

That said, I absolutely loathe Lotus Notes for being excruciatingly slow.

Re:Grrrr

[neonprimetime]

We recently upgraded to Lotus Notes 6.5 and now Sametime is INSIDE Lotus Notes ... so they're no longer 2 separate applications. Pretty annoying ... and I haven't seem a work-around yet.

Re:Grrrr

[neonprimetime]

This could be true? Nobody has showed me ... and getting good documentation on Lotus Notes is impossible. All I know is ... We recently upgraded to Lotus Notes 6.5 and now Sametime is INSIDE Lotus Notes ... so they're no longer 2 separate applications. Pretty annoying ... and I haven't seem a work-around yet.

Re:Grrrr

[callistra.moonshadow]

I used to be a Notes Developer/Adminstrator 8 years back. Even then Notes was sadly full of code bloat. If you had the skills to develop in it great, but otherwise you were out of luck. I haven't seen any real improvement on ease of use or performance. Sad but true.

Re:Grrrr

[neonprimetime]

Yeah ... we upgraded to 6.5 ... and I saw no real benefits from the user's perspective ...
not sure if I was clear or not ... but I'm a web developer that just happens to have to use Lotus Notes for my job ... I'm not a Lotus Notes developer ... and really really hope i never get to that point in my career :-)

Re:Grrrr

[Elvis Parsley]

The help database provided with the Notes client didn't help? Granted, nobody may have told you about such a basic feature, but that would seem to be the fault of your organization, not the software. Do this:

1. Launch the Notes Client
2. Hit F1 to bring up the help database
3. Click on the Search button
4. Type your search term (say, "Notes minder") into the search bar and click "Search"

I've always found the built-in documentation useful, though it's a better reference than a teaching tool.

Re:Grrrr

[supremebob]

You should really try using NotesBuddy instead, which is basically a Lotus Sametime client with a lightweight Notes mail client built in. It works well for most messages, but you still need to open Notes if you get an embedded database link.

Re:Grrrr

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Disable logon during startup option in Notes.
2) Disconnect from Sametime in Notes.
3) Run Sametime application of choice.

Please make sure you do step 1, or you will be logged into Sametime twice with unknown consequences.

Re:Grrrr

[callistra.moonshadow]

I'm not massively crazy/slap-happy about sharepoint, but it does what it is supposed to do. Back early in my career when Notes was starting to lose it's edge in the market I moved away from being a C++/Java Notes API programmer and did more Windows/Unix coding erring on the side of improving my OOA/D skills instead of sticking with a particular shareware application. I have several friends that are still working as Notes Admins or Developers and their job opportunities are shrinking along with the user-base of Notes.

Re:Grrrr

[neonprimetime]

So I'm pathetic ... what the hell is help anyways? :-P Just as a followup ... wanted to say thanks ... got it working ... I was having the following documented issue

I don't know who to root for!

[Anonymous Coward]

On one hand, I hate Microsoft because they love to make this sort of stuff not work very well/at all unless you're running Windows. I'm sure SharePoint is no different.

On the other hand, Lotus supports multiple platforms, but does a terrible job of it. Lotus Notes for the Mac, for example, is a godawful abortion of a program. It only recently started supporting locating user data files in the user's home directory instead of the application's directory, for one thing. For another, it's a lousy port-- the application installs listerally hundreds of 8.3-named files that are clearly recycled portions of the Windows version.

So if you don't use Windows you're probably going to have a subpar experience no matter which you choose-- the only difference is the root cause: malevolence or ineptitude.

Progress?

[hlh_nospam]

The company where I have my current day-job is in the process of moving from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook. This is being presented as a Big Leap Forward.

Re:Progress?

[gbjbaanb]

It is, believe me. I've been to a few job interviews in the past where people have said "yeah, we use Notes here, but apart from that its quite a good company to work for".

I have used Notes before at my first company, which is why I sneak the topic into conversation at interviews. (usually it means the company has a IT dept that is rabidly anti-MS and pro IBM, and therefore usually religiously blinkered to a lot of other things that make life easier)

Sharepoint is OK

[br00tus]

I've never worked with the Lotus stuff. I work for a Fortune 1000 company where until a few months ago, all public IT documents were stored in a shared directory on a Windows file server. So there was no record of when it was created, who was modifying it, who erased it if it was erased etc.

Recently we began using Sharepoint. The upside is it's like CVS - you can see who edited a file, when, and what they changed. This is useful more for utilitarian purposes than spying - if I see Joe created a file, or modified it, I can ask Joe about it.

One drawback for Sharepoint is linkage. In the old days I could just tell people to go to \\FILESERVER\IT\Documents\Whatever\Coolstuff.xls . They click on that in e-mail and it pops up. Now I have to give convoluted instructions on how to get the document. The URLs are long and convoluted. It was easier to direct people to information before.

I am stuck here in Windows hell, are there any GPL and possibly UNIX-friendly versions of this type os software?

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[duplicate-nickname]

Really, the URL's are no different that UNC paths depending on how your SharePoint is setup. Instead of your path listed above, it might be http://sharepoint/IT/Documents/Folder/Coolstuff.xl s. The only convoluted part is that spaces are encoded into %20 which can be annoying.

All-in-all, I am very impressed with SharePoint 2003 and we keep finding more and more uses for it.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[gambino21]

If your primary need is document management (version control, approval process, etc.) I have found Knowledge Tree to work pretty well. We've been using it for about one year, and it's fairly easy to set up and we haven't had too many bugs.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[optikknight]

if you build it, they will come. ;)

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.alfresco.com/

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[ackdesha]

I am stuck here in Windows hell, are there any GPL and possibly UNIX-friendly versions of this type os software?

I've been using basecamp http://www.basecamphq.com/ as a lightweight solution, and I really like it so far. I'm not sure about scaling it up to a large corporate level, but it has been great so far for my small team. The downside is all of your data is on their servers.

It uses a Software as a service model, pay as you go. So not GPL, but it does expose a HTTP/XML API that could easily be hacked with perl, python, etc.

The company http://www.37signals.com/ also offers a few other solutions. You may have heard of them through all of the RoR hype lately.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[plopez]

I tested and pushed hard for theis one at a place I worked at:

http://www.cybozu.com/

then they hired an IT genius for a director or it who thought that the only true software is microsoft....

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[optimus-25]

www.alfresco.org (maps a netbios drive so \\fileshare_A works as well as the web ui, check out the feature set) open source, j2ee

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[HrothgarReborn]

I have actually used a wiki for this type of thing. It takes a bit more technically savvy set of editors but the markup is easy, versioning is tracked and everything instantly indexed, searchable and cross linked. Works really nice for documentation. If you want your docs written in word format though go with Sharepoint. You will not find a good GPL system for Word format. Subversion, and others like it will treat it like a binary file and just record new copies. No way to see diffs, etc.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not open source, but my group has been using Confluence for developer documentation and I love it. It has a very polished user interface, is easy to configure, and uses web standards so you don't have to be running all MS crap to get anything done. We also use JIRA for bug-tracking and the way they tie together is very cool.

As far as open source alternatives, you can check out any of the hundreds of wikis out there. I think XWiki has a lot to offer.

Unfortunately, we've been told by management that we have to use Sharepoint. I've only used the services bundled with Windows 2003, so maybe it gets better, but using it from a Linux desktop with Firefox makes me want to claw my eyes out. It looks like something cobbled together over the weekend by a refugee from 1995.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[Anonymous Coward]

So good that their product's Wiki is ... a MediaWiki.

They didn't even edit out the "Donations" link.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[killjoe]

Sharepoint is a pale subsitute for plone.

I would also reccomend people take a look at ifolder, it's really nice.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[ozric99]

Nothing much to add to this except "me too". We've been using it for a number of months now. We're just a small group of around 10 people working on some certification documentation and I've yet to hear anyone complain about any aspect of it.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a document management guy who has managed a migration from Lotus Notes to Sharepoint Portal Server over the last nine months.
Lotus summary - buy Domino.Doc, or whatever the ERDM package is called now, and it does basically work.
MS summary - SPS is inadequate when it comes to managing access control, which cannot be applied at folder levels, nor can it change throughout the document lifecycle. Audit trails are inadequate - while you receive notification of changes, the whole history is not retained. Version history is simplistic. Workflow is not really a part of the SPS feature set, but is more dependent on BizTalk. Documents other than Office (e.g. AutoCAD drawings, FrameMaker documents, etc) are not managed effectively in Sharepoint.
You're better off to get EMCDocumentum to put in a serious system with eRooms for the collaboration functionality, although costing must be controlled.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

[batkiwi]

Two things you're missing:

1. Sharepoint integrates with outlook 2003, so that you can email a sharepoint document from the sharepoint UI and it automatically gets "reference attached" to your outlook email. This is very handy as it opens from within sharepoint, so if they edit it it's updated automatically on the site.

2. "\\sharepointserver\sitename\document library name" will work unless your sharepoint server is misconfigured. They still let you use it as a network share.

this reminds me

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me of this image:
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/attachment.php?attachm entid=31893&stc=1&d=1135277304

Conclusion

[Zebra_X]

Sharepoint is clearly looking down upon Lotus notes.

Re:Conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to justify your comment, at all?

Another "Well, DUH!" comment

[overshoot]

if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat

What a surprise. Isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's platform strategy? That it's pretty much an all or nothing proposition?

Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoint

[diatonic]

A lot of the UI functionality in Sharepoint depends on MS ActiveX controls. God help you if you use a non-microsoft browser. *VERY* painful.
 
:: diatonic ::

Recycled Boogie

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't there an article here about three weeks ago that whether it was Scarepoint, Slowest Notes or Gropewise, that the average user finds collaboration software to be unnecessarily clumsy and time consuming? So much so that most revert to e-mail for collaborative communications!

Re:Progress? Over or inTO the

[davidsyes]

great deep chasm?

(GO LOTUS! GO IBM!)

Goddamned Stupid:

"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING."

I only lower-cased ver in over to end the abort..

Re:where is the open source alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

good point, I mean, why can't I run something like this:

gnuPoint -g ://item/project/data/entry /my/local/directory >> nano

It's so much simpler!

Ermm. Looks can be deceiving

[mpapet]

It's microsoft after all, and they have a history of deception.

What's nice about that is that as a sysadmin I'm -guaranteed- work anywhere that attempts to do anything slightly different than a default installation.

(I after e except after c right?)

Subversion is far better for your needs.

[955301]

Subversion. http://subversion.tigris.org/

What you are describing is a source control system applied to documents instead of code. By design any files in the subversion repo are accessible via url. And you can restrict access using apache httpd access controls.

For example, here is a subversion repo: http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/

notice you only needed a browser to get to it. If you use TortoiseSVN as your client, you can grab a copy using Window Explorer as a file-friendly client.

Here's a screen shot of TortoiseSVN:
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Access via apache httpd is through web DAV, so you can put it in your network share list as well.

I've used Both

[Anonymous Coward]

In the company I work for, we use both systems, While Lotus is a full Giant monster, their Workflow implementation has a LOT of Bugs... I wouldn't put a critical process under that horrid scheme....

Sharepoint is simple.. very simple.. and there lies its weaknesses... (afeter downloading some sheets, you can enhance it.. but not so much..)

Sorry for the horrid grammar and vocabulary...

They compared the wrong products

[Lt. Pierogi]

For ease of collaboration nothing beats Lotus QuickPlace (which runs on Lotus Notes) We switched from QuickPlace to SharePoint, and it completely sucked. The Lotus Notes client completely blows but the Lotus Notes server kicks ass.

Blowtus Goats vs. ScarePoint

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I dislike SharePoint, I loath Blowtus Goats with a royal pashion. While developing it, I think the IBM developers took the George Costanza way of "doing the opposite" of that which makes sense. It's amazing that they couldn't even make a decent e-mail client with all the years of development that went into it, much less anything else.

Sharepoint v Twiki

[Kurt Granroth]

We use Sharepoint and Twiki nearly interchangeably at work. I don't have a problem with either of them. The people complaining about Sharepoint needing a lot of ActiveX controls must be using far more advanced features than are available on our installation. I access Sharepoint using Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera (on Linux) regularly and have never had any problems. I'll admit that I resisted when "they" started pushing Sharepoint on me since past experience with MS designed web applications has shown me their zeal to lock out everything but IE on Windows (*cough*MS Project Central*cough*)... but since using it, I have no complaints at all.

Typically, we use Sharepoint for any Microsoft formatted docs (xls, doc, ppt, etc) since Office 2003 has pretty decent support for Sharepoint built-in. Click on a spreadsheet and Excel will check it out, show you who is working on the file, and check it back in when you save. Pretty slick. Gnumeric comes pretty close in that it appears to check it out, but Sharepoint doesn't seem to recognize the checked out state so checking it back in is problematic.

We then use Twiki for docs that are more static (PDFs, typically) and for pages that are heavily customized. I'm sure that Sharepoint allows for very customized pages as well but we use what we know and we know Twiki.

Uh-huh?

[ms1234]

I wouldn't compare Notes 7 and Sharepoint. I'm using Notes 7 at work everyday, gets the job done. Watched last week as a Microsoft salesperson came to the company and held a Sharepoint presentation. Was nice but it assumed you were all Microsoft. We're not. Good if you are, otherwise I think you'll have issues integrating whatever non Microsoft you're using.

sharepoint sucks

[llbbl]

Anything by MS you know is gonna suck cause it's overpriced and they force you to use closed document standards. Novell GroupWise is the way to go!

They both suck

[Chazmyrr]

I won't comment on the "collaboration" features, but a big part of Sharepoint and Domino are document repositories. Both of them have some major drawbacks in that area.

The big end user problem in Domino is the limited hierarchy. You have rooms, cabinets, folders, and files. People find it very limiting and confusing to be forced into that model. Some other issues involve poor performance and difficulty of performing backups because of certain design decisions that haven't been changed in the last 10 years. Everyone I've spoken to in my company hates using Domino.

Sharepoint offers unlimited hierarchy. The big problem in Sharepoint is security. You can set security on a respository but not on folders or documents. As far as I can determine, Windows authentication is required. This can be a real problem in a large corporation where various parts of the business have their own domains or active directory trees that aren't configured to trust the other domains or directories. Also, documents are differentiated and versioned entirely based on filename.

Sure, there are some things about document management that can be hard. I know from experience. I've written a document management system. That's why it amazes me that IBM and Microsoft haven't been able to put forth better offerings.

Re:They both suck

[buro9]

Hi, I was going to avoid this little flamewar as I have a biased viewpoint*, but I feel compelled to address this ditty:

"Sharepoint offers unlimited hierarchy. The big problem in Sharepoint is security. You can set security on a respository but not on folders or documents. As far as I can determine, Windows authentication is required. This can be a real problem in a large corporation where various parts of the business have their own domains or active directory trees that aren't configured to trust the other domains or directories. Also, documents are differentiated and versioned entirely based on filename."

This was true of WSS v2 (as reviewed). However, WSS v3 offers true item level security across all lists (including documents), across all sites.

We were given the simple scenario of: "Bill G didn't like the idea that the board level minutes were accessible by any sysadmin with access to the site."

It's a fair point, who would trust WSS as a document repository if there is no security around some of the most sensitive documents in an organisation.

As a result, we now have per-item permission, audit trails, etc.

On the permissioning, the next version uses Kerberos by default, and not NTLM. This is also true of the latest service pack version of WSS v2. So Windows Auth is *not* an absolute given, you get to choose... and Kerberos is what you get by default now.

Document versioning remains similar... with versions of a document being seperate items in a WSS list. However this need not be an achilles heal, you could add work flow to check for a unique identifier on an Office XML document, and if not present, prompt the user to enter it... and if present look for existing documents and version based on the property rather than the filename. Having Windows Workflow Services available with such a rich set of hooks means that gripes like this can easily be resolved, and at the same time document management can be enhanced, as you could enforce organisation wide document numbering policies.

I will be the first to complain about the WSS v2 featureset, and some of it's limitations - just try and customise a template ;) - however the vast majority of issues that I had with WSS v2 have been resolved in WSS v3. In fact, only one issue remains in my mind: Cross-site querying using web services. The scenario being multiple Project Workspaces created from the same template, how do you query all high impact Issues across all Projects? At the moment and in the future, the answer is to build your own web service and use the object model to go through each site... an answer which isn't really desirable given that it would produce more SQL queries under the bonnet than is really necessary.

Anyhow, the majority of WSS problems are resolved in the beta's for WSS v3 issued just a few days ago.

Here's hoping I didn't just breach a load of NDA's by declaring that WSS v3 is actually not as bad as v2!

* Declaration of interest: I'm a member of the Content & Collaboration Developer Advisory Council for Microsoft, basically one of a group of about 20 or 30 people representing major partners who get early access to and are able to give early feedback and advice on the Windows Sharepoint Services range of products.

Wrong Products to compare

[Manitcor]

Why are we comparing 2 second string players in the industry to eachother? I would say BEA AquaLogic/Plumtree vs IBM would be a more valid article. However I dont take alot of stock in an article that glosses over the details of such a large discussion topic not to mention speaks as if Lotus and Microsoft are the only major players in this space.

Sales and Consultancy

[donutello]

IBM and Oracle have much better sales forces and more competent consultancy services than Microsoft.

I know of two very large organizations where they're sticking with IBM solutions for no reason other than the fact that the IBM sales guy has built a great relationship with someone very high in management and the Microsoft sales guy has been downright incompetent by comparison.

Besides the sales savviness, IBM and Oracle both have very strong consultancy departments which will customize their software to do whatever you want it to do. With Microsoft, you're stuck trying to hire an independent firm that will do the same for you.

Re:Sales and Consultancy

[Elvis Parsley]

IBM has better sales? That doesn't mesh well with what I hear in the Notes/Domino community. There's a sizable community of developers and admins who love the product, but despair of a sales department which appears disinclined to actually sell anything.

Happy Fun Ball sig

[raftpeople]

That was one of the funniest SNL fake commercials I have ever seen!

Ghetto SharePoint

[gravyface]

1. Take Office files.
2. Put in folders that make sense on shared drive.
3. Open Explorer, change View > Details. Right-click on column list, add Author, Date Modified, Owner, whatever.
4. Browse and send as attachment, open, edit, print.
5. Search > Advanced Search > "File Contents" for whatever.

Point

[free space]

I think that might indeed contribute to the IBM/Oracle sale, and may also contribute to the general crappiness of the products, since making Notes or Oracle software very easy to use will kill half of the consultancy market overnight.

Heh, Oracle even has "software installation consultants"

Big reason for Sharepoint...

[neveragain4181]

..is that the base version if free. It comes bundled with all Windows Server 2003 editions. I've worked with it a lot as a developer, which isn't much fun.

Sharepoint 'Portal' Server is the paid-for-product, but a lot of companies dip their toe in the free 'Windows Sharepoint Services' version and get hooked/caught. Both verions share the same code base, but Portal has more features (obviously).

Microsoft seemed to spend a lot of time getting the split between the free and paid for features just right. As soon as you have a couple of SP sites then it basically becomes impossible to manage them without 'upgrading'. That sometimes comes as a shock.

The MS Office team also provides a bunch of integration options for Sharepoint too, as in you can save directly into the 'Document Libraries' from Word/Excel, plus sync up your calendar in Outlook.

One important point to always consider about Sharepoint, and it's subsequent success, is that it has done well *because* of the OS and Office market Microsoft hold - without those two heavily linked in, it would never have sold on it's own, IMO.

Another example of Sharepoint's 'spread factor' is that you *must have* MS SQL Server, and most probably MS Active Directory too, to make it work - in case you haven't figured it out yet, once you touch Sharepoint you are more or less signing up for the complete Microsoft 'stack' across your desktops and servers.

Now Sharepoint is established off the back of Office/OS divisions (what's that M word again), it is actually getting better. The upcoming new drop with Office 2007 fixes most of the things wrong with SP 2003.

It's one of those situations that personally makes me go, hmmmm. It works well and is getting better, but you might feel you've been run over by the licensing truck...

- NA

Why Leave Out Apache and FOSS tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with using an HTTP-based solution, that is, an intranet? Or use SSL, and proxy servers to run on the Internet?

IOW why not model it after the WWW, the best and largest collaboration tool in existence?

But..but..but

[ch33kymonk3y]

That's really sharepoint portal server (quite expensive) v's Workplace services Express. Not Domino.

I have no idea!

[twocents]

I just wanted to add that I thank everyone on this board for working with these two pieces of software so I don't have to!

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere (or Notes...)

[StabnSteer]

YES YES YES...I agree that this is not an apt comparison at all. I worked for a company that used both. I loved and loathed them both. But each did something very well - and those "somethings" were very different. I think it is pretty unusual to use Notes solely as a rapid development platform for web-based database apps with workflow and granular security, but that's what we did with it - no email...no groupware. It completely blew anything else we had out of the water at doing this.

SharePoint? Well...it was great for little web sites using default web parts, which is what most clients wanted it for. But the doggone things multiplied like tribbles in the hold and if you have any kind of serious change management system in your company, SharePoint likes to thumb its nose at working within those types of guidelines (Head of IT: "What do you mean the users change the content of the site LIVE? We need to lock that down!") (sigh)

We went with Confluence

[puppetluva]

We went with Confluence from atlassian for our knowledge sharing. It uses real open-standards, is easy to use and costs less.

It is a hell of a lot easier than either of those two behemoths, won't lock you into anything, and the company isn't going to force to you into upgrades you don't want and don't need.

Or if you are in a large fortune 500 company

[Anonymous Coward]

'If you don't have the resources dedicated to developing collaborative applications...

If you are in a large fortune 500 company and you install sharepoint, all you've done is replaced NT file shares with a new dumping ground for "stuff". I suppose the one side benefit is now all the zillions of gigs of "stuff" is on a group of clustered servers instead of scattered through the corporation.

Organizationally, it is still as messy as before. Instead of using a dozen drive letters to connect to various NT file shares I now use my web browser to view a dozen dumping grounds.

I don't see how that has improved "collaboration".

Just like choosing between two lousy presidents

[seniorcoder]

Choosing between Lotus Notes and MS Sharepoint isn't an enviable choice. I've used both. I thought they both sucked in so many ways.

I particularly like the entry in the interface hall of shame specifically dedicated to the disgrace called Lotus Notes. The problem is that I thought Sharepoint was almost as bad.

Luckily I am a developer and I will just build a custom website that continues to function (unlike sharepoint) and has an intuitive interface (like neither).

My choice would be "none of the above".

niether are what you need

[WamBamBoozle]

My favorite tools for collaboration are MediaWiki and DARCS.

Niether Notes nor Sharepoint can show you the history, discussion, and differences like MediaWiki can. And MediaWiki can do it with immediacy and with an economy of bandwidth that IBM & MS can't approach.

I've programmed for lotus notes and a flakier monster you'll never know. I am currently using sharepoint for one of my clients and it is, well, lame. So much infrastructure for sharing files. Microsoft Word files.

Been using SharePoint ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Way too primitive for us ...

We are leaving on it only basic stuff and moving to wiki/php.

Also users complained about stability and lack of search capapbilities ...

Not mentioning mysterious access denials ...

Re:Been using SharePoint ...

[slantyyz]

I agree. We've got a Mediawiki set up with a few extensions and a "restricted access" patch and it works better than anything I could do with Sharepoint or Notes/Domino in the same amount of time. I'm a big fan of Notes/Domino, but the paradigm behind a Wiki (everyone contributes) will help prevent it from becoming shelfware at my company. Yeah, it's missing some functionality that the others can provide, but ultimately the true value of any system lies in the amount of knowledge entered into the system.

I Would Pay Good Money

[Greyfox]

For pictures of the looks of horror on their faces when you pulled out your mac and started booting it.

I've been subjected to "Bloated Goats" every time I've worked at IBM. I've already arrived at the conclusion that all email products suck, but both IBM's and Microsoft's groupware products suck that little bit extra that makes all the difference. Notes and Exchange both get a rating of "Sucktastic" in my book. You know it's bad when you're glad to go home to an email client that "only" sucks donkey balls.

Exactly.

[gravyface]

Which is why I mentioned the "ghetto sharepoint" a few comments up -- try to get your users to use, share, and organize their "stuff" on an NT share before making a commitment to fancy new software.

If your policy and process is a shambles then it doesn't matter if you buy Lotus or SharePoint or whatever.

You're not talking about Domino...

[sean.peters]

the big end user problem in Domino is the limited hierarchy. You have rooms, cabinets, folders, and files.

Rooms, cabinets, folders, files, etc; are not Domino features... they're Quickplace features. Domino applications can be developed to have any sort of hierarchy you want. Quickplace comes out of the box with the room/cabinet... architecture you refer to.

Probably, though, the comparison of Quickplace to Sharepoint is more relevant anyway, as Domino is the full-fledged application server, and Quickplace is the easy document collaboration product. Quickplace specs match a lot more directly to Sharepoint than Domino specs do.

Sean

Re:You're not talking about Domino...

[rhsatrhs]

Actually, I suspect he's talking about Domino.Doc, not QuickPlace. In any case, it's not Domino. It's an app built on top of Domino.

Re:You're not talking about Domino...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rooms, cabinets, folders, files, etc; are not Domino features... they're Quickplace features. Domino applications can be developed to have any sort of hierarchy you want. Quickplace comes out of the box with the room/cabinet... architecture you refer to.

Wrong. Those aren't QuickPlace features, they're Domino.Doc features. Trust me, I know, I worked on DomDoc for 5 years. QuickPlace is a great collaborative product, but lacks true document management functionality. That is what Domino.Doc provides.

Our rigid hierarchy was always a problem with customers, and was something we looked into fixing a few times.

Secretaries turned Dev

[Belial6]

I'll tell you, 80%-90% of the clients I have worked for have had this same story. It is why most people that dislike Notes/Domino, feel the way they do. Imagine how much people would hate C, C++, or Java if all of their applications were written by secretaries.

That being said, a secretary and a real developer can make a fabulous development team. I do a lot of work for a steel mill, and their devleoper employee got the job because she was willing to do the work. No development background, and little interest. Because she knows here skill level, and works without ego, she saves her company huge amounts of money. Any work she does saves the company from having to pay me for that time, which really just means they have me work on harder stuff. Often this is stuff that I would rather not do anyways. While I will do these tasks, but if there is someone else who will do it, do it right, and do it cheaper... woohoo! Some of the tasks she does are:

*95% of all user contact
*Testing
*Moving code changes from Development to Test to Production
*Debugging - She may not know how to fix a bug, but if she can pinpoint exactly where it is, I can fix it in far less time
*Fixing of small bugs
*Design specifications
*Training
*Initial configurations

The trick is being realistic about peoples capabilities. Being a contract Notes/Domino developer has been very good to me. Primarily because most coders see it as beneath them, and most Notes/Domino developers are secretaries. This leaves plenty of room to be a hero.

Long Live Notes!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Notes

Many people, including competitors, some industry analysts and mainstream business press, have claimed that "Lotus Notes is dead" in 2006. There have been repeated insinuations of this since the mid 1990s, yet none have proven true. For example, an article published in Forbes magazine in April 1998 proclaimed "The decline and fall of Lotus". Since that time, the installed base of Lotus Notes has nearly tripled from an estimated 42 million seats in September 1998 to more than 125 million in 2006.[1]

Current claims of the death of Notes are fueled by lingering market confusion emanating from IBM placing marketing emphasis on Websphere and IBM Workplace in 2003 and 2004. IBM's most recent figures, however, indicate that the product is enjoying a sustained period of double-digit growth. While the future of any product in the technology sector can not be predicted, IBM has made announcements that indicate that it continues to invest heavily in research and development on the Lotus Notes product line. The next major Notes release, currently code-named "Hannover" (after the location of the 22nd Deutsche Notes User Group meeting, where it was first shown to the public) will incorporate Notes into a larger Eclipse framework and include support for a Linux version. At a Deutsche Notes User Group meeting on May 15, 2006, IBM announced of incorporating Workplace client technology into Notes, which will in turn give Notes wide-ranging support for the OpenDocument format.[2] In addition, IBM executive Ken Bisconti has made public comments on several occasions asserting that there will be releases 8, 9 and 10 of Notes and Domino.

How is this true?

[systems]

I read the product description, and, for one I dont see how can a company need to collaborate 250,000+ employee.

I dont think this is humanly doable, in other words, the human manager will break or not even consider coodinating such a huge number of people, even if the software exist.

Break and conquer, I think the 250,000+ and coordinated via a smaller group of managers, a lot smaller, I dont believe a company this size (if such a beat exist) would be so decentralized, plus, in such larger firms the majority is labor, they probably dont need such tools

Re:How is this true?

[Anonymous Coward]

250,000+ employee ... I dont believe a company this size (if such a beat exist)

Outside the government and Wal*Mart, which both have 1+ million employees. There's GM, Ford, PepsiCo, and Siemens that I know off the top of my head.

Jeez, I get tired of hearing this

[sean.peters]

The "interface hall of shame" site is ludicrously out of date. It refers to Notes release 4.6, for God's sake! That was released in what, 1996? We're up to version 7 now! It's a little silly to keep harping on an interface that hasn't even been used in 10 years.

And criticizing Lotus Notes because you don't like the interface of a Notes application is somewhat like criticizing Linux because you don't like the GIMP. Applications can be well or poorly designed in any environment.

Sean

No where near a proper comparison

[GlobalMind]

Sorry but the article is crap.

They simply aren't comparing the right products, which of course shows exactly how lame ZDNet is in reviewing this sort of thing.

First off what they are showing in SharePoint is much more closely tied to say Lotus QuickPlace or Workplace. Taking the stock Domino product, even with its strong collaborative backbone and putting it up against SharePoint as is simply is not a correct test.

Where is Exchange mentioned here? Despite all of the features that Domino has, the real competitor is Exchange, not SharePoint. Domino is just a starting point for the discussion.

They are clearly making the same mistake that so many other MS shills make when trying to act independant and compare products, in that they don't compare the right ones.

Add Workplace or QuickPlace to the mix and then make a comparison.

GM.

As a Lotus Notes/Domino developer....

[wift]

Disclaimer: I've been developing Lotus Notes applications both Client based and Web based for 12 years.

I have heard all the complaints about Notes and agree with some of them. I can't speak for Microsoft's answer(12 years late) to Lotus Notes because I haven't used it. I'm not gonna belittle it without getting my hands on it so I'll just do my part in defending what I know.

  The part of the article I disagree with is the developer resource as being a downside. Lotus Notes is not a difficult application platform. Trust me on this. I find it easy to work with and while I don't know every nook and cranny. If you know Visual Basic you know Lotusscript. @Formula language is very simple and isn't nearly and complex as application macros. I found most templates, even ones that are put out by openntf.org's open source templates will need to be customized in the real world. I can only count on one hand how many times a template or even preexisting application didn't need to be alterted in some way. I don't care how easy a template is on any development platform, you will almost always need some customization at the very least. I find the customization is key in making a customer happy with their application. If you know HTML, Javascript, C++, Java, Cold Fusion, etc, you can use these products to enhance the Web side of things aka Domino. Are they as integrated as they should be, no. But it's not impossible.

IBM knows their products...

[Belial6]

My experience has been that for every piece of every software product supplied by IBM, SOMEONE knows how it works. This means that if something doesn't work, you might have to jump through hoops to get to the right level, but someone can answer your question.

MS on the other hand, has a lot of code that no one knows is even there. If something doesn't work as expected, you may just be out of luck.

Besides, IBM just dropped support for OS/2 this year. Point me to one MS product that has recieved support for that long after new sales were stopped.

Open Source and some Security Dirt

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, I'm surprised at this point, with the ODF (OpenOffice) and all, that we don't have an open source "Collaboration Suite" similir to Notes by now. There clearly is demand for it. Secondly, re: Lotus Notes' security: I worked for Lotus and I can tell you that a good portion of the bits of the private key were given to the government, *voluntarily*. So, think twice about your data being secure.

Forget Sharepoint...we use Central Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharepoint is a travesty of a product.

Re:Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoi

[ddig83]

Everything in Domino depends on an IE plug-in. God help you if you use a non-IE-with-plug-in browser. *VERY* painful.

Sharepoint versions improving with each release..

[healyje]

Sharepoint 2001 was an abortion and a pain in the ass to use. The current version is about slightly less than halfway to where it needs to be. The next version will be be a huge improvement on numerous fronts (architecture, object model, integration, workflow, etc.) and I would expect the version after that to actually be a great product. Now if they would only get a standalone MS Rules Server 2007 out the door I'd be a relatively happy camper...

if you don't need it then get sharepoint. Nice.

[dominux]

'If you don't have the resources dedicated to developing collaborative applications, don't have complex application or integration requirements or if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat,' the review concludes. so to paraphrase: "if you don't need a collaborative application server then get Sharepoint" so basically for the task at hand Domino wins by a mile but the review manages to end up with the wildly complex double negative conclusion that on first reading sounds like the M$ solution came up on top.

Re:Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoi

[ednopantz]

I use our internal portal from Firefox. No troubles.

But don't let total ignorance of the product stop you from bashing it. This is, after all, Slashdot.

Re:Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoi

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything in Domino depends on an IE plug-in.

WTF???

But don't let total ignorance of the product stop you from bashing it. This is, after all, Slashdot.
I second that.

You're squeezing my balls here...

[marcushnk]

Why the hell would you compare sharepoint and Domino???

If you're going to make proper comparisons you _really_ need to compare Domino with Sharepoint/Exchange maybe even that "other" MS Web server products *shudder*.

Domino is everything to everyone and uber fucking stable at that.
The _only_ thing that sucks about domino is the Notes client and personally I can get over that because the alternative is just as pointy-end-of-the-pinapple bad.

Sharepoint requires Office and IE

[plazman30]

Sharepoint REQUIRES MS Office and MS IE. We're about to implement Sharepoint for my department for a documentation repository. You HAVE TO use IE, and viewing any documentation requires Office be installed.

Personally I would prefer some home grown solution that uses a content management system, bugzilla and dokuwiki. The use of a wiki for documentation is a much better solution than Sharepoint.

Andy

Re:Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoi

[batkiwi]

Nice FUD there.

The only thing that requires an active X control is some of the advanced LCS integration functionality (mouse over someone's name, it tells you their online status in LCS) and other things like that.

I use it in firefox all the time.

Having been on the user and dev end of both prods

[Exter-C]

I have used and built systems on both software sets, Here is what i found

- Lotus notes was more difficult to build an application but once we had built that application it did exactly what we wanted it to do and we could introduce our own work flows etc. That was something that sharepoint never gave us the ability to use/do.

- Sharepoint provides another great way for Microsoft to lock users into their software suites, We had disabled the use of IE across all servers within our company and installed and manage firefox, That leads us to massive problems with users ability to run with Sharepoint.

- Lotus notes is cross platform and does not have nearly as much lock-in to any particular vendor. There are so many additional third party products that integrate into Notes that you can have something so powerful that your entire business world can run from it with minimal development and maintenance.

- Sharepoint is something that was easy for us to deploy, but scaling it and keeping the whole system running seemed to take much more support time from the help desk which instantly made the software more costly over time than the Notes solution even after taking the development time for Notes into account.

- If you want to use Sharepoint from a system that is NOT on the domain its an absolute nightmare. When you want to add an article its time to start authenticating several times just to post, then it will often report that you do not have permissions even though you have authenticated to access the server. If you join the domain then it makes it all much easier.. but how about working from home and remote users? Its not an issue for Notes.

Re:Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoi

[gbjbaanb]

Yep, like the man says. I use our sharepoint site in Firefox, and it all works fine. It even opens Word documents in Word instead of in-place which I find very annoying, so AFAIK it works better in firefox.

Re:Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoi

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no plugins involved with Domino. If needed, there are Java applets, but you can force it to use plain HTML/JavaScript.

Lotus will go the way of NDS

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell had directory services that worked great ten years before Microsoft's Active Directory. Microsoft's AD slowly overtook NDS because it became a feature of the Microsoft software everyone was already using, just had to configure it and turn it on. Even though Lotus Domino has been around for years, Microsoft will win this battle too, in the same way.

Sorry...

[sean.peters]

I haven't worked with either product in a while, and I got them confused. But Quickplace does have at least some of the same stuff. I just created a test Quickplace at the IBM trial site, and you can create rooms and store folders in them (the metaphor's a little confusing - are the "folders" just stacked on the floor of the "room"?).

Anyway, my apologies for talking about the wrong product.

Sean

we are recommending sharepoint for....

[glitch23]

a local government facility. This is only half on topic but we conducted a small trady study that showed Oracle Collaboration Suite was the best (MS and Xerox were in the running) however we were building for Windows. OCS 10.2 isn't out yet for Windows despite Oracle stating it would be out 1st quarter of this year and 9.x is not supported after next March (we deploy in October). The sales rep won't return calls (we assume it's because he has no good answers for us). We couldn't wait any longer with a project deadline looming in the near future so we switched to Sharepoint Portal 2003.

There is already a Windows 2003 domain installed and so integration with ADS is simple and Sharepoint allows for scalability with little amount of work since they allow separation between index, search, and database servers. We are going to have a clustered db with 2 front-end servers. It will handle the group of 500 users nicely. We don't have to do any development work for it as the default interface and features is sufficient for a group of people who aren't tech savvy but need a way to store lots of reference material and to search on it. I installed a beta of OCS 10.2 and it was a storage (10 gigs) hog, memory hog (10 cmd.exe processes, 15 java.exe processes, and time hog. I spent at least 3 days trying to get single-sign on working which required sync'ing Oracle Internet Directory with Active Directory and never got it working (the SSO part, the sync'ing worked though, seemingly). So at least between SPS and OCS, we're putting our money on SPS and the gov't liked the demo, which is the important thing.