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Lotus vs. SharePoint 181

Posted by Zonk from the let's-get-it-on dept.
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."
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Lotus vs. SharePoint More

Lotus vs. SharePoint

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  • Haven't RTFA yet, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Qui-Gon Jinn ( 53730 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:03PM (#15403448)
    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
    • I find the Notes/Domino solution confusing - the learning curve is quite steep and requires actual training it seems. BUT my coworkers find it very flexible and useful. On the otherhand, I've had difficulties getting sharepoint to work properly in a large distributed developer group.

  • Irony (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by sodul ( 833177 )
      I have to use Share-point where I work and I truly deeply hate it.

      Sure it kind of works in an All Windows/IE, purely M$ environment, but as soon as you add an alternative browser, or even worse OS, then it's damn painful.

      It's also quite difficult to update data automatically (it might actually be possible, but I doubt it's trivial to get data from a non M$ machine).

      I guess something like sharepoint works for 'Management', but for developers I think it's hard to beat a good Wiki. And good ones have history,

    • Re: Irony (Score:5, Interesting)

      by i am kman ( 972584 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:28PM (#15403669)
      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 (Score:3, Insightful)

        by popeyethesailor ( 325796 )
        It's very good for what it does out of the box, but the extension capabilities suck.
        Three different programming models(Web parts,CAML,Sharepoint object model) for extensions, wacky directory structure, SQL server dependence, windows authentication, a stupid markup language with no designer support, and a whole lot of inadeuqately documented features.

        Working across firewalls? Do you use the whole gamut of office integration features? Such as MS Project publishing, Outlook sync, and document storage for Offic
      • It's nice for small shops. In a large corporation with 250,000+ employees, Sharepoint doesn't work so well.
      • > I also used Lotus 2-3 years ago and it was far more difficult to use and setup new areas.

        Am I the only one that first read that as "I also used Lotus 1-2-3 years ago"?

    • Re:Irony (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      so Sharepoint sucks because your company is incompetent, interesting.

    • Re:Irony (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Plone doesn't do the same thing as Sharepoint AT ALL. It sounds like your problem wwas that Sharepoint was an inapropriate solution, rather than that it's a bad product.

      • Re:Irony (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Now, why can't it be both? Inappropriate an bad.

    • Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <{jmorris} {at} {beau.org}> on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:43PM (#15403800)
      > 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.
      • 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
        • What if I cut the monkey training budget so my stock would go up one quarter of one percent?

          Then you will have to hire trained monkeys and you will wonder why your current monkeys get cranky and while about working too hard when you can't find ones that will work for the relatively few peanuts you provide.

    • Re:Irony (Score:2, Interesting)

      by notaprguy ( 906128 )
      POSP (plain old sharepoint) is probably not the right solution for managing a complex software development team/project. I'm no fan-boy but Microsoft's new "Team System" product includes a collaboration server for source control, team management, requirements management etc. that I think is based on Sharepoint and has rec'd good reviews. I'm sure there are better products out there but I bet there a hell of a lot more expensive.

  • infinity (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why not try infinity [crosslogic.com]

  • The key phrase (Score:2, Informative)

    by crummyname ( 977083 )
    "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."

    • Re:The key phrase (Score:3, Informative)

      by Serapth ( 643581 )
      Sharepoint is actually a pretty damned impressive product now that it hit 2003. 2001 and the origonal werent near as impressive. Sharepoint is pretty damned close to a disruptive technology if your company uses it correctly. It pretty much blows away the concept of organizing via shared network file system aswell as sharing documents internally with attachments. If you can train yourself off both those practices, the productivity gain is pretty damned impressive.

      That said, Workflow is the biggest weak
  • Sharepoint Wins...

    FATALITY!

  • Too little too late (Score:3, Informative)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:14PM (#15403551)
    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.
    • (rant)

      which is the goofy part, as Notes has been around for soooo long it still is as buggy as beta. I have been using and supporting notes for almost 4 years and there is no end to the crashes, bugs, missing dic files, random unread docs, replication conflicts, and dont get me started on trying to migrate from version 5-6, let alone from 6-7. Every day I fear turning on the sametime server or using the more advanced features, often waking up in a cold sweat seeing the Red Box of death from the old days

      • Re:Too little too late (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Belial6 ( 794905 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:58PM (#15403948)
        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.
        • As for the rest the problems I am aware of are just that problems, I can fix them just fine, the misterious unread documents are still that, a mistery as the users who are experiencing it do not use the web interfact let alone know what something like that would be, they are rather simple folk. Nah this is something completely separate, I have seen the web gui issue, this is different in that it is almost always 1 unread, misteriouly appearing during the working day, even had it happen a couple times fo
          • I'll tell you, 80%-90% of the clients I have worked for have had this same story. It is why most people that dislike Notes/Domino, feel the way they do. Imagine how much people would hate C, C++, or Java if all of their applications were written by secretaries.

            That being said, a secretary and a real developer can make a fabulous development team. I do a lot of work for a steel mill, and their devleoper employee got the job because she was willing to do the work. No development background, and little
      • I've been working with Notes for the past 4 or 5 years, the problem as I see it is with a little bit of knowledge you can get something up and running, then you build on top of what you've got, a little more functionality here, a funky new screen there......

        You can code absolute crap and Notes will run, yeah it'll pop the red box up or piss off and think about things for 20 minutes before giving you control back but it will run.

        Currently for my sins I'm maintaining and extending a Notes system written b

      • In the next month or so my work will be migrating from 5-7. I too wake up in a cold sweat.
    • I remember when the same could be said with Novell and their NDS ( now Edirectory) services.

      Look where they are now?

      Its amazing how much integration gives phb's a woody. Active directory is a pos or was when I was in IT in 1999 when someone told me its bloated 70x over NDS and would require a whole lan upgrade!

      I think most linux users who love to bash Microsoft never understand why their os is not king of the desktop. Articles like this mentioning Office2k7 integration and windows integration is what MS use
  • Me thinks they forgot about Novell's Groupwise too.
    • GroupWise is something completely different. It's comparable with Exchange/Outlook
    • I can say as a company we are moving away from Novell to a sharepoint solution. ( By the way, Groupwise is closer to Exchange, so far as products go ). Right now we make fairly extensive use of iFolder for our Extranet and hands down Sharepoint has it beat. First of, the stability of Novell is something horrid compared to Windows 2003 ( never though id say that... ). Yet, since about Netware 6, its brutal the number of critical crashes that occur.

      On top of that, Novell just can't compete feature wise.
      • Try Plone.

        Office integration, DAV support, FTP support, workflow, permissions (with delegation), internalization, all out of the box, all with one click install.

        You can't really go wrong. If you really want to pay get Z4I from zope corp.
      • Crashes in NetWare? I've seen two or three of those, and completely related to hardware. I'm just comming off the phone with someone that wants me to do some NetWare (6.5) consulting, and tells me that they have been without a NetWare support person for years, because it's zero maintenance. Sure, it's a dying platform, but not because of lack of stability.

  • Speaking as a Scarepoint user (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Limburgher ( 523006 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:21PM (#15403610) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • key phrase: "from a ...site I built"

    • Re:Speaking as a Scarepoint user (Score:5, Informative)

      by awkScooby ( 741257 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:43PM (#15403804)
      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.

      • For pictures of the looks of horror on their faces when you pulled out your mac and started booting it.

        I've been subjected to "Bloated Goats" every time I've worked at IBM. I've already arrived at the conclusion that all email products suck, but both IBM's and Microsoft's groupware products suck that little bit extra that makes all the difference. Notes and Exchange both get a rating of "Sucktastic" in my book. You know it's bad when you're glad to go home to an email client that "only" sucks donkey balls

    • God forbid anyone use something other than IE.

      I've used it with Mozilla without any problems, and when there are problems, the same problems also show up in IE...

  • WSS v3 & MOSS 2007 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iacyclone ( 180583 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:23PM (#15403626)
    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.
    • It's microsoft after all, and they have a history of deception.

      What's nice about that is that as a sysadmin I'm -guaranteed- work anywhere that attempts to do anything slightly different than a default installation.

      (I after e except after c right?)

  • Grrrr (Score:1, Interesting)

    by neonprimetime ( 528653 )
    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.

    • Re:Grrrr (Score:3, Interesting)

      by supremebob ( 574732 )
      You should really try using NotesBuddy instead, which is basically a Lotus Sametime client with a lightweight Notes mail client built in. It works well for most messages, but you still need to open Notes if you get an embedded database link.
  • 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.
    • great deep chasm?

      (GO LOTUS! GO IBM!)

      Goddamned Stupid:

      "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
      Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING."

      I only lower-cased ver in over to end the abort..
    • It is, believe me. I've been to a few job interviews in the past where people have said "yeah, we use Notes here, but apart from that its quite a good company to work for".

      I have used Notes before at my first company, which is why I sneak the topic into conversation at interviews. (usually it means the company has a IT dept that is rabidly anti-MS and pro IBM, and therefore usually religiously blinkered to a lot of other things that make life easier)

  • Sharepoint is OK (Score:5, Informative)

    by br00tus ( 528477 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:30PM (#15403684)
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by duplicate-nickname ( 87112 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:39PM (#15403755) Homepage
      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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by gambino21 ( 809810 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:41PM (#15403780)
      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.
      • Nothing much to add to this except "me too". We've been using it for a number of months now. We're just a small group of around 10 people working on some certification documentation and I've yet to hear anyone complain about any aspect of it.
    • if you build it, they will come. ;)

    • Re:Sharepoint is OK (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ackdesha ( 572569 )
      I am stuck here in Windows hell, are there any GPL and possibly UNIX-friendly versions of this type os software?

      I've been using basecamp http://www.basecamphq.com/ [basecamphq.com] as a lightweight solution, and I really like it so far. I'm not sure about scaling it up to a large corporate level, but it has been great so far for my small team. The downside is all of your data is on their servers.

      It uses a Software as a service model, pay as you go. So not GPL, but it does expose a HTTP/XML API that could easily be

    • Subversion is far better for your needs. (Score:5, Informative)

      by 955301 ( 209856 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:58PM (#15403946) Journal

      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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by plopez ( 54068 )
      I tested and pushed hard for theis one at a place I worked at:

      http://www.cybozu.com/ [cybozu.com]

      then they hired an IT genius for a director or it who thought that the only true software is microsoft....
    • www.alfresco.org (maps a netbios drive so \\fileshare_A works as well as the web ui, check out the feature set) open source, j2ee

    • Re:Sharepoint is OK (Score:4, Insightful)

      by HrothgarReborn ( 740385 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @03:11PM (#15404067)
      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.
    • Sharepoint is a pale subsitute for plone.

      I would also reccomend people take a look at ifolder, it's really nice.

    • Re:Sharepoint is OK (Score:3, Informative)

      by batkiwi ( 137781 )
      Two things you're missing:

      1. Sharepoint integrates with outlook 2003, so that you can email a sharepoint document from the sharepoint UI and it automatically gets "reference attached" to your outlook email. This is very handy as it opens from within sharepoint, so if they edit it it's updated automatically on the site.

      2. "\\sharepointserver\sitename\document library name" will work unless your sharepoint server is misconfigured. They still let you use it as a network share.
  • Sharepoint is clearly looking down upon Lotus notes.
  • 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by diatonic ( 318560 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @02:43PM (#15403809) Homepage
    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 ::
  • 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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kurt Granroth ( 9052 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @03:05PM (#15404016)
    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.
  • 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 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chazmyrr ( 145612 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @03:26PM (#15404215)
    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.
    • Hi, I was going to avoid this little flamewar as I have a biased viewpoint*, but I feel compelled to address this ditty:

      "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 othe

    • You're not talking about Domino... (Score:4, Informative)

      by sean.peters ( 568334 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @04:18PM (#15404676) Homepage
      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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by sean.peters ( 568334 ) on Thursday May 25, 2006 @04:30PM (#15404778) Homepage

      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

  • '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 conclus
  • 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 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
  • 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 mana

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