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IBM's Inexpensive Notes/Domino Push Against MS
Deviant writes "Speaking as an IT consultant, the one big gap in the Linux stack is in messaging / collaboration. MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product on which many businesses truly rely, and it is almost impossible to match on Linux — server or desktop. The one competitor to MS in this space has been IBM's Lotus Notes / Domino, which has always had the general reputation of being expensive, bloated, and unfriendly. I certainly wouldn't have considered it for the small businesses that we usually sell on MS's SBS server product. That is why I was truly surprised to hear about the new Domino Express Licensing and Notes 8. This is a product that has native server and client versions for both Mac and Linux. Notes 8, now written in Eclipse, also includes an integrated office suite, Lotus Symphony. This could conceivably let a user do all of their work in one application. And you can now license the server and client components together for as low as $100/user. It's packaged for companies of 1,000 seats or fewer. Is this the silver bullet to take out the entire MS stack — server, client, and Office? Or will IBM drop the ball yet again?"
At $100/user, it still out of the grasp of most small businesses. Makes more sense from a cash flow perspective to pay $5-10/month/user (as capital is usually tight at most small businesses). Call me when you can ASP license it monthly like you can with Exchange.
The term "silver bullet" comes from the old myth that the only way to kill a werewolf is by shooting it with a silver bullet. Its use in every other scenario refers to the "magic" item being completely ineffective in its intended purpose.
"OOA/D is the silver bullet we've been looking for to tame our out of control schedules!"
"Linux is the silver bullet which will fell MS-DOS/Windows from desktop dominance!"
"We don't need to invest in alternative fuel research. We've got a silver bullet with bio-diesel!"
As you can see, the hope in the silver bullet is high, but more likely than not, the result is worse than expected.
I've been an IBM contractor in the past. For the duration of my contract I was given an IBM e-mail address that I could access only via the Notes client.
The built-in editor is terrible (no redo and undo is kinda stupid). Over anything but a very fast connection it is very slow. It is also unintuitive to say the least.
I'm no fan of Outlook/Exchange (heck I use PINE+Postfix personally) but the MS solution seems much better than Lotus Notes.
I think I would be more productive if my e-mail was faxed to me than sent to my Notes client. And I don't have a fax machine.
A review with many screenshots of the new Notes 8 interface - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019476/
>> MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product
Baloney. Its a terrible product. It just happens to be ubiquitous in the corporate world because of Microsoft's monopolistic practices combined with a lack of good competition.
...and now with the lower price it's just bloated and unfriendly ?
Seriously though, I have used Lotus Notes in a global corporation which made extensive use of custom forms, applications, groups and the whole shebang in addition to relying heavily on the calendar for scheduling. It was a terribly counter-intuitive and unresponsive piece of software, and I'd rather pay for Exchange than having a Lotus Notes installation for free, despite being known as the anti-Microsoft advocate in my company.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
This is a thinly veiled article to generate some publicity for Lotus Domino / Notes, and hence deserves to be tagged slashvertisement
I definitely like the chances of a hybrid OSS solution like Zimbra, above that of Notes. The reality still is that holding one's business hostage to either IBM or Microsoft is just sketchy, and by the time the need comes around for a Notes/Exchange platform pretty much the entire IT needs to be scrapped for a small company.
Instead, Look at Zimbra. Start with OSS, go sponsored if you need it, and the company can pay for it. Plus no IBM or Microsoft hanging over your head.
Well, it's no silver bullet , but it's at least a blunt object moving in the direction of Microsoft's market share(s).
It would be very interesting to see something like Notes 8 specifically customized for Ubuntu 8. I theorize such a setup could drastically reduce IT costs. Suddenly hardware is "good enough" for several more years, the OS is free and the groupware and office suite are cheap, and all of it is self updating. If only the users were comparable!
Roy, "Hello, IT. Yes, have you tried turning it off and then on again? Well, is it plugged in?"
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I wonder how much Slashdot was paid for this post.
I don't have experience with this, but from my point of view, any extra options are a good thing to have whether you take advantage of them or not.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Don't do it; the pricing just says they want to have a few extra sells. But IBM is used to supporting big clients, not small ones. I have the feeling they're not really committed to this market.
I've seen the same with Oracle. Some nifty pricing got an Oracle database within reach of small businesses. Is it affordable? Yes. Do you need all those fancy features? No. Will it give headaches later on? Yes. Will you need expensive consultants? Yes.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Not likely, in order to unseat Outlook/exchange at this point you would have to give users a set of damn good reasons why its worth their time to switch. As much as everyone loves to hate MS, there isnt anything major another product is capable of that you cant get from Office. Even if MS does lag a year or two in adding a feature that its competitors have already shipped (think opera and firefox shipping tabbed browsing first) ultimately it wont matter much unless MS waits an extremely long time to ship that feature. They may not be first with everything but they know better than to let their rivals get too far ahead of them.
In any industry it isnt enough to be as good as the market leader, you have to be better in order to survive. Its their game to lose and they have been playing it long enough that they probably wont make a mistake big enough to give a competitor an opening.
I'm sure some of you will disagree.
Alex
Can someone revoke kdawson's rights to post "news"? I hate all the IBM slashvertizements on /. of late.
Am I missing something here? What the heck does that mean? I haven't seen any "Written with XCode" or "Written with Emacs" stated for other products.
Does it mean that it's written in Java perhaps? Because Notes 8 is not only a total horror in terms of usability, it's real slow as well. In fact, Lotus notes is something I do my best to avoid, it's crap.
Instead of blowing smoke up Microsoft's ass, this guy should have looked around. Zimbra is just one of LookOut's many competitors. It even inter-operates with the MS product (ewww).
you had me at #!
TFA refers to its 'Robust' hardware requirements, and says you shouldn't try to run it with less than a gig of RAM.
Seriously, at some point, do you just have too much stack? OS+Java+Eclipse+++...
I (have to) use it fairly often these days, and I can't say I see what the big deal is about it besides it's unintuitive, but integrated and collaborative calendaring system. Any one care to clue me in?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
"Baloney. (MS Outlook with Exchange) is a terrible product. It just happens to be ubiquitous in the corporate world because of Mcrosoft's monopolistic practices combined with a lack of good competition."
I don't habitually defend Microsoft, but I completely disagree with you here. At work we're migrating away from Notes (thank the maker), and I happily volunteered to be one of the first users during the beta stage. I live my programming life on Solaris, and in G2, and I'm a fan of UNIX in general. I've run umpteen versions of linux in my life. I've used a dozen or more email clients with some regularity, and a number of calendars. And over the years I've realized this:
Outlook and Exchange Server make me happy.
Have you seen the Web Acess client? There's NOTHING out there that compares. The ridiculous bag of inconsistent behaviour and busted UI design that is Lotus Notes is something I'll be glad to see the tail end of.
Most small businesses I deal with don't really need or want Exchange/Notes/Zimbra, but what they do need is an Outlook type app that can get to whatever email system they want. The big problem is and always has been that most third party hardware won't sync with much else besides outlook. Take a look at Blackberries which most every small business owner is using. You can sync to Outlook, Yahoo, Groupwise or Notes. Since most users are familiar with Outlook that is what they want. The could care less what is running on the backend.
I've taken a look at Zimbra for some clients but the issue there is price yet again. For a small company (5 users) you're looking at over $1000 for licensing that can be used with the Blackberry and outlook plus the cost of outlook. At that price you might as well put them on Exchange SBS and not worry about the BES connecter for Zimbra. Plus, now with MS looking at Yahoo who knows what is coming down the road for Zimbra (Owned by Yahoo). Since MS has started offering Outlook as a seperate license I have been offering that as an options to clients with OpenOffice, but most choose to just get Office since the OEM license is about $250 and the Outlook license is $100.
I really think Zimbra would be a great app if they would just rethink the pricing structure for <10 users. Maybe allow the Network Edition for a fixed cost under a certain user count.
Error: Sig not found.
Users have always used it in their last job and don't care about learning a new system just because it's "better." To most users "better" is defined as them having to not learn something new.
Error: Sig not found.
Notes 8 is pretty slow & unwieldly. Its ability to deal with custom forms makes admin for big corporations a lot easier, but for a smaller business? Probably one big headache... I spose if you had a Notes guru to customize it exclusively for the business you could really benefit, but for most people Outlook will be the preferred option.
Skill is when luck becomes a habit.
At work, we run a Lotus Notes 6.5 shop and are due for upgrade soon. Unless we get higher end computers, Lotus Notes 8 will be slow to run even for everyday things. There is an update 8.1 that is either due out soon or out now, that is supposed to make it more friendly for lower end computers, but if it fails to do that, we will end up going with Outlook as we can't afford to buy high end computers for every seat just because of the requirements of one of our core programs. We have tested it in our environment and anything under 2gb just doesn't cut it. That is too much for a program that (at the time of testing) was just doing email.
So I wouldn't look at new newer aggressive pricing as a sign to look further into it, more as an act of desperation to make a bloated program seem more accessible.
While I am on the subject, most enterprise software these days has become overly bloated with features added without considering the disadvantages, usually in speed and memory usage. Until businesses start considering these aspects though, it isn't a trend that is likely to stop anytime soon.
I never liked Domino. Especially when Websphere was first coming out. It seemed IBM was in a weird spot. They always touted Domino/Notes as an application deployment platform, not just a collaboration tool. They really muddied the waters in their own offerings.
I don't see how Domino really has a place anymore with all the new standards that have evolved and the importance of interoperability. I thought Domino already was put on the shelf next to Token Ring.
If you're a large business Domino may still make sense in some situations. If you're a small operation you're going to want to stick with a platform that is more familiar and easier to find contractors for, like Exchange. Many companies do fine with the smtp/pop emails they get with their 6.99/mo hosting. For those that want more, there are a number of good companies that provide Exchange based hosting.
On top of all the various Exchange based hosts, MS Office Small business Live even has a form of email hosting in their package that is $14.95 per year or something like that after the first free year. It includes up to 100 email addresses. Google apps provides a good solution for small business email, calendaring and document sharing. They have a paid version for $50/mailbox/year with some more features.
If you're big enough to host things yourself, or if regulations such as Hippa necesitate it, Exchange is pretty easy, open source alternatives like Open-Xchange are out there though I can't comment on them. If you'd like to try some good messaging, colaboration, calendaring, IM, etc tools you can download and use Sun's Java Enterprise System for free and sign up for a subscription if you need support. Pricing was $100/emp/year a few years ago but not sure what it is now. It has a connector for MS Outlook as well. JES also has some other applications that may be useful as well.
The only people that I can imagine still using Domino are shops that haven't been interested in changing their current setups.
IBM should have open sourced Domino/Notes a long time ago if they wanted to keep MS Exchange from taking over their market share. Don't know what they really could do now though. The majority of people on windows are going to want to use Outlook, period. People with a large number of employees and remote clients might lean to Domino for better performance and maintenance. People using linux will look for open source solutions.
Sun came up with this $100/employee pricing a while ago and while I don't have any numbers I suspect that this has been pretty good for them. This is just an observation that I've been seeing a lot of Sun's default favicon.ico's showing up in sites over that past couple of years. They seemed to have had the right idea with this pricing, as IBM seems to confirm. Now Sun has taken it a step further and they are giving away the software and you pay for a support subscription only if you want.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Not a chance.
Actally, there is collaboration wares that compete with Outlook and Exchange.
Couple things. eGroupware can talk XML-RPC to Kontact and synchronize Calendar, Addressbook, transparently. Just one problem. No Kerberos. No Kerberos means I have to hand configure each user's login name and password for every user. This is bad.
Secondly. I need to be able to configure Kontact settings and FireFox's settings with OpenLDAP Schemas. Why? Because I have no other way of standardizing trusted Kerberos URIs in FireFox other than copying prefs.js to every machine with the URIs I want.
Sharepoint.
There are two things I can foresee competing with sharepoint. One is Geeklog. The other is Knowledge Tree. But in order for this to be so, Geeklog/Knowledge Tree would need to be able to again, store data in OpenLDAP, (maintaining a separate database in MySQL is a non-starter) Authenticate with Kerberos, and eGroupware and Geeklog/Knowlege Tree need to communicate via XML-RPC.
All the peices are in place but I don't have the skill to put it together otherwise I would have. These things have to be done to destroy Exchange.
...than go back to Lotus fucking notes. It started off as BBS software, and it shows!
Well almost.
Surely there are other alternatives?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1089
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1098
$100/user is still too expensive. Do you think that Microsoft can't sell for a quarter of that if it gets them the account? To make any significant dent in Microsoft's market share, IBM/Lotus, Zimbra, Scalix, and all the others clearly need to have a viable competitive product, but more than that they need a price that is attractive enough for PHBs to consider it purely because of the bottom line. To make people really sit up and take notice it needs to be closer to $1/user for non-profits and education, and $5/user for government & business. Unbundling support might possibly be a way of doing this without losing money.
The biggest question is what level of support this comes with. I have my doubts over a number of third party companies that can fix your Domino server if something within its database goes screwy. If you have to pay for support, then it's a bad deal (just compare the number of Exchange specialist/providers to a number of Domino specialists that are not inside of IBM)
Hyperom.com
But it's not just a problem with the commercial software. I've never met a mail program I really liked. Mail software seems to be a vast wasteland of sucktude. I like to single out Notes and Exchange because if you work in IT you're pretty much forced to use them, but I've used and not liked pine, mutt, the emacs lisp based web client, the Apple mail client, Thunderbird and Evolution. Of the lot, at LEAST the emacs client combined with the remembrance agent offers functionality that you won't find in any other email client, but they all pretty much suck to one degree or another.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Outlook has gotten more bloated, but it really does work much much better than it used to, as long as you've got enough resources to work around its warts. The monolithic-PST-file structure means it's sometimes slow, very hard to back up, and a mess to fix it it gets corrupted, but it doesn't get corrupted very often any more. For server-based mail systems, the bloat means that you need a *lot* of very expensive fast disk farm to store email on, and most corporate IT departments never want to provide enough of that; one reason that Outlook PC storage has become tolerable is that disks have been outrunning Moore's Law for enough years that they're simply Big Enough that it's ok if my current year's PST file is over 2GB.
Outlook has also started to do some really cool things with presence servers, and the server may end up replacing PBXs as we know them, especially because they're doing SIP (to the extent that SIP is a usefully-open protocol.) Their servers are pricy and large, but that's partly because they keep adding more and more functions, and they've certainly seized enough of the calendar market that it's hard to get people to give them up, in spite of lighter and better competition.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Outlook is one of the most user-acceptance tested applications in the world. Really, it is.
Outlook just happens to work really well with Exchange.
Exchange/Outlook just happens to plug really well with SharePoint/MOSS (for document sharing, workspaces, etc).
The both just happen to use SQL Server, and of course the whole security model just happens to be based in AD, which in turn just happens to be a Windows Server only technology.
It's all very integrated, and actually works very well with not too much knowledge. Seriously, I think 99% of the people on this site could setup the system above I just outlined in a day.
Why? Well, you start with Outlook and before you know it, you've got the whole ecosystem. It's designed to plug in as easily as possible to enable you to give cash as easily as possible to Microsoft.
Clever eh?
throw new NoSignatureException();
1. Calling Outlook a Fine product with Exchange is like saying having Hepatitis C is better than HIV.
2. Impossible to match? Dude, Notes is waaay far ahead of outlook. Banks rely on Notes for security, keeping out the pesky worms that seem to infect the weakling outlook. Secondly, on linux there are other email clients far better than outlook.
You seem to be an MCSE saying IBM's decision to compete on price is due to inferior quality. Like saying Microsoft reduced prices on XBox because it genuinely wanted to same customers some money.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
"This could conceivably let a user do all of their"
I wonder what the true percentage of users who do not require anything but an office suite to do all their work?
Why do people get the impression that most of the working people are lawyers or secretaries (the only type of workers that could arguably do all their work with on an office suite)?
Even accountants use software other than a spreadsheet...
I for one, didn't have any use for a "complete" office suite for years... and the parts that I did use, were mostly for viewing "administrative" documents that were sent to me (obviously, by the only true users of these office applications).
Sigs are for the weak.
As a small business user of GMail, I find the service hard to beat. After all, it's still free, and free is really hard to beat. GMail is by far the best component of the Google Apps business suite, but their other components (calendar comes to mind, for example) are slowly and surely maturing, also.
The web-based solution to the common IT needs of small and medium sized organizations, in my mind, is a no brainer. And so far, Google is offering the best value in this space.
Why a no brainer? Because managing computing resources yourself (i.e. in-house IT) is a waste of money. Forget about the cost of proprietary software: suppose you go all open source. You'll still have to manage this stuff and that cost money.
And from a privacy angle, it's also a no brainer to use a web based service for a small or medium sized organization. Correspondence in an organization is not all that *private* any way. Quite the contrary, the more transparent (with appropriate user access control mechanisms), the better for the organization.
So these factors and my own very favorable experience with GMail suggest to me that this would-be Office competitor is missing the point: the battleground for productivity suites will occur on the web, not on shrink wrapped software.
...that the Web Access client is superior to Outlook itself. My work PC takes an age to boot as is, if I try to open Outlook before it's stabilised, I can look forward to another 3-4 minute wait before anything else responds. Admittedly, this is just about long enough to go and get a cup of tea/coffee but I'm fairly certain this isn't intended as a feature.
Would this help at all? I don't really know anything about it, but I've been wanting to give it a whir for a few months now; it's got an open source API, and built in LDAP server and authenticates to gmail... it's at least centralized.
GCALDaemon
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I hate Outlook. I really, really despise it. I even hate Outlook-wannabes like Thunderbird. But if I had to choose between it and Notes, no question: Notes is possibly the worst-designed, most unintuitive, unconventional bit of software of all time. It's strange whn you consider that its parents have in their time produced some of the sweetest software ever (Lotus: AmiPro, IBM: OS/2) that they could be responsible for such a pile of crud.
At $100 per user it runs at double the cost of Google Apps Premier Edition (the one with support and more storage, 25GB per user for mail for instance) and you still have to buy all your own hardware and infrastructure and do the support.
In most companies email and collaboration is managed by a central team (no matter how small), so shifting it into a SaaS model is just a small step away. That is the competition for MS, not old school hosted solutions.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Notes is absolutely awful.
Eclipse PDE and Me
UNINTUITIVE?? Try using Notes. (and yeah i mean the latest greatest 8.0.1).
/sarcasm
here's some of my pet peeves -
-memory hog (350 megs of ram gone no matter what you do)
- No context sensitive menus. you get the same fucked up 'database' options no matter where you click. why can't i rightclick a mail and mark it read/unread, FFS?
-cannot run your mail rules on existing mails in the inbox or subfolders.
-Single threaded network access, which means clicking on a link to a remote database will freeze up the application till it completes.
MS outlook is a messaging and calendaring/scheduling app, and no more. And for that, it does the job quite well, speaking from a corporate mail rather than an end user point of view.
Notes tries to be some kind of all in one groupware/application platform out of which mail is just one function and there it loses out.
Seriously...try Notes and soon you'll be crying out for the wonderfully friendly and efficient Outlook!!
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not free but I've recommended and used Kerio Mailserver at two sites that had either had Exchange in the past or considered it. Support for Outlook clients is pretty good, the web interface is nice and quick and it works with Thunderbird, Apple Mail and other standard clients. CalDAV calendar support is there now so I can sync iCal with the server and it also supports Mail for Exchange on Symbian which gives me push e-mail, tasks, contacts and calendar.
All in all it works as advertised and as far as the Windows users are concerned it works with Outlook so they are happy while the price per seat is much better than Exchange. The server software runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. Not affiliated but a happy customer.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
If by impossible to match you mean an email server that needs to be mothered and looked after then yes, the alternatives can't match the flakey Exchange server.
Have you looked at Open Xchange? it even has an Outlook connector for those who still want to run Windows desktops.
http://www.open-xchange.com/
Of course the Outlook connector isn't free, but the community version can be free if you use Linux or free email clients.
The idea isn't to create another application. Its to foster interoperability between the ones we have right now.We don't need another Kontact, another Evolution.. We need Kontact and Evolution, and Geeklog, and Knowlege Tree, and FireFox, and just about everything else to talk to each other. It MUST support Kerberos, it MUST support LDAP because those are the things we have authentication Modules for. It MUST support iCal and it MUST support XMLRPC because Thats the authentication module support Kontact has.
Exchange and Active directory win these victories because they talk to each other.
For this to work, I need to be able to tell KDE where to get its user information from LDAP, I need a "Use GSSAPI" checkbox in Kontact for XML-RPC. I need an LDAP Schema fore Fire Fox. I need bug fixes to mod_auth_krb5 so it works right with HTTPS. I need all sorts of fixes to start happening because people think the objective here is to clone outlook.
It has to work, and I need it to work NOW!
I've got a live CD of this from RedHat, here it seemed well polished and includes mail, calendaring, Symphony and more..
For those that don't know and don't feel like using Wikipedia, it's basically OpenOffice 1.1.4 at the core with some extended features, most noticeably that it uses a tabbed toolbar in the manner of MS Office 07's "Ribbon" but instead of randomly putting menu items onto tabs, each existing toolbar has been turned into a tab...
With one exception, all the OSS "alternatives" either:
- Require a plugin which sucks donkey balls, costs money and is hard to manage across many desktops to integrate with Outlook.
OR
- Are purely web based and don't offer any Outlook integration at all - which doesn't sound like a big deal until you've got a senior manager wanting to be able to read email that he's already downloaded when he's on a plane at 30,000 feet.
And none of them have the fancy commercial plugins like Blackberry Enterprise Server available.
(The 1 alternative which claims not to suffer from this lot requires an Active Directory infrastructure and has similar per-seat costs as Exchange).
Replacing de facto MS Exchange based collaboration S/W in enterprises shouldn't be easy, especially if it's for another proprietary solution.
Now that MS has released a bunch of documents for their APIs and other proprietary protocols, including for MS Exchange Server, maybe will we see open source / free solutions for MS Outlook replacement.
Mozilla Fondation? Plugins for Thunderbird? Extensions to Lightning?...
While this wouldn't be a MS Exchange Server replacement, it would at least free MS workstations from MS made clients and allow interoperability with non-Windows workstations. This could be first step toward full, free and open source messaging/collaboration solution.
I'm still waiting for the outcome of MS specs release...
Eric
It's been proven to me time and time again, that it's *very* rare for any business to use more than about 5% of the features of exchange. That probably grows to about 50% of outlook's features on the desktop.
People generally don't know how to use it. It's not "obvious" to use, it's a skill, it requires training which is seldom budgeted for.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Notes is a piece of shit, and the only mail client to actually make me miss the "good old days" of Outlook.
I dont know, there are a wealth of options for collaborating on Linux. Zimbra, Novell Teaming+Conferencing, Groupwise, Google Apps and all the various open source projects out there. The choices are pretty endless with both very mature products and cutting edge stuff in all priceranges. IBM adds something for the nervous enterprise CIO who wants someone to blame when things gets b0rked.
HTTP/1.1 400
I agree 100% with you: we are a small company and the Googles Apps suite ( gmail, calendar, docs, sites ) is perfect for us, and free too. I think until a company reaches >20-25 people there is no need for exchange/outlook. Plus, salesforce is now integrated, which is a double bonus. Of course this depends on what kind of company is, but for IT and software it fits with online. cc.
Hell no! Have them hosting (and maybe reading) your company's data?
Rely on them to keep your mail running, to not shut down the service or start charging?
Google are not some part of the net infrastructure, they are a company, and what don't we do? Trust other companies with corporate data, trade secrets, sales and marketing communications, anything really.
Anyone heard of GroupWise ?
Runs nicely on Linux, and has done for a while now...
Having recently compared OWA2007 and GW Webaccess, OWA still has a way to go.
I just managed to sync an outlook client and a nokia mobile with egroupware, a completely free collaboration suite, other (albeit still in infancy) interesting systems are simplegroupware and everything supporting funambol or syncml in general.
i believe that it is not true, that floss sw is behind in this regard, the problem is, that the communication lacks.
Not even sure why we're wondering--IBM has never had success marketing a single software product in their entire history. Look at OS/2 (remember the OS/2 Fiesta Bowl?), look at Domino/Notes ... IBM isn't a software company and never will be. Simply dropping the price isn't going to gain them any market share because A) people won't switch only based on price and B) when last I used it, Domino/Notes blew chunks compared to Exchange. I hate Outlook as much (probably more) than the next guy, but Notes STILL feels like a piece of software from ca. 1996. Until they make it BETTER and not just CHEAPER, they're wasting their time.
I have been using Lotus Notes as mail client for two years at my former job. It was a nightmare. The UI paradigm was from Alpha Centaurus. Everybody was just silently screaming.
People do not want to learn new UI paradigm. They want to sit down and start clicking their TPA memos right away.
Complete trash.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"the one big gap in the Linux stack is in messaging / collaboration"
Ever heard of Kolab KDE? Nothing is missing.And this is not the only one. Especially if you just use web-based solutions like everyone else.
This conversation reminds me of the question that was often posed when I was a kid.
Would you rather suck on someone's nose till their head caves in or slide down a razor blade into a pool of alcohol?
Tough choice!
"MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product"
No it's not. I use this combo every day at work and every day is a PITA full of swearing because it's such an utter piece of crap. I'm not even going to go into what is bad with it because it's easier to say what's good: uhm, sorry. couldn't come up with anything. Maybe the name which is pretty good?
I take any other IMAP + Mailclient any day if I get the choice. Even mutt, as long as I don't have to see the terrible nightmare that is Outlook again.
Sorry if this seems like trolling, it's not. I may be disgruntled yes, but it's how I feel on the subject.
Considering that you can licence Exim 4 (server) and Evolution (client) for an indefinite number of users for £0 which includes full Source Code audit and modification rights, why would anyone use an expensive, proprietary solution?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I work for a company (that shall rename nameless) the late last year migrated from Exchange to Notes, and someo of our other lines of business went from Groupwise to Notes.
While i'm no longer involved with server administration (that was all sent offsite) I can truly say that Notes is likely the most hated software piece I'e ever used. It's horrible, slow, complicated menus, confusing options. I have found myself using Gmail and having corporate client send me email there.
Exchange and Outlook are hideous products with terrible usability and bizarre/unexpected behavior.
I say this as a relatively new user of both products, having recently joined a company where they are the standard, coming from a company where they were not used.
Outlook, in particular, is a crime against humanity.
And we all use it.
I don't know how long ago you were here, but now everyone in Tivoli uses notes, from execs to software engineers. Including the (now built-in) IM service.
It's much better now, the last two versions (7 & 8) actually work as they're supposed to and aren't prone to falling over and fucking up like 4/5 were.
I wouldn't say I prefer either notes or outlook over the other (I like thunderbird when I'm not at work), but your experience is now a bit out of date.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My ex-wife was a technical writer at Lotus which is now IBM. She worked on the Notes team. I have had a lot of exposure to Notes. In short I love the architecture of Notes, but I don't very much like the applications it has. The big joke is that Notes has every mediocre program ever written.
That being said, if IBM REALY REALLY wants to compete with M$, outlook, and exchange it would make sense to fully document the server API so that an open source server project could duplicate the server functionality. I know that sounds counter intuitive, but it makes sense. It would be a while before any open source competition would come out and also make the case for no vendor lock-in.
It would provide a platform for 3rd party and free software applications that could be developed without requiring an official Notes server, which a lot of open source people wouldn't use. Hell, maybe IBM could even release a GPL reference server.
Letting loose the open source community with an "open standard" for Notes will put a lot of pressure on Microsoft, and if OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnome Office, thunderbird, evolution all support an open standard Notes server API, then IBM has a real win for sales: "We published the API and there are a lot of third party applications, there's even an open source, free, implementation of the server, but our implementation is by far the most mature and secure."
In the last few years it has become more and more clear to me that the software business is not really a business. Sure, there are a few software vendors that make a lot of money selling software, Like Microsoft, but most do not.
Most big vendors make money off initial deployment and support contracts. Selling boxes of bits only works if there is some sort of leverage, like a monopoly, "buzz" about a game, etc.
For someone to compete with Microsoft's monopoly, they need real value. The Notes architecture is rich and powerful, but too "big" for a company to really exploit. Making it basically available as open source will allow every guy with a funky idea to add value to Notes. Most of these ideas will, of course, be crap and would never even have been tried in a corporation. However, a few ideas may come out of the open source environment which will be interesting and new which could make a huge difference.
If you talk with your average notes user and the it people there are some common things you hear a lot of about domino. 1. a fear of upgrading, the phb's dont like that. 2. a fear of changing the templates that scares the phb's too, and affects point one. 3. Sometimes companies with the big ibm software contract visit conferences just to find out what Notes is, after all they have paid of the use of it. If anything ever gets done is speculation. Domino is a gentle step towards open source, theres a lot of 'you cannot do that politics' when you come to email systems. I will not disagree that notes ui sucks, but it begins to replace the mantra that 'unless it says microsoft' then it is a trusted desktop application.
We're testing it and it won't work well/at all in under 1GB. Which is frightening high for an office suite. And since it's OO with bells and whistles and some extra file formats it's hard to see what the value add is.
But I've never understood what all the gripes about Notes is. It's stable it doesn't crash. After it starts up it runs quickly enough. If you're using it JUST for mail, yeah, that's a waste. It's an application hosting system. We run big chunks of our business apps in Notes and it's fine for that purpose.
Rogue employees are (by far) the top threat, followed by downtime and security.
:-) There ARE other ways to communicate, many of which have less of an audit trail.
/. post
The complaint I have with this entire genre of "groupware" is the tendency to misuse it. People start to think they can build an operational database out of just about anything.
The key to e-mail security is to AVOID USING IT for sensitive communications. Just ask the execs in Redmond about their internal "Vista" e-mails
I would trust Google over MS as far as uptime and security are concerned. On cost, it's a no-brainer.
I choose Google apps for my startup because I can't afford to act as a help desk for my colleagues. They have to be self-sufficient in the field. Everyone uses a Mac, connected to Google apps.
In addition to Google, we use a variety of web-based open source apps. The salesman used to be a die-hard MS Outlook guy. He really wanted a PC. Had to pry the old Toshiba notebook from his hands. Even then, he bought MS Office for his Mac before I proved he didn't need it. Today, he would be a candidate for Apple's "Switch" ads if they ever re-started that campaign.
Swapping out Microsoft enabled us to avoid the massive expense of a self-serving IT department that spends most of its time (1) crippling the PCs we pay for, (2) causing more problems than they solve, and (3) accelerating the upgrade cycle.
I have more importnant things to do than chase down MS problems. By eliminating them, I even have time for the occasional
I ran the beta of that awhile back and the sheer act of installing it made it grab all of my OpenDocument/OpenOffice.org extensions. With no prompting or anything. Fine, I figured. Maybe that's just a bug in the installer. But then, after setting it back, I launched Symphony to check how some documents opened only to find that Symphony re-grabbed the extensions again. I looked for a setting to disable this behavior, but there didn't seem to be one. Unless something has changed in the latest version, I couldn't recommend Lotus Symphony to anyone. It's simply idiotic for an application to change your file associations every time it launches without any prompting and without any way to opt out of the changes. Of course, file association changes should be opt in and not opt out, but even opt out is better than "no option at all."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
JM
Oink, Oink!!
IBM is not supporting the iPhone and has no plans to support the iPhone.
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21271899
While I'm a Blackberry bigot, I've had several folks approach me about getting their iPhone connected to Domino (Lotus Notes' server). I believe I could use IMAP, but most other IMAP handhelds (generally on ATT&T) freak out at the quantity of e-mail in my end-users mailboxes.
And I still wouldn't be able to synchronize their calendar or address books:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21296737
The idea that messaging/collaboration is a gap in the Linux stack is a complete myth. There are numerous options available, such as Citadel which is end-to-end GPL code, has all of the most requested groupware functions, and even has an Outlook connector available for those PHB's who aren't ready to leave the old world behind yet. I wish people would stop pushing this idea that Outlook/Exchange can't be matched.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Zimbra and Scalix don't count as true FOSS because they are scaled-down crippleware. If you want the full feature set of either one, you have to pay. Insert RMS rant here (this is one of those situations where it's relevant). These two companies went with a (just barely) open source license for two reasons: (1) cheap street cred, and (2) so they could help themselves to existing code without paying for it or developing it in-house.
There is plenty of good messaging/collaboration software out there that is true FOSS and not some bastardized commercial hybrid. Citadel and Kolab come to mind as a few of the most versatile.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Make it open source! It's true that the open source community lacks a good groupware platform.
Here hopes Chandler will be 1.0 stable soon :)
I've been designing, installing, and admining Exchange-based email systems for about 8 years now. The "Exchange doesn't scale" arguement is so false, as to be laughable.
I've worked on servers with 2000 users/server, 1TB of mailstorage/server, users with 45+GB mailboxes, mail databases in excess of 350gb, and many other various scenarios. If you RTFM and do the storage part correctly, Exchange scales just fine, even with the 2003 version. Exchange 2007 provides a quantum leap in performance and scalability.
... with a network of about 750 users and we migrated away from Outlook/Exchange in 2003. Our incidence of email-borne malware has dropped from epidemic levels down to virtually none at all with the migration.
Yes, the end-user experience when we went to Notes/Domino 6.x in our initial deployment was somewhat painful and about half of our users rebelled, but management stuck to their guns and told the users either use Notes or you won't have email at all. The users adapted.
Notes/Domino 7 was a big improvement, and after developing a few really useful workflow and groupware apps in Notes, the user community here has grown to really like Notes. There are still a few rough spotes, the out-of-office function is broken by design, and mail journaling (master archiving) still doesn't have a way of automatically switching logfiles on a monthly basis.
I've been running Notes 8 for the last six months, and using the built-in office suite a lot, rather than install MS Office 2007 on my workstation. It's working so well, that we're seriously considering a phase-out of MS Office.
As to the amount of users on our network who require just standard office package email and file sharing to do their jobs, that would be roughly half of them in my case. About half run certain apps which are presently MS Windows only, but we've just replaced one of our main Oracle-based apps with a new version that runs the client-side inside a web browser (Oracle App Server w/JInitiator) which can be run on a Linux workstation. That would theoretically make it such that we could deploy Linux desktops to many of these users, with the Eclipse version of the Notes 8 client, and the Firefox browser and those users could do 99.9% of their daily computer work under Linux. The only big showstopper here is that now we've recently begun using some advanced Active Directory group policy stuff for desktop, app and user management that has no counterparts in Linux.
Notes is not the only enterprise grade alternative to MS for collaboration on Linux. Novell GroupWise has been on Linux for years now. Novell also offers Novell Teaming + Conferencing which could be considered an alternative to Sharepoint though it came to market more recently and is more squarely aimed at enterprise social networking vs Sharepoint's roots in the prior paradigm of intranet server / portal.
To qoute my Domino Administrator: Lotus Stinking Notes
He asked about when we were getting off of it, to the CIO. No, he is not an 'exchange' guy, but he figures that anything would be better then Domino. I did mention Groupwise, which he had to conceed on that point.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Yeah... right... LDAP... Notes LDAP implementation is a real LDAP which can't be said about the pseudo LDAP included in AD.
You want LDAP ? You've got in in your Notes, you are free to use it... and you're free not to.
Well, Zimbra and Novell GroupWise are great choices other than Exchange. GroupWise is very robust, secure and scalable. The back end runs on Linux and they have clients on Mac/Windows/Linux. Well worth a look. The pricing is cheaper then Exchange and easier to manager. One person can easily manage 10,000 users.
Well, both Zimbra & Novell GroupWise are great options beside Exchange. GroupWise is cheaper, more robust. Thousands of users per server, Secure. it has clients that run on Mac,Windows & Linux. Uses less hardware then Exchange. One person can easily administrator GroupWise for over 10,000 users.
I (have to) use it fairly often these days, and I can't say I see what the big deal is about it besides it's unintuitive, but integrated and collaborative calendaring system. Any one care to clue me in?
First of all, the calendaring system *is* Outlook.
Secondly, what do you consider unintuitive? Notes? When I used Notes version 6, you could easily create an calendar item that ended before it started-- really intuitive there! Of course, it completely bombed out all of the sync software (also from IBM) we had to run to get Notes to talk to Palms, and I had to go manually resync all of them every single time.
Comment of the year
It's a known issue with preview; it's a lot less aggressive about escaping than the actual code that generates the posts, I guess.
I noticed it a while back both with emdashes and smartquotes (which can be an issue if you copy/paste from an application that actually changes the normal quote character to the Unicode directional quote characters), so I don't think it's a result of the new Ajaxy goodness. It's just "Preview" not really 'previewing'.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
OMG.. Notes. It's not an email system, it's a form of punishment.
Doesn't anyone realize that these dinosaurs like Word Perfect, OS/2, Novell, Lotus, etc., all lost to Microsoft for a reason? These freakin applications are like zombies, they just don't know when to die and leave the world of the living alone.
Enterprise computing didn't walk away from these guys... it RAN away. Anyone who thinks IBM is trustworthy obviously hasn't been around long enough to have seen the real IBM in action. IBM and Novell made MS look like a wimpy pushover.
Lotus Notes carries an extremely negative weight to it. I don't care if their suite was amazing, I couldn't imagine trying to convince a manager to go the Lotus route, simply based on problems IT departments have had in the past with it.
Pardon me, but I have to mention Citadel http://citadel.org./ This system is easy to install, zero maintenance, and with BerkeleyDB as the back-end, it scales pretty well. Citadel is a very good system for small to medium size businesses and will probably be able to handle large businesses as well.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I have no particular beef about Notes, but I've used it in various organisations in my career. It has always been too quirky and unintuitive. It may play with the geeks, but won't get an acceptance in the SME sector where it counts.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
It's not here yet, but it is coming.
We went through the process of installing Notes and Domino for our environment and in testing it seemed to work great. We bought 275 seats and guess what.... When you try to run it on Microsoft Terminal Services only one user per server can use the client.... By the time we got everything deployed and tested it was too late for IBM to give a rebate (by 4 days) and so we were out 20000+ dollars... Don't get me wrong, I love Notes and Domino, but don't try it on Microsoft Terminal Services. It supposedly works on Citrix though.
Deven Phillips, CISSP, CCNA
He's insightful because he's correct. The world has had ages to develop a decent mail client and yet this still has not happened. Of the many clients I've used, the least terrible (and thus the one I stick with for now) is Claws. It bites.
I'll point out just one major feature seriously lacking from nearly every client (although Gmail comes close on this one): A decent way to organize your old mail.
The sad thing is that it's starting to look like email will die as a medium before anyone gets it right. I predict it will be replaced by a hybrid stored/IM with tighter sender controls that shall be called "Slow Messaging", and that the clients for this will also suck.
-- The reader anything less than completely failing to not misunderstand this sig is cursed.
Notes is hardly the only competitor to the Exchange monopoly.
Novell Groupwise is another contender and is actually far cheaper. The Open Workgroup suite from Novell is $110 a seat with a yearly maintenance of $75 (http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/howtobuy.html), includes groupwise, openserver, Netware (edirectory included), and groupwise mobile for windows and palm mobile handhelds (also works with blackberry). I fail to see how notes is even slightly competitive in this area.
Not only does Novell give you a complete single sign-on solution that is equal to microsoft in ease of setup and user use, but they give you an exchange server replacement, Server licenses with no limit to accommodate the users you have AND support. Most small businesses show easily be able to afford $75 a seat when the equivalent MS solution is close to $300.
Depends if your company is ready to use Spreadsheets instead of calculators. I find this to be a good analogy w/ my customers. A spreadsheet can make a confusing calculator if all you need is a calculator, but if you know what you're doing, a spreadsheet will make your work a *lot* more efficient. And you can program a calculator UI for a spreadsheet.
:-), built-in Office doc editors, security designed from the ground up (secured databases and network traffic and PKI), *secure* business level IM, etc. Mail/Calendaring just happen to be applications written on top of it, but you get all the built-in plumbing (security, replication, etc.) that are part of Notes.
;-)
Lotus Notes has a much better UI in 8.x (everyone griping about probably has experience w/ Notes 4.x...it's like saying Windows 2.0 sucks when everyone is on XP or KDE or Gnome..seriously
So you have to ask yourself and your coworkers: do you want a calculator or a spreadsheet? What if your competitors are using spreadsheets and you're stuck on the freebie $5 calculators that Staples gives out? Who do you think is more efficient getting their job done? How much is that $5 calculator really costing you?
After I got past laughing over "MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product on which many businesses truly rely", I began to wonder why no one thinks of Novell's GroupWise? Runs on Linux stack (or for that matter WinOS or NetWare), feature comparable with Exchange and certainly less resource intensive/virus prone. I still see large installations out there chunking away wihtout much maintenance...
5 user license is free, and licensing above that isn't too painful.
It includes an Outlook plugin, and it can do all of the collaboration things that Exchange does - but it is much less painful.
If you think 14,000 pages of yesterdays "secrets" delivered by court order are enough to make things work with today's M$ formats, you have been sleeping for the last 25 years.
This whole discussion is crazy because KDE (and desktop) and Gnome both have free groupware stacks. There is no "hole" in the stack, there's just a hole in the submitter's knowledge.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
Another point of lock-in is coming, Active Directory, A number of SMB are going to be forced into Active Directory Servers, when XP is dropped and Vista is the only thing that is allowed.
This can go both ways though. There are a number of SMB's which still rely on NT4 and can't or won't move off because it is cost prohibitive. So if there is an alternative to AD that would allow them to still login NT4 and Vista they might go that route.
Otherwise they may succumb to using AD and work there business around the AD server.
So once they start using SBS they may be locked in unless they have problems with it.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
http://www.postpath.com/
People are catching up with postpath and major vendors have begun to certify their products...
Recently announced:
http://www.zimbra.com/forums/announcements/17100-zimbra-starter-edition.html
Check it out, sounds like it's what you've been looking for.
For 3-4 years [IBM] has been selling express versions of Domino/Notes. Basically, you can install as many servers as you want with this licensing (which is very cost-effective with geographically distributed companies).
.Net. The good is application development will be easier and faster; the bad is I am paid by the hour. The information below is from last week's discussions with IBM about Domino pricing.
This statement is only accurate for the Collaboration Express licensing plan. I just convinced a client to use Domino Utility Express for a Web application project. The original plans were for MS IIS + MS SQL Express + a physically separate Active Directory + MS Visual Studio + one of the ever-changing versions of
The standard licensing plan for Enterprise Domino has per-user and per-server costs. Both Web user licenses and the higher-priced Notes client user licenses are >$100 so 100 users is more than $10,000. Every user and server in the Domino Directory must have a license. The user licenses are good for both applications and messaging.
The Utility and Messaging "Express" servers are only available to companies with less than 1,000 employees, counting every employee -- not just computer users. The company may only have up to 4 Domino "Utility" or "Messaging" Express servers with a total up to 8 CPU cores = 4 single or dual core servers, 2 quad-core servers, or 2 + 1. This plan includes unlimited Web and Notes user licenses. "Express" has some limitations on functionality -- each server is either "Utility" (applications) or "Messaging" (email). The "Utility" server is missing some applications (Domino.doc and Workflow) and cannot be clustered. The good is one single- or dual-core Utility Express server license is only $2650 (double for quad-core.) The server can max memory and processor speed without changing the license price. Domino Designer clients are not included; add one Domino Designer license for $805.
Also for less-than-1,000-employee companies, "Collaboration Express" licensing includes unlimited servers with per-user costs >$100. This option includes applications and messaging. Applications servers have the limitations of the Utility Express servers. Server licenses are free, but the per-user licenses are only slightly ($7) less expensive than the Enterprise plan.
The Domino Enterprise Utility (applications-only) server allowing unlimited user licenses for companies with more than 1,000 employees is >$20,000 -- a bargain when an application allows Web registrations and the >1,000-employee company does not want to buy licenses for every user registering. (Small companies should choose the much less expensive Express server.) This option may also be good for companies needing only one application server without Domino messaging for more than 200 users.
"CEO" licensing plans are for companies buying much IBM software. I do not have information about high-volume pricing; IBM probably negotiates prices with each customer.
All licenses include one year of support and upgrades with no obligation to purchase additional maintenance -- the licenses never expire for the supported versions. Additional years of support/upgrades may be purchased as renewals extending current support for 20% initial cost (25% for Express) or after support lapses for 60% initial price. If you upgrade less often than every 3 years, the second option is less expensive.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
this has been the case in most Exchange shops I've worked in the last 10 years.
Before that, I was at IBM for four years. In Lotus Notes, *end users* could define team pages and workflows - within their permissions - to receive mail, route mail, publish pages based on content of that mail - in about 10 minutes. rather than
I guess you're saying "in a Microsoft-only environment, with admins in possession of deep product knowledge (which default installers and 3rd party software vendors don't have), Office/Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint is a terriffic solution."
That's probably true for several solutions.
Gmail kicks the shit out of the web access client.
Yahoo! mail kicks the shit out of the web access client.
I can't search at all, or select all messages in a view in OWC. It's pretty much the same since I first used it (well, it used to work only in IE/Windows; now it's at least accessible from other browsers).
Lotus Notes is ass-ugly, but I'd never need a web client, as I'd replicate the mail database and have things locally. (but it is ass-ugly, and even the last time I saw it - ~v6 - still seemed to have an awful time rendering markup in email.
Unison launched in March (www.unison.com) and does unified communications out of the box -- not just email, but also PBX/telephony/IM/groupware/LDAP. It has a Linux server and Windows/Linux client. It is easier to deploy and use, more powerful and less expensive than the MS and Lotus products, which were designed for large enterprises, not SMBs. Rurik Bradbury
Notes has pretty much been dead since Ray Ozzie left IBM. This is fairly typical of IBM...buy an innovative product and milk it for 3-5-10 years. This last "refresh" is merely a way of decreasing the attrition rate to Exchange rather than a honest attempt at competing. Now IT managers have an excuse for hanging on to Notes for a couple more years.., The dramatic price drop is the ultimate last gasp - similar to selling the Corel suite for $79 instead of $399. I really don't see any sub 1000 person enteprise doing a Greenfield Notes install let alone a conversion from Exchange.
You want the most scalable mail-server on the planet? Use Sun Java Communications Suite 5for free.
https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_us/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=COMMSUITE-5-RR-G-F@CDS-CDS_SMI
You want the most scalable mail-server on the planet? Use Sun Java Communications Suite 5 for free.
https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_us/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=COMMSUI
Is the NSF (Notes database format files) open? why don't open the specification to the public?. That will turn Lotus Notes even more friendly to the Open Source community.