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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
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.
"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."
Help kill corporate productivity!
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.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
You are not the customer.
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.
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?
Or lotus workplace which are the real collaborating software. comparing notes to portal server, is like comparing outlook to sharepoint.
An armed society is a polite Society
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
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.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
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.
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.
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Karma: Somewhere between SCO and Microsoft
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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
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.
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.