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

Re:Expensive, bloated, and unfriendly...

[the bluebrain]

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.