Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I wonder how much Slashdot was paid for this post.
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?
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.
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+++...
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.
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.
Notes has ostensibly come a long way since, but when I was working for Tivoli we were avoiding it in droves. Actually, many of us avoided using their stupid GUI screen-scraper (over the top of a 3270 app) for trouble tickets and learned to use the native thing (all hail x3270!) even though it was horrible too. But what I really wanted to mention is that NOBODY used notes unless they were a manager, or wanted to be one (it's where forms were going.) No one at IBM ever used notes unless they were forced to :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"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.
I use Notes every day ... indeed, I develop in Notes. So, mea culpa.
I do see two main problems with Notes:
(1) It's unconventional, especially the user interface.
(2) It's easy to develop stuff in Notes
The main root cause for (1) is that it was very early if not first at quite a few things. For example the "brackets" (top left, bottom right) that denote a text-entry field. No-one else uses these, but NO-ONE. But at the time they were invented, you couldn't just look at HTML forms and make it look the same, because they didn't exist yet. So they came up with something on their own, and it wasn't good enough to be copied by everyone else - but they were stuck with it.
The main problem with (2) is that since it's so easy, everyone is a Notes developer. Take for example the spectrum of web pages. It's wide: everything from "weee-I-just-discovered-Frontpage-OMG-background-images!", to super clean XHTML-with-CSS that take into account that some users want to use Lynx or screen readers. The spectrum in Notes is wider. So if some Notes apps are bad - blame the IT department for hosting them, much like a bad intranet page - but don't blame the platform.
yes, we have no bananas
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.
Vista.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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...
I've not used Lotus, but I do use Outlook and Exchange in my current company. This is single worst messaging piece of software I've used. It's (Outlook) menu is horrible - just try to change e-mail form (text only, default is RTF), guess where to change signature, how to create local folders. I've worked with various client/servers - and what I can tell is Exchange/Outlook is crap. People do use it not because it's good - it's not - because of power of admins dullnes. What's so exceptional in Exchange? Calendar? Sorry, but it even doesn't have iCal support.
Fortunatelly things are changing and people see gmail and google calendar - and sudedenly realize thet Exchange is not thing given by God, and there are better things - lightweight, faster, easier to use. And You doen't have to pay $100/Year MS for every single stupid e-mail account You've created.
From my perception MS software is really viral. Usually when company starts, someone somewhere asks for e-mail server. And there always some guy around who, having zero knowledge in the topic - istalls Exchange as it is easy - just few clicks. And if You have excahnge some other dull guy advices to use Outlook as the best solution. People start to use this crap - start to send those invitations and other stupid Outlook specific things - and You are in deep sheet. Welcome to Hell. You are locked. You cannot change the client, You cannot get rid of this stupid server. And if You business goes well - You have few more emploees - suddenly You relize that You have to pay $100/year per single stupid mailbox.
There is nothing in above soloution that cannot be done on linux with totally free solution. Nothing.
"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.