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?"

Comments

Screenshots of Notes 8

[Deviant]

A review with many screenshots of the new Notes 8 interface - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019476/

Re:Screenshots of Notes 8

[MishgoDog]

I'm using the beta of Notes 8 (I work at the big blue), and I can say that it's significantly improved from a UI perspective, and even a bit from a response perspective (which has always been my gripe with Notes)

Re:Written in Eclipse?

[The_Myth]

You can use the base code from Eclipse as the starting point for any gui-type application - be that a word processor or graphics program or in this case an email client. Both the Netbeans and Eclipse IDE's allow you to extend them to create other applications outside of programming applications. The difference between the two is mainly do you want your application to use SWT (IBM) or Swing/AWT (SUN) for your GUI controls.

At the end of the day though it means that its written in Java.

I disagree.

[Petersko]

"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.

Re:I disagree.

[pstorry]

So you're eager to move away from Notes.

(Although you don't say which version of the client you're using, so it may not be a fair comparison. The R8 client is a major upgrade, especially in interface terms.)

However, your eagerness to move to the client tells only half the story.

The server side - well, frankly, Exchange is a pit. A big money pit. It's fine for 100 users in a small business. Past that, its storage systems show the strain.

It's not as scalable, it's not as robust, and it gives far less functionality than a Domino server. It's a mail system that was designed to beat cc:Mail in 1995, and is still straining at the architectural limitations that brief imposed upon it.

And your response will no doubt be "I don't care, I only see the client" - fair enough. But the quote was "MS Outlook with Exchange" - so you're already replying out of context.

Oh, and speaking of web access clients, the Domino Web Access client (formerly known as iNotes) is no slouch either...

Re:I disagree.

[iamhigh]

Agreeing with the AC...
We have Exchange 2003 running on 5 year old hardware, with about 200 mailboxes. I have seen SBS with almost 100 mailboxes and everything else on that server. I have no doubt that a brand new server, maybe with a SAN or something, could handle 2000 mailboxes with no problem. And since I know for a fact it does serve many more than that, I just don't know where the GP gets the idea Exchange isn't for a mid-large sized biz.

Re:I disagree.

[timster]

Witness the process of lowered expectations as applied to Microsoft software. We've gone from "Outlook/Exchange is a fantastic product" to "do users REALLY need multiple gigabytes of email"?

For shame. Of course they do, and there should be no debate about this in 2008. GMail's capabilities have proven to millions of users the benefits of having a large, centralized mail store that is accessible (and searchable) from any device.

I haven't run an Exchange server since the days when Outlook would silently(!) corrupt PST files that attempted to exceed 2GB in size, so perhaps they have improved it a lot. But when I see someone defend Exchange by saying users don't really need a mere few gigs of email, I doubt it.

Re:What are you smoking?

[rossz]

The meeting planning feature of Exchange is simply outstanding. Nothing else out there comes close to doing the job so well (from the user's perceptive). Security and backend stability is an entirely different matter. You couldn't pay me enough to touch an Exchange server.

Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz

[Macthorpe]

How is Candy Land this time of year?

Microsoft discloses 14,000 pages of coding secrets

"Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007."

Re:Mail client and Groupware client ubiquitous

[drinkypoo]

have you tried opengroupware.org? I wasn't very happy last time I tried it but maybe it's advanced since. they apparently have an ldap+kerberos authentication scheme.

As for competing with sharepoint, you might consider Drupal. Drupal has LDAP/Kerberos auth, which I have personally set up and tested. And it worked. It was a horrible pain to get set up, but not in a hacking kind of way, just in a bad documentation kind of way. Drupal is a PHP-based CMS which stores to MySQL or Postgres (mostly) and which in a version or two will have a PDO layer :) It uses jQuery for making sites sing and dance and there's an absolute grip of add-on modules for it. It's got your auth and it's got an XML-RPC layer.

Re:Zimbra

[sdnoob]

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. that is.. until microsoft forcibly takes over yahoo (who owns zimbra).

Lotus Bloat vs. Outlook Bloat

[billstewart]

I last used Lotus about 10 years ago. I really *wanted* to like it, having used PLATO Notesfiles back in the 1970s (:-), but it was really too big and clumsy for the laptops we used at work, and it spent too much time trying to be a "friendly" GUI to be an actually-useful GUI, especially on smaller screens. It was too bad, especially since MS Mail was still the third-or-fourth worst mail system I'd ever used (IBM PROFS was awful, the early 24x40-screen 300-baud Prodigy wasn't too hot, and we'd once had a Kermit-based homebrew thing that crashed a lot.) Really none of them were as user-friendly as /bin/mail.

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.

Re:Comedy gold...

[Gazzonyx]

The thing I like about Eclipse (on top of what you've said... portable... I'm between: Solaris SPARC, X86_SMP Windows XP, X86 WinXP, X86_SMP Gentoo, X86_64 Slackware, X86 Slackware, and a Mac G3 on any given moment of the day; eclipse runs on them all (haven't actually tested the G3 TBH)), being a software development major, and interning writing various code for work, I can use Eclipse for about 12 different languages and switch between workbenches and languages with the click of a JButton! From ADA to Flex2, perl, Java, I've always got the same IDE, and it all stays in a single folder that I can zip and throw on a jump drive. The icing on the cake is that I can keep all the code in my subversion repo and with subclipse I have my SCM integrated to all my projects. Just today I wanted to mock up a GUI real quick... no problem, JBuilder is based on eclipse now and installing an update is just unzipping a folder, or using the built in update site feature. I've also got Yoxos service (it's free) that lets me browse a good couple hundred of extensions and install them and their dependencies automatically, and update plugins and their dependencies in the background at the click of a button. I also love every summer when they release 14 or 15 projects simultaneously as a single release. Did I mention multithread capable debugging inside the IDE? Stop any thread at any moment and see its stack while the others run. Ant build scripts are nice, too.

Re:Written in Eclipse?

[Rexdude]

The poster is incorrect; it is not 'written in Eclipse'. Rather it uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.
Eclipse started out as an IDE, now it provides rich client frameworks so that you can quickly create an application for any of the supported platforms with the same widgets and look and feel that Eclipse provides.
I am using Notes 8.0.1. After taking a look-they've essentially wrapped an Eclipse framework around the same old client as Notes 7. While it does add on some pretty features, it is just a veneer.
Scratch the surface and you find the same fugly old Notes client as was present earlier. Infact, there are 2 binaries for launching notes- notes.exe and nlnotes.exe. The latter launches the client without the eclipse framework, and you get the same Soviet era style horrible UI as before.
Oh and be prepared to forfeit about 350 MB RAM when running the full client, ie with Eclipse framework.
And-this is priceless- in the year 2008, there STILL is no way to start a network operation without locking up the application solid. In other words, it still does not feature multi threading for network access, so click a database link and be prepared to either sit back and wait and be unable to do anything else, or cancel it by ctrl-break.

Re:Still don't see what the big deal is about outl

[Rexdude]

UNINTUITIVE?? Try using Notes. (and yeah i mean the latest greatest 8.0.1).
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!! /sarcasm

Re:Written in Eclipse?

[pstorry]

It's a really bad bit of phrasing.

What they mean is that it's now using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.

Most of the core code is still C/C++, and was already somewhat cross-platform. For instance, the database code already runs on Windows, AIX, Solaris, Linux, OS/400 and the z-Series mainframe. This is because IBM tend to use the same code on the client as they do on the server - it reduces maintenance, and increases reliability.

However, over the past few versions of Notes (R5 to R7), the Notes client had become more Windows-centric as it put in place or improved various features that IBM's clients were asking for - such as Dial-Up Networking support, better OLE support, etc.

In fact, those versions didn't ship Unix clients, and the Mac client often lagged behind in terms of both shipping and functionality.

IBM's solution has been to rework the Notes client so that it uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. It's given them a common UI and OS abstraction layer across their three target platforms - Windows, Mac, and now Linux too.

With a common platform and common libraries, IBM should be able to support multiple operating systems without crippling development costs - and it's benefiting the Eclipse project, because a lot of the work that IBM has done to get it working properly on the Mac platform (for example) is going straight back into that project.

(In fact, IBM's commitment to Eclipse is so strong of late that some people feel they've become dominant in the project, which is a bit of a sticky political situation for them.)

Eclipse isn't perfect, and it's a bit heavy on the system resources at present. But as with most heavy applications, what's large and slow now will be small and svelte on the latest machines in a year or two's time.

Meanwhile, the ability to mix Eclipse plugins with traditonal Notes functionality - especially in workflow applications - is something that's extending Notes in some rather interesting directions...

Oh my exchange server is so great...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Big gap?

[miffo.swe]

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.

Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz

[Nursie]

I've had the (dis)pleasure of using Notes since R4. Think (through moving jobs and stuff) I missed R6, now use 7 and/or 8 on different machines.

It's a lot better now, much more usable. Doesn't randomly die and leave child processes littering the machine, doesn't refuse to restart etc. It's pretty good now, and the built in IM client in 8 is actually pretty good as well.

I wouldn't highly recommend either notes or outlook, but I'm not so sure I'd have a preference fo outlook any more.

Re:It's more than that

[miffo.swe]

It all works just wonderful except for one little detail. It all demands your organization works just as Microsofts products are designed. As soon as you try to change something you are in for a world of hurt and all the nice "plugging in" becomes a real nightmare.

if you add up what Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint costs and multiply it with your users you can have a tailormade solution adapted to your companys needs instead of trying to turn your organization around on a dime and start working the MS way (tm). Its a one-size fits all solution that Microsoft sells.

Microsofts solution also demands a hefty number of it and support staff to keep it all running.

Exchange to Notes migration

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I work for IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:$100/user is still pretty high for small biz

[darthflo]

there is no other seamless setup like this

Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise plus BlackBerry. It's not open, but it works.

What gap?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.

Re:Still don't see what the big deal is about outl

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Re:Lotus Notes

[pstorry]

They've already documented the C API (for locally using the Notes DLLs to access Notes data/databases), provided a number of decent open protocol implementations (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, HTTP, SOAP, WebDAV, DIIOP), and they don't lock/hide the design of the templates that they ship with Notes.

I'm not sure what more they could do... ;-)

Actually, I am sure. I think that the Notes APIs are Windows only, so making them available on Linux/Mac might be nice. Otherwise, though, just pushing to polish the HTTP server and get even more interoperability that way might be useful...

What about Groupwise?

[rahvin112]

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.