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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?"
A review with many screenshots of the new Notes 8 interface - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019476/
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
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.
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.
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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.
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+++...
"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.
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.
-- Will program for bandwidth
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
Erm, the Microsoft equivelent costs more than that in Client Access Licences alone. Add in all the other licencing costs and this is far cheaper.
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();
"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.
Yeah, I've been reading about that, but it's really only free if you're in Europe, where you don't have to worry about software patents.
That's great for open source where you can claim you're only distributing it from Europe and don't intend to make 'sales' of any kind in the US. This is how it is possible to acquire free implementations of non-free codecs in the US for Ubuntu, in my experience. But for an actual business it's a problem., especially for startup that lacks the ability to engage in cross-licensing that makes the problem disappear. It's no doubt to me that IBM could do this with Microsoft, the IBM patent warchest is a license to print money/contracts when dealing with other software companies. So what does a startup do? They lack the ability to sell an actual product in the US without vulnerabilities to patents and frivolous patent lawsuits that eat up gobs of money and allow their competition (Microsoft, namely) to bury them, and open source vendors stand on shaky ground and have significantly fewer options for distribution.
It's a bad situation for everyone, I'm normally defending Microsoft's products recently on Slashdotâ€"the Ribbon is a fantastic UI innovation that I hope to see use in other ridiculously overcomplicated applications that have submenus that have submenus that have... It's menus all the way down, or so I've heard philosophers and UI designers say. But in this area, I don't see a lot of positive. The US desperately needs patent reform to fix this problem, and until that's done, a huge market is closed off for people seeking to use those "coding secrets."
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.
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."
I see you found the ellipsis key.
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...
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
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
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...
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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!
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
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...
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.