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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?"
I don't see that at all, but the problem isn't just the MS 'stack' from client application to server, but the fact that MS is pushing all sorts of integration and features that competitors don't have.
Everyone else (StarOffice, Lotus Notes) is so busy playing catch-up to compete on features, and once Microsoft hooks these businesses on things like SharePoint and what-not, well, suddenly switching to the competition means you lose functionality, and productivity in doing things "the old way" again.
It's a bad deal all around and I really would like to see Microsoft open up things like SharePoint for interoperability, but if you honestly think that'll happen in short order, you're living in Candy Land.
...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
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.
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 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();
It's possible, yes. If you limit your service.
As an example, Exchange uses shared mail by default - but only within the storage group for that one mailbox.
Up until very recently, the maximum size per storage group in the Information Store was 16Gb. I believe it's now either 75Gb or 16Tb, depending on the license for the server. 16Tb is fine, but even 75Gb - for a shared store - is a bit constrained. It doesn't need a huge number of large mailboxes to start giving you serious problems, and in a large enterprise that will happen very quickly.
The way you work around that is simple - you either spend a lot of time monitoring your information stores and doing capacity management, or you set hard quotas at low values.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know that have very low quotas on their work mail systems are on Exchange Servers, whereas most of the people I know with gigabytes of mail aren't.
Now contrast this situation with Domino, which has a shared mail system which is switched off by default. Nobody uses it because they know it introduces these kinds of scaling issues. (By the way, even Microsoft recommends that you should ignore shared mail when capacity planning.)
Everyone gets their own database, which means that monitoring, moving, replicating and generally managing users is much easier.
That's just the start of it. Uptime? In my experience, the shared storage system that Microsoft's clustering solution requires reduces uptime, not increases it. Domino servers fail over faster because they have no shared resources.
Exchange's architecture does show strain. If you're a Microosft Gold Partner and can call on them to advise you, then fine - otherwise, good luck to you!
This is exactly right. Everything ties together so tightly that once you get one piece you might as well take the whole. You buy Office, which runs only on Windows and which comes with Outlook. You want to use that for email so that means Exchange. Exchange depends on MS Active Directory so that means storing all your user accounts on the MS server and authenticating against that. As long as you have these MS servers for authentication you might as well do your file/print sharing there. As long as you are doing your file sharing there you might as well use DFS replication and put another server in the branch office. Once you are running Exchange you might as well run Outlook Web Access and that means IIS. Once you are already hosting that on IIS you might as well host your other web pages there. Since you are hosting your web pages there you might as well use MS SQL as the backend as well as Sharepoint for the intranet page - etc etc.
They even are nice enough to bundle all of this into one (relatively by MS standards) inexpensive product called SBS Premium. The big catch is that you have to run all of it on one server. As the buisiness expands, and they have already got you depending on it all, they really sting you with the licensing increases involved in buying the full versions of all the various software and their associated Client Access Licenes (CALs) so that you can seperate into multiple servers. When you get bigger still and need clustering and redundancy you need to throw still more servers and more licensing fees at the problem (usually for "Enterprise" products then as well) and that is when they really get you.
I am an RHCE as well as having the full spread of MS certifications - I love Linux and run that and a Mac on the desktop at home. I rarely get to use my Linux knowledge/certifications these days because of all the MS lockin/ubiquity. There are a few places that I would have liked to use CentOS or RHEL for some things but was forced to use the MS product by their insistance on Exchange - and once you have the infrastructure for that there then is no place/need for Linux any more. That is why I submitted this story and have been looking for this solution - the hope that I might actually have something I could sell a buisiness on that would allow me to actually get some Linux out there!
Trust me though when I say that Office/Outlook/Exchange is the #1 reason for half of MS's dominance in the server space. We need something to counter it. I am just really hoping that IBM, with all of its resources and its relative presence in this space, can give it to me...
The problem with not being reliant on one vendor is that interoperability seldom works quite as well.
The latest Office/Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint work together absolutely amazingly if your sysadmin has actually sat down and configured them correctly instead of relying on the installer or 3rd party hacks. I've not yet seen a similar ecosystem for businesses from any set of independent vendors due to the tendancy to 'do things their own way'.
Open Source should be able to do this with ease if there was a clearly agreed on method and format for exchanging information between applications, rather than (as I've seen in several places) a collection of hacked together scripts to do things like extract email attachments and put them into the document share, or move calendar appointments from the shared diary to a personal one.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
"I assume you're one of those people who thinks they need their own IT department as well then."
Well, I'm a software engineer and have worked for various software firms. Yes, we need IT departments. People who are there, on premesis, keeping systems up, doing custom configs, supporting our work in general.
"Unless you're a large company, doing IT in house is a huge waste of money."
I know some large ones that contract out and some smaller ones that don't. I really can't comment on the costs, I have no experience there.
"then somebody to twiddle their thumbs while they wait for something to break?"
Is that the sound of millions of pissed-off-at-how-their-job-is-being-portrayed IT guys I hear? I think there's a spot more to it than that.
"Google are probably more trustworthy then anything you can do in house for a reasonable price"
I can do something with postfix and dovecot for free, on my own servers, if I have my own guys or contractors.
"and honestly, do you think they even *care* about your data?"
Yes. There are two reasons for google to offer the free service - Embedded apps and data mining. Embedded ads are bad for me as a business owner, I don't want my guys clicking them in work hours. Data mining makes me uncomfortable because, however abstract it is for now, google are using my data for market analysis and advertising.