MS Exchange 2007 vs IBM Lotus Domino 8

[bignod55]

I'm a big fan of Domino, and truly believe it is a much better platform than Exchange. One of it's problems is that companies install a Domino server and it runs well with little upkeep. Because it causes little trouble, the company cuts costs by not keeping up with current versions (there's a lot of shops 2 to 3 releases behind - i.e. 5 to 10 years behind), and then they start comparing it to the latest version of Outlook/Exchange, and no wonder why MS looks better.

That said: this comparison is very biased. Since it looks like IBM/Lotus marketing material it will result in the opposite affect, where people will not trust it. I mean come on! Under maintenance you put "Install & Forget" (as I've said above companies often do that, but in this context any reader with a brain would say a marketer wrote this).

I was hoping to send this link to my clients to use for making a true comparison, but this marketing blurb is too transparent.

[vmguru007]

Hello MR Mc_admin,

I working on Exhcange from last 6 years.

I do;nt know much about Lotus but in your comparasion you have mentioned

"Exchange 2007 require newer 64-bit hardware and more servers (at least 6 server in case of redundancy) where Lotus Domino can reach full redundancy with two servers only, this is due to the new roles Exchange 2007 came up with. "

This is not true , as you can get the redundancy by implimenting only 2 servers in Exchange 2k7 instead of 6 server.

As you can club the rolles which is not recomended by MS but supported.

Take care.........

AMan

Hi Aman,

I have been working with Exchange since Exchange 5.5. I know in all previous versions you were able to mix the roles, but that does not work the same way on Exchange 2007. If you install Exchange 2007 mailbox cluster then the two mailbox roles will have to be installed seperately. You can not install any other roles onto these two servers. Go and try it and let me know if you succeeded in doing that. Even if you probably do it, it won't be supported. The next two server will be for HubTransport/Client Access roles. These two roles work fine together on the same server and to make them redundant you will need and extra server. You have a total of 4 needed at the moment. If you had decided to use Edge for antispam & Antivirus filtering which is almost a must if not using anti-spaming service these day. Then you need another 2 servers as Edge can't be installed with any other role. So that six servers if you are not counting the Active directory servers which will be required if the company is not originally running it. Please update us if you were able to get any statement of Microsoft to support the opposite of that.

In reply to bignod55, I doubt the comparison is trying to market any of the products and all the team members try to keep it far from that as much as possible. If that phrase is used "Install & Forget" we have not used it for marketing, but that was a point made to us by most of the Domino administrators we have met. If you think we need to seriously change some phrasing in the comparisn please let's know. We would like to make it as usable as possible for everyone.

Enjoy,
VMguru007

[vimal]

This is a totally biased report written in favour of Domino.

Lotus Notes client is a nightmare for end users.I have worked as an Exchange & Outlook admin for more than 2 years in my previous assignment and using Notes client & Domino as an end user for the past 3 years.My users are frustated with Lotus Notes & Domino which always require a magician to make the things work for them.

Who will love the application which kills the local machine performance.
Who will like the application which always a require an IT person's to do basic things even after using it for years.

[bignod55]

in response to Vimal...

You definitely haven't seen Notes Domino 8. The email client is very nice, much improved, and more similar to Outlook and/or a nice web app's look 'n feel. And Notes can do a whole lot more than email.

As far as nightmares, they can come with both Exchange and Domino. As far as nice features, they both have some. I've worked with both and much prefer Domino. Another consultant was mentioning how his client has a huge IT department, almost all of them were supporting Microsoft products. Domino requires far fewer support people. Support spends a ton of time continually applying Microsoft patches.

This has been the experience with my clients as well. Often the IT staff of small to mid-sized companies have more expertise and training on MS products, and are able to get away with having very little Domino expertise (because once it's set up,it tends to run reliably), but when a problem occurs, they don't have the experience to deal with. Then they make the problem worse, and users think it's Domino's fault.

[amagladon]

I have been a Sr. Manager of IT for many years in Fortune 500 companies. Some of my responsabilities include testing, evaluating, recomending and choosing technology. I have implemented both Exchange and Notes in their various versions and I can tell you that Notes 7 and Notes 8 are just getting to what Exchange was in 5.5.

Did the forum administrator who "classifies" Notes as a superior e-mail system actualy installed or has ever installed either product, I think all he is doing is going over the IBM literature and not really performing a real comparision based on experience and hands on.

Notes is by far an inferior produt, Notes 8.0.1 (I just Installed) claims to be more like Exchange - Outlook and I can tell you that it is, it is trying to mimic Exchange - Outlook but is is Outlook 97 and Exchange 5.5 many years behind the feature functionality of Exchange.

The problem with all IBM software is that IBM builds products from the Top down, extremely complex and extremely difficult to integrate with anything, in the process they miss the simple user interaction and user friendlines, opposite of Microsoft's approach startt simple and build up from there.

Keyboard shortcuts, copy and paste, linking and embedding, dirctionary, etc. are all user needed functions and functions that Notes suck at big time, on the other side, the cost of maintaining Notes every year cost as much as a full Exchange implementation and that I have the paper and invoices to prove.

Exchange has its share of problems and no one is perfect however Lotus Notes losts all its early glory after IBM bought it, no inovation and harldly anything has changed on Notes since the mid 90's. IBM announced 3 years ago it was discontinuing further development in Notes and moving their e-mail system to websphere (as everything IBM) IBM is trying to make websphere the one product that runs the entire enterprise.

IBM lost some of their biggest costumers due to their announcement that in 2009 Notes would be out of mainstream support, they had focused all their resources on the new product but provided no upgrade to existing customers which meant all customers running Notes would have to build their e-mail systems from scratch, at that point Enterprises faced with the decision selected Exchange (easier implementation, less cost, less hassle and you don't need a PHd to deploy).

IBM took a big blow and reversed its course releasing Notes 7 and now 8 and now IBM is plegdging 1 Billion worth of innovation and upgrades in the next 3 years to bring Notes up to par to Exchange with unified communication and other features that Microsoft put into Exchange 2003 and imporved with 2007.

In my opinion IBM is doing too little too late. If you are face with the decision of Notes vs Exchange, take it from a real pro who gets his facts from the real world and real life experience. With Exchange you will save time, money and effort and your users will be a lot happier, I can't name a single person out of my 20,000 notes users today that can say they prefer Notes over Outlook.

[MessagingGuy]

I wanted to respond to an earlier message . . . and for the record, anyone who is being reasonable will see that this is a tremendously biased message and is not a useful comparison. Just think! The majority of businesses in the world have been snowed and have bought an inferior product! (According to Gartner, IDC, and Radicati).

See my responses in Bold.
_________________________________________________________


This isn't biased, those are plain facts. If you're going to accuse the authors of bias, at least detail your reasons for saying so, thereby giving them an opportunity to reply.

I'm a Domino Admin of 13 years experience and I admit I don;t know much about Exchange, and so I would love to hear some reasons from Exchange admins on why they think Exchange is better. Even on a purely email vs email platform, if that's what they'd prefer.

Here's some things I have heard about Exchange so feel free to rebuke if you can:

The jet-based data store is not designed to grow into the hundreds of gigs as commonly seen in modern corporate email systems. As a result, there are only two kinds of Exchange Administrators - the kind who have experienced data loss and the kind who soon will. I am sorry, but in todays corporate environment where compliance is often very important, you cannot afford to base your email system on a server that has such a reputation of being this unreliable.
I've worked on databases as far back as Exchange 5.5 that were over 100GB, but what you're missing from your knowledge is that in Exchange you can have MANY databases (20+) all of which can be over 100GB if you need them to be (but who wants to take the time to backup and restore a 100GB file?). Honestly, if you need to have more than 1TB on one server, don't you think you'd have two servers? Corruption? Data loss? If your domino database is sitting on a disk that is not mirrored and you don't have it replicated anywhere and the disk dies, does Domino magically bring the data back? No. just like Exchange, Domino is only as good as the design and implementation. If you don't know what you're doing and make a bad design the result will suck. End of story.

We all know that Outlook/Exchange is far more prone to virus attacks than Notes/Domino. Apparently Exchange has more flexible anti-spam controls but Domino has good enough, and if you use a service such as messagelabs or mailcontrol you don't need that anyway.
I've never had a customer infected with an email-borne virus on Outlook. Ever. I know that it happens, but since we're not talking about actual facts and figures here, there's my anecdotal evidence. For the record i also recommend using MessageLabs or Frontbridge, or Postini, or any of those external services.

You have to take the server off-line to backup the data store. I wouldn;t have thought this was true with open file backup clients so can someone tell me?
Are you kidding me? I've been working on Exchange since 5.5 and NEVER have you had to take the server off-line to do a backup! Even free NT-Backup can backup your exchange stores on-line.

In my current job, we have a target of 99.9% server uptime during production hours - not including any scheduled maintenance/upgrades. I am sure that would be impossible to meet under Exchange but we do it easily. We cover Australia and New Zealand which includes several time zones so production hours is 13 hours per day. That allows for about 4 minutes downtime per server per week.
Again, the "i am sure that would be impossible to meet under Exchange" shows how biased you are. You have no idea. No enterprise messaging platform would survive in today's marketplace if you couldn't maintain a VERY high level of uptime. Exchange can give you all the nines you want. Most of our customers sit at 100% for the year, and none of them are below 99.9. Honestly many companies are looking at 4 or 5 nines. Exchange is a highly stable product when installed on stable hardware.


To my knowledge, the one thing MS does better, other than marketing, is integration, especially if your company is using microsoft desktops. Having the lions share of the market, 3rd party applications such as document management systems tend to build their integration into Exchange first and Domino is done almost as an afterthought. Having said that, if you are a SAP house do some reading on an upcoming product called Atlantic.
The bottom line is that Exchange is extremely viable in the messaging space, and so is Domino! Domino provides excellent business process and development that can be harnessed into an incredibly powerful money-saving engine! However in order to do it right you need to spend some bucks. If you're going to compare nothing but Exchange and Domino, Exchange is MUCH cheaper. However if you want to talk all the Bus Dev apps then you're on much more equal footing on a cost standpoint. I do hear that Notes 8 is going to be awesome! If you guys are really interested in being a shop that does real "comparisons" then make sure to put some effort into understanding both products. It is clear that whoever wrote this doesn't know anything about Exchange. And no, installing it a couple of times in the lab doesn't quite count as "knowing" it.

[MessagingGuy]

In my opinion IBM is doing too little too late. If you are face with the decision of Notes vs Exchange, take it from a real pro who gets his facts from the real world and real life experience. With Exchange you will save time, money and effort and your users will be a lot happier, I can't name a single person out of my 20,000 notes users today that can say they prefer Notes over Outlook.

I think you're probably right. I'm excited to see where IBM goes in the next few years with all of this focus. The UC space is where the future is, and while Microsoft and Nortel have a bit of a head start, IBM has a very strong partner in Cisco that can help to close that gap. In addition, the fact that you can run Notes on Linux is a key factor as well. Notes is not dead, but man did it come close!

[doitsmart]

Does anyone have an estimate of the relative size (market share) of the user base of IBM Domino vs. Exchange? And what percent of the Exchange base is 2003 vs. 2007? Thx

[forumadmin]

Hi,

The percentage according to IDC as far I remember in 2007 was about EXCHANGE = 51 % ,& DOMINO 40 %. I am not sure how much Exchange 2007 & Exchange 2003 Share go. I would estimate it to be 75% for Exchange 2003 & 25% to 2007 as the migration is a bit lengthy. I hope these were helpful.

Enjoy,
ForumAdmin

[mike555]

Wow this is one of the most biased reports I've ever read. It seems like you are anti-Microsoft or something.

From an end user's perspective of someone who has used both Lotus and Outlook I can tell you that Outlook is far superior. Nothing gives a bigger headache than watching your whole UI in Lotus freeze as databases or messages are loading up.

It's actually enjoyable to read email in Outlook and schedule meetings. In Lotus it's a pain... scheduling a meeting means freezing up your whole Lotus process and every single window associated with it, possibly for a while if a database happens to be slow.

I have worked at 3 different companies - 2 that use Outlook and 1 that uses Lotus. I'm glad that I'm back to using Outlook.