We use Lotus Notes at my office and it may be the worst product ever made. We only have around 1000 users and it takes 6 people to maintain it! It's down for 5-10 minutues a few times per day; not to mention at least one multiple hour outage every 3-4 weeks.
We've tried upgrading from 4 to 5 to 6.5, new servers, IBM onsite to help config and troubleshoot. It is a hassle, a pain and not worth the effort.
If you need an enterprise level solution, sadly Exchange is the best solution. However, if you can do without all the bells and whistles there are numerous *nix based solutions using imap/pop3 that will suit your needs.
You might also consider using something like Exchange for the employees and then using something less featured, but more robust and inexpensive for your "free" accounts.
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We use Lotus Notes at my office and it may be the worst product ever made. We only have around 1000 users and it takes 6 people to maintain it! It's down for 5-10 minutues a few times per day; not to mention at least one multiple hour outage every 3-4 weeks. We've tried upgrading from 4 to 5 to 6.5, new servers, IBM onsite to help config and troubleshoot. It is a hassle, a pain and not worth the effort. If you need an enterprise level solution, sadly Exchange is the best solution. However, if you can do without all the bells and whistles there are numerous *nix based solutions using imap/pop3 that will suit your needs. You might also consider using something like Exchange for the employees and then using something less featured, but more robust and inexpensive for your "free" accounts.