IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 take on Microsoft

They would have to take some extremely revolutionary measures to try beat the Exchange/Outlook offer. Notes sucks :P
 
IBM Lotus Domino 8 VS MS Exchange 2007

Hi all,

Yes Domino is doing better now in its competition with MS Exchange 2007 than any time since 1995. To see a good competitive comparison between the two please visit
MS Exchange & outlook 2007 vs IBM Lotus Domino & Lotus 8
The above comparison show both MS & IBM Approach of this competition.
:cool:
enjoy,
VMGuru007
 
The Lotus DB that I know is a slow dog. Proprietary much.
 
I'm a notes/Domino Developer and Administrator. And 8 is a major improvement. I like the spreadsheet editor and word processor that is included, and the sametime. Looks way more attractive too. And theres the fact that exchange sucks pile. I was working in a building still running Lotus Notes R5 (around ten years old) and it was running on par if not better than the rest of the company using exchange.

There are smileys now aswell for ppl who judge a mail system by what emotes you can display to friends. :D

All in all its a big improvement.
 
I've worked with (and am certified in) Notes/Domino (older versions) and MS Exchange, and they both have their good and bad points.

Notes is a fantastic goupware application, great for shared apps/documents/files, workflow, intranets, support databases, that sort of thing. As a mail system, though, it's clumsy. The security can be damn annoying.

Exchange is a superb mail system - clean, stable and reliable, and damned fast. As a groupware system, it's not there - you need other MS products to make it happen. Security, provided you are running AD, is a pleasure.

Personally, I like the idea of both running in parallel.

I saw this bit from the biased comparison article linked to above:
Maintenance:
Notes: Install & Forget
Exchange: Time-Consuming
Click to expand...

I'm afraid that's a blatant lie. There's no time-consuming maintenance on Exchange; I run 16 Exchange servers and 3000 users, and hardly ever need to do anything on them; they just sit there ticking along happily. Most issues (and there aren't many) involve Outlook on the client side.
 
Exchange keep you busy.

Claymore said:
I've worked with (and am certified in) Notes/Domino (older versions) and MS Exchange, and they both have their good and bad points.

Notes is a fantastic goupware application, great for shared apps/documents/files, workflow, intranets, support databases, that sort of thing. As a mail system, though, it's clumsy. The security can be damn annoying.

Exchange is a superb mail system - clean, stable and reliable, and damned fast. As a groupware system, it's not there - you need other MS products to make it happen. Security, provided you are running AD, is a pleasure.

Personally, I like the idea of both running in parallel.

I saw this bit from the biased comparison article linked to above:


I'm afraid that's a blatant lie. There's no time-consuming maintenance on Exchange; I run 16 Exchange servers and 3000 users, and hardly ever need to do anything on them; they just sit there ticking along happily. Most issues (and there aren't many) involve Outlook on the client side.
Click to expand...

Hi Claymore,

I am sorry I have to disagree with you about the time consuming point. I had worked with one large logistics firm with over than 20,000 exchange users. We were running around 16 Exchange 2003 servers. We had a team of 9 well trained and well certified who was only responsible for administrating Exchange & Active directory(I believe too many to only maintain a mail system). Microsoft was fully involved in creating the setup and still we were having to put 10-14 hours per day to maintain the system. If you consider only patching the system against new worms and security threats that used to take us about 48 hours every month using GFI LANGuard which is in no mean little as Lotus did not require me almost any with one investment firm running 3 Lotus servers on Power 5 with AIX as Operating system for 15,000 users. Each time a virus catch into your exchange database as your anti-virus vendor has not yet released signature for this virus your exchange get down and recovery procedure is just a waste as these viruses only can hit exchange but not Lotus. When you grow that large being hit by viruses before anti-virus vendors is no rare case even with trend micro being your anti virus vendor. If you see any other points that not fair in that comparison you can post it on their forum and they will discuss it back and if you prove you are right they will be more than happy to fix it. :o

Best Regards,
VMguru007
 
vmguru007 said:
I am sorry I have to disagree with you about the time consuming point. I had worked with one large logistics firm with over than 20,000 exchange users. We were running around 16 Exchange 2003 servers. We had a team of 9 well trained and well certified who was only responsible for administrating Exchange & Active directory(I believe too many to only maintain a mail system). Microsoft was fully involved in creating the setup and still we were having to put 10-14 hours per day to maintain the system. If you consider only patching the system against new worms and security threats that used to take us about 48 hours every month using GFI LANGuard which is in no mean little as Lotus did not require me almost any with one investment firm running 3 Lotus servers on Power 5 with AIX as Operating system for 15,000 users. Each time a virus catch into your exchange database as your anti-virus vendor has not yet released signature for this virus your exchange get down and recovery procedure is just a waste as these viruses only can hit exchange but not Lotus. When you grow that large being hit by viruses before anti-virus vendors is no rare case even with trend micro being your anti virus vendor. If you see any other points that not fair in that comparison you can post it on their forum and they will discuss it back and if you prove you are right they will be more than happy to fix it. :o
Click to expand...

Then, to be blunt, there's something not set up right.

The organisation I manage used to be on Exchange 5.5, which had over the years become very unstable (some servers were running on Pentium 2s with 128MB RAM). We migrated the whole lot to Exchange 2003 (and when I say "we", I mean "me" - for various reasons, I ended up sole implementer, and it was a rough 4 months!). Since then, I have been the sole administrator for all these 16 servers, which link into a global organisation. I have one colleague who fills in for me when I'm on leave, but he doesn't have to do much. I manage anything to do with Exchange, plus anything OS related on those boxes, except for user creation/deletion/moves (which, as per SOx guidelines, is done by a separate department). We have an admin dedicated to AD, but he doesn't have much to do either. Antivirus and patch management is handled by a colleague; very little is done manually, as the AV (McAfee) updates automatically, and patches are rolled out during change control slots. We haven't had a virus outbreak in 3 or 4 years, since we were on Inoculan and Exchange 5.5 (and that didn't infect the Exchange servers).

Of course, there may be good reasons for all the stability - I work for a global IT company with plenty of procedures and policies for managing systems, we have strictly controlled change management, we have a really good setup with firewalls and perimeter security, and we have all Exchange internet mail routed through a dumb Linux box, and OWA traffic routed via a reverse proxy.

Naturally, this leaves me with plenty of time to surf the net...er, I mean, be proactive on the systems I manage.
 
Last edited:
Gee guys, funny how all of a sudden it all goes about how Exchange is time consuming or not...

I'm a Domino Administrator consultant myself, and let me tell you that I can easily not have work, because of the pure reliability and stability of Domino. I see my clients once a week and most of the time its about client issues (users) or changes that they require.
 
Funnily enough, since my last post on the topic, I moved companies to a company with Exchange 2003 and Notes 8. Both Exchange and Notes were not at their most stable, and I sorted out Exchange while another new guy sorted out Notes. Both are really nice and stable now, though I'm inclined to say that Notes gives us a little more in the way of problems - primarily replication issues over WAN lines (it kills the network).

Amazing what a difference trained administrators can make though.
 
One thing which I don't like about Exchange is that you have to perform offline defragmentation in order to shrink the database should a lot of data be deleted.

Another is that the DB can grow extremely large should world+dog keep their data in .OST files and not perform AutoArchives on a regular basis...

Other than that, it's pretty much stable and works well once properly set up.

But I'd prefer a Linux system with individual mailboxes rather than one monolithic mail database.
 
Claymore said:
I've worked with (and am certified in) Notes/Domino (older versions) and MS Exchange, and they both have their good and bad points.

Notes is a fantastic goupware application, great for shared apps/documents/files, workflow, intranets, support databases, that sort of thing. As a mail system, though, it's clumsy. The security can be damn annoying.

Exchange is a superb mail system - clean, stable and reliable, and damned fast. As a groupware system, it's not there - you need other MS products to make it happen. Security, provided you are running AD, is a pleasure.

Personally, I like the idea of both running in parallel.

I saw this bit from the biased comparison article linked to above:


I'm afraid that's a blatant lie. There's no time-consuming maintenance on Exchange; I run 16 Exchange servers and 3000 users, and hardly ever need to do anything on them; they just sit there ticking along happily. Most issues (and there aren't many) involve Outlook on the client side.
Click to expand...

I'm also an Exchange engineer and have run small to medium exchange installations from single to multiple servers from 5 upwards, biggest install was about 2500 users. Maintenance is minimal now in comparrison with the old stuff and it's coming along with unified messaging.

Nothing wrong with it at all.
 
The_Librarian said:
One thing which I don't like about Exchange is that you have to perform offline defragmentation in order to shrink the database should a lot of data be deleted.
Click to expand...

One way round that: create a new store, and move all the mailboxes from the old store to the new store; then remove the old store. A user's mailbox is unavailable only while it's being moved, and the move reduces database size better than the offline defrag does (thanks to a new, empty streaming file).
 
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