MS has recently released several products that, at least according to the reviews in PC Magazine, seem to target traditional strengths of Domino and Sametime. The products include Windows Server 2003, Sharepoint, Exchange 2003, and the new version of Office. The reviews emphasize new capabilities in workflow, collaboration, and reduced headaches with Exchange.
In our company, we happen to be right in the middle of a debate about standardizing on Domino across multiple divisions where we now have a mix of Domino and Exchange.
Some people who have read the PC Mag reviews are questioning whether these new MS products blunt the relative strengths of the Lotus offerings. Workflow is important to us, and has, until now, been taken as a strong argument in favor of Domino.
I would very much like to hear what people think of the new landscape, both from a functional and TCO point of view.
As you say, MS has released “several products” that, tied together, may do what Domino does. But how many products are you going to have to buy, and how many boxes are you going to need to put them on, to do what one product does for you now? (OK, two products if you count Sametime).
You’ll need Exchange, Sharepoint, Office, the IM server (whatever that’s called), plus possibly SQL Server too. If you need email encryption, I think that needs another seperate product, on another box. (Notes has it built in).
At least some of this stuff will also only run on Windows 2003, a server OS that’s only just been released. If you’ve not gone through the pain of Active Directory yet, then that’s one massive overhead, in terms of your people’s time, that you’ll have to swallow.
And you’ll be tying yourself into MS pretty well forever if you do. None of these products will ever run on non-MS servers. In contrast, the Domino server runs on most server OSes out there. This includes Linux, with its very attractive licensing costs, of precisely nothing!
though I’m not quite prepared to lay out our entire competitive fountain of knowledge on the pages of LDD, I’d be happy to discuss with you/your organisation as appropriate. I suspect, though, that you posted here in hopes of getting what might be slightly-less-biased views…I’d be interested in reading those too.