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

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.

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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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