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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?
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?
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
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.
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?
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.
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.