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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.
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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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?
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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.
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...
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...