Bill. There is no key.

I was forced into it via the company being bought by the French. But like an arranged marriage you can grow to love each other. Now that yet another French company is buying the current French company we face moving away from it to something Microsoft. The sad thing is that my Global Messaging Team in the last two years has really cleaned the crap out of the 100 odd sites running servers. We have WebEx meetings with my team members in France and Pennsylvania, me in Everett, twice a week. I'm sad to see it go.

Exactly. Doesn't matter which platform you use, enterprise is non-trivial when done correctly. One nice thing about the Microsoft environment is you can mostly buy your way out of any jam via M$ or consultants. Also everything works with Microsoft. I have 34TB of archived mail on Symantec Enterprise Vault. It mostly supports Domino, until you want to extract. Then it's to the cmd line and half the time it locks up the indexer. The "Sure we support Domino" often turns out to be "we have a ten year old script people say they've got working."

Slow roll out. Active Directory. LanDesk Manager. Heterogeneous environment (same OS, same versions of clientware, same models of client hardware. Running IT/IS under ITIL methods. If you don't do enterprise IT then you might not be aware of all the tools out there to help.

Not sure about improved but we have beat them in to stable.

Hrumph! Server is Domino 9.0.2 and stable client is Notes 9.02FP7. They have FP10 our but we haven't tested it. One really fucked up thing is that FP can mean Fix Pack or Feature Pack. FP7 was the latest Fix Pack.

Going through that now with 100 servers and 30k users. Some servers have Enterprise Vault, some are DAOS, most are running applications that the site never told you about but it is business critical. Email me, I need a shoulder to cry on.

I'm sure they have made that up with just my company and 100 server with 30,000 users. But really, it's not as bad as you think.

I have 100 Domino servers on Windows Server, one on an AS400 (to be retired) and have it running on CentOS in my lab (damn corporate fear the Linux.) The AS400 is slated for replacement but I do have to say it is one solid bit of kit.

Yep, get Sharepoint to replicate to 100 different sites across the world.

Sending secure mail internally was easy as long as you kept track of you user's .id files.

I'm running 30,000 users all over the globe on IBM Domino (it hasn't been Lotus for two decades.) It is interesting but I must say there are some really cool things about it. Think of it this way, Exchange is a mail program that tries to be a database. Domino is a database program that tries to be a mail server. With Domino, email is just one way to use it. It's data replication between hosts over the WAN is like nothing Exchange could do. Domino was designed in the 90s when intermittent dial-up between hosts was the common solution. I have about 100 servers sitting in Tunisia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, all the EU, US and even Canada. They all talk together and share the same address book and master config.

So yes, now that we have been bought by another larger French aerospace company, we will be moving to some form of Exchange. It will still take years to get out from under all the applications so I'm sure I'm good until retirement in about 10 years.

But don't knock Domino until you have really looked at it. Did you know it runs on Unix and Linux? IBM supports it on the AS4000 so do you want to talk about uptime?

Nice to see that someone is still messing with resistors that have bands. You must like the old cruft like I do. My issue is the focus now. Many many years ago I was able to solder a 40 pin flat pack without glasses. Now I'm lucky to find the damn iron without technological assistance.

I'm a BSD/Linux head from way way back. No way would I run it for clients at a company over about 20 people. I do IT operations for a 90,000 user international 120 year old French company, I might know what I'm talking about.

If you think cherry picking is fun, I have some Eastern Washington orchardists that would like to chat with you.