28 Apr 2008
IBM's Inexpensive Notes/Domino Push Against MS

I have to use Lotus Bloats at work - and if I were the IT guy there, they'd have to pay us $100 per seat to get me to adopt it. I never thought I'd pine for the halcyon days of Outlook and Exchange server until I ran into this abomination.

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?"

(link) [Slashdot]

05:50 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link