Both IBM/Lotus and Microsoft have recently released new versions of their groupware suites--Notes/Domino and Exchange--with an emphasis on collaboration. We take them both through their paces.
Products like Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange provide a foundation for collaboration, e-business, and corporate messaging. They are designed with reliability, scalability, interoperability, and performance in mind and feature a number of tools that help keep your systems ticking over as well as making administering them easier.
In a nutshell, these products will help you set up policies, manage e-mail quotas and spam filtering, as well archiving your users' e-mail. You can also purchase add-ons that will enable you to take responsibility for creating workspaces or discussion forums for projects that you may have running. They will enable you to share documents with colleagues from around the world in real time. They can communicate using instant messaging to mobile phones and wireless PDAs. Another area where they can help you is development. They can help you quickly create multi-platform applications to automate business processes and increase workflow. You can also combine Web-based standards to create e-commerce solutions.
The real battle between Lotus and Microsoft no longer rests on mere e-mail or calendaring. These days, the real competition is in developing environments where staff can collaborate on projects--Microsoft's SharePoint and Lotus' QuickPlace and Sametime. These two companies also wrangle in the area of rapid application development, enabling you to develop custom collaborative applications for staff.
Platforms
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 is specifically designed for Windows 2003 Server, while Lotus Domino supports most major server platforms including Linux, Windows 2000 Server, IBM iSeries (AS/400), IBM zSeries (S/390), IBM pSeries (AIX), and Solaris. So with Lotus Domino you have that multi-platform support that you don't quite get with Microsoft Exchange.
Web/Mail
Both Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange integrate a Web server. Microsoft's Exchange server is Internet Information Server (IIS). If you want to develop Web-based applications you can use the Comprehensive Object Library (CDO). CDO for Exchange 2003 includes enhanced calendaring and contact management, and is dual-interfaced for programming in C++, Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual Basic Scripting Edition, Java Script, and Java.
For mail, Exchange Server can use SMTP/POP3, IMAP, and Microsoft's proprietary format MAPI. It integrates best with Microsoft Outlook. There's an Outlook Web Access client that provides a robust Web client for remote, home, and occasional users.
Domino's Web server on the other hand is firmly locked into the Domino package, but is based on Apache. For developing applications, Lotus Domino Designer 6 can be used to develop and maintain Lotus Domino applications. Some of the new features include JavaScript libraries, document locking, more flexible agent security, remote debugging, XML tools, and rich-text tools. You can also build and deploy applications on existing platforms while using industry-standard programming skills such as LotusScript, Java Runtime Environment (JRE), JavaScript language, HTML, XML, C application program interfaces (APIs), CORBA, component object model (COM), and object-oriented programming.
Lotus Domino offers iNotes mail and POP3 mail as its two primary e-mail services. iNotes Mail service provides you with two ways to access your mail: via a Web-browser (iNotes) and via a POP3 client. POP3 Mail service allows you to access your mail using standard mail clients such as Outlook Express or Eudora. However Lotus Domino works best with the Notes client, so in order to get the best performance from your Lotus Domino server, you should use Notes.
Choosing the right product can be a difficult task. There are a number of factors such as company size, whether or not you're going to be developing applications in-house, network infrastructure and budget which all have to be considered.
For this review we take a look at some of the features of Lotus Domino and Exchange Server and the add-ons that make them full-featured collaboration products.
This article seems to overlook the historically poor performance of the Lotus Notes client for regular email and calendaring functions.
Even most workers at IBM cannot get the web mail portions to work properly.
I love the way the author described the EXTREMEMLY overdue feature of automatic inbox refreshing. This feature has been a "Duh" default in even free email clients for years.
Advanced collaboration functions are of little value if I cannot count on the basic commincation features.