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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."
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
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.