Lotus vs. SharePoint

daria42 writes "An article at ZDNet pits the software collaboration kings against each other. IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino 7 goes head to head against Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003. 'If you don't have the resources dedicated to developing collaborative applications, don't have complex application or integration requirements or if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat,' the review concludes."

Haven't RTFA yet, but...

I've used both apps, as a user, not a developer. I can say this with certitude: if I want something fast with reasonable workflow capabilities, I can get it out of Sharepoint. Aside from my corporation's resource constraints, development on Lotus is way over my head and thus useless to me. /Begin flamewar

Irony

Given that I spent the last four weeks designing and implementing a Plone intranet site because SharePoint turned out to be an unworkable solution for a 80 developer team that is distributed over 4 locations in the US, Japan and Europe, this "review" cracked me up.

Re: Irony

Why was Sharepoint unworkable?

We're using it across a 250+ person project distributed across 7 US location through multiple firewalls and it works GREAT! It not only works well within our company, but we use it extensively to 'publish' project deliverables and status to our clients and selectively share information with subcontractors.

It's also very easy to setup new Sharepoint sites for new projects.

I also used Lotus 2-3 years ago and it was far more difficult to use and setup new areas. Sharepoint beats Lotus hands-down.

For what it does, it does very well and is easy to use. For developers, it's not a CM tool and doesn't seem particularly oriented towards them, so perhaps you were just looking for something else?

Re:Irony

> Given that I spent the last four weeks designing and implementing a Plone intranet site

No, no, no. If it doesn't have per seat and per server licensing it isn't a solution. I also loved the way they mentioned the existence of other products (because they knew readers would know about them and wonder) then promply blew them off to concentrate on the two most expensive and infexible offerings on their way to a conclusion that was a no brainer.

One paragraph summary of the review:

If you are already in bed with IBM, stay there for now and if you are a Microsoft Slave(tm) buy their stuff without question. If you haven't picked yet you should probably buy Microsoft because IBM costs more (it does) and trained monkeys can operate it (the stock excuse for buying any of Microsoft's junk) and anyway, we all know Microsoft always crushes all opponents so skilled Lotus people are going to be rare exotic creatures (read expensive) in the future. But whatever you do, DO NOT look over at those free offerings, they will only lead you from the One True Path, paying out the ass for licenses and consultants.

infinity

Why not try infinity [crosslogic.com]

The key phrase

"SharePoint on the other hand is the relatively new kid on the block, and while it doesn't have the complete feature set that Lotus Notes offers, it does have a leg up in terms of Microsoft Office integration and ease-of-use."

Kollaberation Kombat?

Sharepoint Wins...

FATALITY!

Too little too late

While I'm often the first to make fun of "Slowest Notes", It's a helluva a full-featured package, and the companies that are interested in this sort of functionality have already been using Notes for a long, long time. Microsoft is just too late to the party.

Re:Too little too late

While I can say that I have found a bug or two, crashes are very rare. Missing dic files means that something is screwed up at the os level. You can get missing files with any application if you start deleting stuff at the os level. Random unread docs is usually only a problem if the user is sometimes reading from the web interface, and sometimes reading from the client interface. Of course sometimes it is because the document HAS been updated, and the database is set to flag updates to unread.

I can tell you this about Replication Errors. They work flawlessly. If you are getting replication conflicts, it is because you have different data on different Replicas, and the data was changed on each replica since the last replication. Save/Replication conflicts are not a failure of Notes/Domino. They are the proper handling of conflicting data. Most other platforms just pick one copy and indiscriminatly over write the other. This is general done by date, and is a very poor way to handle things. Of course if you want your data handled poorly, you can set Notes/Domino to just overwrite the older data.

The biggest curse of Notes/Domino is that for years, the Designer was the same application as the Developer. Given how easy it is to produce robust applications on this platform, many companies assigned the first user to be the developer. Now, I'm not saying that a secratary cannot be a good developer, but being a secratery certainly doesn't mean that you ARE a good developer.

GroupWise??

Me thinks they forgot about Novell's Groupwise too.

Speaking as a Scarepoint user

I've not user the newest Lotus Notes, but I use Scarepoint daily. I hate it. God forbid anyone use something other than IE. And if you want to view a document quickly, forget it. My department mandated that all our documentation get migrated from a fairly vanilla but searchable PHP site I built into Scarepoint. Since Scarepoint doesn't support html with linked images, I had to convert everything into Word docs. Now viewing frequently used information takes upwards of a minute where it used to be nearly instantaneous. Thanks a friggin lot.

Re:Speaking as a Scarepoint user

God forbid anyone use something other than IE.

It's pretty much not usable with anything other than IE on Windows. IE on OS X (when they Microsoft provided such a thing) was unusable. Fortunately I had my laptop with me when the Microsoft folks were pimping Sharepoint to management. They said things like, "oh, yeah, it will work as long as it's IE. No problem." So I asked them to show me how since I was having problems with their Sharepoint site using IE on OS X.

Needless to say, we're not running Sharepoint.

WSS v3 & MOSS 2007

I was just at a Microsoft SharePoint conference last wek in Seattle and I have to say I came away very impressed with the new features they will be releasing soon. The integration with the office suite is very impressive. I think this next release will put SharePoint over the top. The 2003 version is good, but this next version looks much, much better.

Grrrr

As a developer at a large bank which requires us not only to use Lotus Notes, but to have it open at all times so we can be sametimed and be alerted of new emails ... I have to say it blows. If it wasn't for me being a developer and getting a P4 2.5ghz 1.2gb ram pc ... I would shoot myself now. I view my co-workers (non-developers) pc's occasionally and they're chugging along on their P3 256mb ram pc ... ouch.

Progress?

The company where I have my current day-job is in the process of moving from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook. This is being presented as a Big Leap Forward.

Sharepoint is OK

I've never worked with the Lotus stuff. I work for a Fortune 1000 company where until a few months ago, all public IT documents were stored in a shared directory on a Windows file server. So there was no record of when it was created, who was modifying it, who erased it if it was erased etc.

Recently we began using Sharepoint. The upside is it's like CVS - you can see who edited a file, when, and what they changed. This is useful more for utilitarian purposes than spying - if I see Joe created a file, or modified it, I can ask Joe about it.

One drawback for Sharepoint is linkage. In the old days I could just tell people to go to \\FILESERVER\IT\Documents\Whatever\Coolstuff.xls . They click on that in e-mail and it pops up. Now I have to give convoluted instructions on how to get the document. The URLs are long and convoluted. It was easier to direct people to information before.

I am stuck here in Windows hell, are there any GPL and possibly UNIX-friendly versions of this type os software?

Re:Sharepoint is OK

Really, the URL's are no different that UNC paths depending on how your SharePoint is setup. Instead of your path listed above, it might be http://sharepoint/IT/Documents/Folder/Coolstuff.xl s [sharepoint]. The only convoluted part is that spaces are encoded into %20 which can be annoying.

All-in-all, I am very impressed with SharePoint 2003 and we keep finding more and more uses for it.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

If your primary need is document management (version control, approval process, etc.) I have found Knowledge Tree [ktdms.com] to work pretty well. We've been using it for about one year, and it's fairly easy to set up and we haven't had too many bugs.

Subversion is far better for your needs.

Subversion. http://subversion.tigris.org/ [tigris.org]

What you are describing is a source control system applied to documents instead of code. By design any files in the subversion repo are accessible via url. And you can restrict access using apache httpd access controls.

For example, here is a subversion repo: http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/ [collab.net]

notice you only needed a browser to get to it. If you use TortoiseSVN as your client, you can grab a copy using Window Explorer as a file-friendly client.

Here's a screen shot of TortoiseSVN:
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ [tigris.org]

Access via apache httpd is through web DAV, so you can put it in your network share list as well.

Re:Sharepoint is OK

I have actually used a wiki for this type of thing. It takes a bit more technically savvy set of editors but the markup is easy, versioning is tracked and everything instantly indexed, searchable and cross linked. Works really nice for documentation. If you want your docs written in word format though go with Sharepoint. You will not find a good GPL system for Word format. Subversion, and others like it will treat it like a binary file and just record new copies. No way to see diffs, etc.

Conclusion

Sharepoint is clearly looking down upon Lotus notes.

Another "Well, DUH!" comment

if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat

What a surprise. Isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's platform strategy? That it's pretty much an all or nothing proposition?

Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoint

A lot of the UI functionality in Sharepoint depends on MS ActiveX controls. God help you if you use a non-microsoft browser. *VERY* painful.
 
:: diatonic ::

Re:Hope you don't need Mac/Linux users on Sharepoi

I use our internal portal from Firefox. No troubles.

But don't let total ignorance of the product stop you from bashing it. This is, after all, Slashdot.

They compared the wrong products

For ease of collaboration nothing beats Lotus QuickPlace (which runs on Lotus Notes) We switched from QuickPlace to SharePoint, and it completely sucked. The Lotus Notes client completely blows but the Lotus Notes server kicks ass.

Sharepoint v Twiki

We use Sharepoint and Twiki nearly interchangeably at work. I don't have a problem with either of them. The people complaining about Sharepoint needing a lot of ActiveX controls must be using far more advanced features than are available on our installation. I access Sharepoint using Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera (on Linux) regularly and have never had any problems. I'll admit that I resisted when "they" started pushing Sharepoint on me since past experience with MS designed web applications has shown me their zeal to lock out everything but IE on Windows (*cough*MS Project Central*cough*)... but since using it, I have no complaints at all.

Typically, we use Sharepoint for any Microsoft formatted docs (xls, doc, ppt, etc) since Office 2003 has pretty decent support for Sharepoint built-in. Click on a spreadsheet and Excel will check it out, show you who is working on the file, and check it back in when you save. Pretty slick. Gnumeric comes pretty close in that it appears to check it out, but Sharepoint doesn't seem to recognize the checked out state so checking it back in is problematic.

We then use Twiki for docs that are more static (PDFs, typically) and for pages that are heavily customized. I'm sure that Sharepoint allows for very customized pages as well but we use what we know and we know Twiki.

Uh-huh?

I wouldn't compare Notes 7 and Sharepoint. I'm using Notes 7 at work everyday, gets the job done. Watched last week as a Microsoft salesperson came to the company and held a Sharepoint presentation. Was nice but it assumed you were all Microsoft. We're not. Good if you are, otherwise I think you'll have issues integrating whatever non Microsoft you're using.

They both suck

I won't comment on the "collaboration" features, but a big part of Sharepoint and Domino are document repositories. Both of them have some major drawbacks in that area.

The big end user problem in Domino is the limited hierarchy. You have rooms, cabinets, folders, and files. People find it very limiting and confusing to be forced into that model. Some other issues involve poor performance and difficulty of performing backups because of certain design decisions that haven't been changed in the last 10 years. Everyone I've spoken to in my company hates using Domino.

Sharepoint offers unlimited hierarchy. The big problem in Sharepoint is security. You can set security on a respository but not on folders or documents. As far as I can determine, Windows authentication is required. This can be a real problem in a large corporation where various parts of the business have their own domains or active directory trees that aren't configured to trust the other domains or directories. Also, documents are differentiated and versioned entirely based on filename.

Sure, there are some things about document management that can be hard. I know from experience. I've written a document management system. That's why it amazes me that IBM and Microsoft haven't been able to put forth better offerings.

You're not talking about Domino...

the big end user problem in Domino is the limited hierarchy. You have rooms, cabinets, folders, and files.

Rooms, cabinets, folders, files, etc; are not Domino features... they're Quickplace features. Domino applications can be developed to have any sort of hierarchy you want. Quickplace comes out of the box with the room/cabinet... architecture you refer to.

Probably, though, the comparison of Quickplace to Sharepoint is more relevant anyway, as Domino is the full-fledged application server, and Quickplace is the easy document collaboration product. Quickplace specs match a lot more directly to Sharepoint than Domino specs do.

Sean

Wrong Products to compare

Why are we comparing 2 second string players in the industry to eachother? I would say BEA AquaLogic/Plumtree vs IBM would be a more valid article. However I dont take alot of stock in an article that glosses over the details of such a large discussion topic not to mention speaks as if Lotus and Microsoft are the only major players in this space.

Ghetto SharePoint

1. Take Office files.
2. Put in folders that make sense on shared drive.
3. Open Explorer, change View > Details. Right-click on column list, add Author, Date Modified, Owner, whatever.
4. Browse and send as attachment, open, edit, print.
5. Search > Advanced Search > "File Contents" for whatever.

Big reason for Sharepoint...

..is that the base version if free. It comes bundled with all Windows Server 2003 editions. I've worked with it a lot as a developer, which isn't much fun.

Sharepoint 'Portal' Server is the paid-for-product, but a lot of companies dip their toe in the free 'Windows Sharepoint Services' version and get hooked/caught. Both verions share the same code base, but Portal has more features (obviously).

Microsoft seemed to spend a lot of time getting the split between the free and paid for features just right. As soon as you have a couple of SP sites then it basically becomes impossible to manage them without 'upgrading'. That sometimes comes as a shock.

The MS Office team also provides a bunch of integration options for Sharepoint too, as in you can save directly into the 'Document Libraries' from Word/Excel, plus sync up your calendar in Outlook.

One important point to always consider about Sharepoint, and it's subsequent success, is that it has done well *because* of the OS and Office market Microsoft hold - without those two heavily linked in, it would never have sold on it's own, IMO.

Another example of Sharepoint's 'spread factor' is that you *must have* MS SQL Server, and most probably MS Active Directory too, to make it work - in case you haven't figured it out yet, once you touch Sharepoint you are more or less signing up for the complete Microsoft 'stack' across your desktops and servers.

Now Sharepoint is established off the back of Office/OS divisions (what's that M word again), it is actually getting better. The upcoming new drop with Office 2007 fixes most of the things wrong with SP 2003.

It's one of those situations that personally makes me go, hmmmm. It works well and is getting better, but you might feel you've been run over by the licensing truck...

- NA

But..but..but

That's really sharepoint portal server (quite expensive) v's Workplace services Express. Not Domino.

I have no idea!

I just wanted to add that I thank everyone on this board for working with these two pieces of software so I don't have to!

We went with Confluence

We went with Confluence from atlassian for our knowledge sharing. It uses real open-standards, is easy to use and costs less.

It is a hell of a lot easier than either of those two behemoths, won't lock you into anything, and the company isn't going to force to you into upgrades you don't want and don't need.

Just like choosing between two lousy presidents

Choosing between Lotus Notes and MS Sharepoint isn't an enviable choice. I've used both. I thought they both sucked in so many ways.

I particularly like the entry in the interface hall of shame specifically dedicated to the disgrace called Lotus Notes. The problem is that I thought Sharepoint was almost as bad.

Luckily I am a developer and I will just build a custom website that continues to function (unlike sharepoint) and has an intuitive interface (like neither).

My choice would be "none of the above".

Jeez, I get tired of hearing this

The "interface hall of shame [mac.com]" site is ludicrously out of date. It refers to Notes release 4.6, for God's sake! That was released in what, 1996? We're up to version 7 now! It's a little silly to keep harping on an interface that hasn't even been used in 10 years.

And criticizing Lotus Notes because you don't like the interface of a Notes application is somewhat like criticizing Linux because you don't like the GIMP. Applications can be well or poorly designed in any environment.

Sean

niether are what you need

My favorite tools for collaboration are MediaWiki and DARCS.

Niether Notes nor Sharepoint can show you the history, discussion, and differences like MediaWiki can. And MediaWiki can do it with immediacy and with an economy of bandwidth that IBM & MS can't approach.

I've programmed for lotus notes and a flakier monster you'll never know. I am currently using sharepoint for one of my clients and it is, well, lame. So much infrastructure for sharing files. Microsoft Word files.

No where near a proper comparison

Sorry but the article is crap.

They simply aren't comparing the right products, which of course shows exactly how lame ZDNet is in reviewing this sort of thing.

First off what they are showing in SharePoint is much more closely tied to say Lotus QuickPlace or Workplace. Taking the stock Domino product, even with its strong collaborative backbone and putting it up against SharePoint as is simply is not a correct test.

Where is Exchange mentioned here? Despite all of the features that Domino has, the real competitor is Exchange, not SharePoint. Domino is just a starting point for the discussion.

They are clearly making the same mistake that so many other MS shills make when trying to act independant and compare products, in that they don't compare the right ones.

Add Workplace or QuickPlace to the mix and then make a comparison.

GM.

As a Lotus Notes/Domino developer....

Disclaimer: I've been developing Lotus Notes applications both Client based and Web based for 12 years.

I have heard all the complaints about Notes and agree with some of them. I can't speak for Microsoft's answer(12 years late) to Lotus Notes because I haven't used it. I'm not gonna belittle it without getting my hands on it so I'll just do my part in defending what I know.

  The part of the article I disagree with is the developer resource as being a downside. Lotus Notes is not a difficult application platform. Trust me on this. I find it easy to work with and while I don't know every nook and cranny. If you know Visual Basic you know Lotusscript. @Formula language is very simple and isn't nearly and complex as application macros. I found most templates, even ones that are put out by openntf.org's open source templates will need to be customized in the real world. I can only count on one hand how many times a template or even preexisting application didn't need to be alterted in some way. I don't care how easy a template is on any development platform, you will almost always need some customization at the very least. I find the customization is key in making a customer happy with their application. If you know HTML, Javascript, C++, Java, Cold Fusion, etc, you can use these products to enhance the Web side of things aka Domino. Are they as integrated as they should be, no. But it's not impossible.

Sharepoint versions improving with each release..

Sharepoint 2001 was an abortion and a pain in the ass to use. The current version is about slightly less than halfway to where it needs to be. The next version will be be a huge improvement on numerous fronts (architecture, object model, integration, workflow, etc.) and I would expect the version after that to actually be a great product. Now if they would only get a standalone MS Rules Server 2007 out the door I'd be a relatively happy camper...

if you don't need it then get sharepoint. Nice.

'If you don't have the resources dedicated to developing collaborative applications, don't have complex application or integration requirements or if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat,' the review concludes. so to paraphrase: "if you don't need a collaborative application server then get Sharepoint" so basically for the task at hand Domino wins by a mile but the review manages to end up with the wildly complex double negative conclusion that on first reading sounds like the M$ solution came up on top.

You're squeezing my balls here...

Why the hell would you compare sharepoint and Domino???

If you're going to make proper comparisons you _really_ need to compare Domino with Sharepoint/Exchange maybe even that "other" MS Web server products *shudder*.

Domino is everything to everyone and uber fucking stable at that.
The _only_ thing that sucks about domino is the Notes client and personally I can get over that because the alternative is just as pointy-end-of-the-pinapple bad.

Sharepoint requires Office and IE

Sharepoint REQUIRES MS Office and MS IE. We're about to implement Sharepoint for my department for a documentation repository. You HAVE TO use IE, and viewing any documentation requires Office be installed.

Personally I would prefer some home grown solution that uses a content management system, bugzilla and dokuwiki. The use of a wiki for documentation is a much better solution than Sharepoint.

Andy

Having been on the user and dev end of both prods

I have used and built systems on both software sets, Here is what i found

- Lotus notes was more difficult to build an application but once we had built that application it did exactly what we wanted it to do and we could introduce our own work flows etc. That was something that sharepoint never gave us the ability to use/do.

- Sharepoint provides another great way for Microsoft to lock users into their software suites, We had disabled the use of IE across all servers within our company and installed and manage firefox, That leads us to massive problems with users ability to run with Sharepoint.

- Lotus notes is cross platform and does not have nearly as much lock-in to any particular vendor. There are so many additional third party products that integrate into Notes that you can have something so powerful that your entire business world can run from it with minimal development and maintenance.

- Sharepoint is something that was easy for us to deploy, but scaling it and keeping the whole system running seemed to take much more support time from the help desk which instantly made the software more costly over time than the Notes solution even after taking the development time for Notes into account.

- If you want to use Sharepoint from a system that is NOT on the domain its an absolute nightmare. When you want to add an article its time to start authenticating several times just to post, then it will often report that you do not have permissions even though you have authenticated to access the server. If you join the domain then it makes it all much easier.. but how about working from home and remote users? Its not an issue for Notes.

Reminds me...

I wonder how the "enterprise" companies like IBM and Oracle sell their software in the first place. My experinece with a lot of their ( very expensive) products is that they are difficult to install, use and develop with. As if they're following a "Making customers hate your product HOWTO". Microsoft's products are like 5 or 6 times more usable, always.

I understand that products of IBM and co are more capable and powerful, but in 70% of the cases the MS product would do fine..how come then the 'enterprise guys' sell much more than they are expected to?

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere

Or lotus workplace which are the real collaborating software. comparing notes to portal server, is like comparing outlook to sharepoint.

Exactly.

Which is why I mentioned the "ghetto sharepoint" a few comments up -- try to get your users to use, share, and organize their "stuff" on an NT share before making a commitment to fancy new software.

If your policy and process is a shambles then it doesn't matter if you buy Lotus or SharePoint or whatever.

Re:Sharepoint vs WebSphere

Yes, comparing Lotus Domino to SharePoint doesn't make a lot of sense. SharePoint was designed with just one purpose in mind, whereas Lotus Domino was designed to be a Web Server, a Mail Server, an Application Server, AND a Collaboration Server. It's like comparing a machette to a swiss army knife... The machette cuts down bushes better, but that's all it was designed to do.

If you wanted to make this a fair comparison, you should really include Microsoft Exchange and IIS to this collection.