10 common beliefs in the Domino community
by Volker Weber
- Migrating from Domino to Exchange is a waste of money. Migrating from Exchange to Domino is not.
- Exchange servers crash all the time, leaving Outlook users for days without mail.
- Windows is a viable platform for running Domino but unfit for Exchange.
- Migrations from Domino to Exchange are driven by incompetent or sinister top management.
- Exchange is proprietary. Domino is open standards.
- The majority of Outlook users run against Exchange 5.5 servers.
- There are 130 million Notes users.
- Microsoft employees are habitual liars.
- Users hate Outlook.
- CIOs of Microsoft customers are incompetent.
Update: Von Tom ins Deutsche übersetzt.
Comments
u really awaiting "non-inherited" feedback on this :-) ?
in my humble personal opinion:
@ 1 in any case YOu have more value for money if You are using Domino. ( not with the oldfasioned IMAP task) ;-)
@3 is a nobrainer LINUX is much better if the customer has the skills for it.
@ 9 do they love I LOVE YOU Viruses?
@10 never heard that.
One is missing: "Users want choice, usability-by-design is for wimps"
And do you mind to put forward what you think a fair range for the real number of users might be ?
I guess ten million more or less won't matter in this context ;)
You missed one...
11. Local .pst files become corrupted all the time but local .nsf files do not.
@11
As can be seen in the USian White House "where da feck are all the emails" saga ... oh the smugness i feel about that is so empowering.
Steve
Lucius, you have to ask IBM. They like to put forward the cumulative number of licenses sold throughout the life of Notes, but the number of users on active maintenance is a secret.
@vowe: yes, the actual number of active notes shops may be a secret, but what I can say, I have a lot of customers who are using notes and who are not on active maintanance - some of them are still on R5... of cause there are also some exchange 5.5 and 2000 users out there as well... by the way, do M$ publish the number of users on active maintanence? As i recall they also used to sum up every office licence sold as an outlook user, was'nt it so?
From someone who has spent time as both a Domino & Exchange Admin over the years:
1) In a vacuum, migrations (in either direction) rarely make a whole lot of fiscal sense.
2) Exchange servers generally see more unplanned downtime then Domino servers, but "crashing all the time" is a stretch.
3) Does anybody really think that?
4) Short of a corporate merger where the dominant company is an Exchange shop, I've never seen anyone provide a good, nonpolitical reason to migrate. That being said, politics are not inherently sinister or incompetent, there just politics.
5) Domino is certainly a great deal more open standard.
6) There are a whole lot of Exchange 5.5 boxes out there, that's for sure (the Exchange upgrade misery index guarantees that)
7) No, but there there's also not 68 billion Sharepoint users (or whatever crazy number MS is throwing out these days). That's just marketing babble.
8) Nope, just the salesfolks.
9)No one believes that.
10) "Microsoft customer" would apply to 99% of CIOs in some way (at least in the US), and they have the same incompetence rate as any other profession I suspect.
I was going to crack a joke about you missing off being "obsessive" about Notes v Exchange talk? But I'm not sure many would get the irony or my humour :)
Here is my point of view, after some Exchange migrations:
1. It depends...
2. Many of my customers use Exchange (2000/2003/2007) never had a crash that takes the mailsystem of for days.
3. That depends of the skill inside of the company. If the company have no Unix and/or Linux skills: Who cares?
4. Argh! That hurts!
5. mhhh, just a little bit, or?
6. Nope! Most wun against Exchange 2003 and a fast growwing count against Exchange 2007
7. Users? Active? Or marketing counts?
8. OK! An IBMers not? normal for the vendor!
9. Users hate Notes to ;-)
10. No comment on that! SORRY :)
Plus find 67 reasons why Outlook sucks here.
May find some more on my own ;-)
Hey this is fun!
Let's see what I can comment intuitively:
1. Migrating from Domino to Exchange is a waste of money. Migrating from Exchange to Domino is not.
Actually you can't compare those 2 at all. Domino is a web and database server, exchange is a windows only holy e-mail client (with holy I mean it has lots of security holes).
2. Exchange servers crash all the time, leaving Outlook users for days without mail.
That's a fact. It has happened more than once, so in a mathematical sense its a prove that it will happen always. Besides, if you want e-mail, why not use some professional software like linux based e-mail servers and clients?
3. Windows is a viable platform for running Domino but unfit for Exchange.
Actually it's the other way around. Exchange runs only on Windows, while Domino greatly suffers from the 16 bit limits of the wannabe-32-bit Windows. Also Intel hardware raises nowadays a big barrier to the full performance of Domino.
4. Migrations from Domino to Exchange are driven by incompetent or sinister top management.
That I can sign. Someone who thinks Domino has anything to do with Exchange, has clearly no clue of IT at all.
5. Exchange is proprietary. Domino is open standards.
Neither is true. I wish Domino would be openSource, since currently vendors have to rewrite whole parts of Domino to fit their business needs.
6. The majority of Outlook users run against Exchange 5.5 servers.
No idea, but why not. It's hard to say with Exchange if a newer version has less problems than an older version.
7. There are 130 million Notes users.
Well, I certainly hope not! Notes is a compiler and debugger for Domino Designer and Domino Web Server applications. All existing Notes applications should be migrated to Firefox applications.
8. Microsoft employees are habitual liars.
Sad but true. Lies are not illegal in any country, and lies can be used to increase profit. IBM doesn't use the lies tactics yet, and I hope they will not in future either.
9. Users hate Outlook.
That's too general. Some users might still like it.
10. CIOs of Microsoft customers are incompetent.
No doubt. It might work today and tomorrow, but in a few years there won't be any Microsoft anymore. You should already start to plan for the future today and look for Linux/AIX solutions.
1. Migrating from Domino to Exchange is a waste of money. Migrating from Exchange to Domino is not.
You left out migrating from Exchange to newer-Exchange is a waste of money, because you need to upgrade hardware and OS as well. :)
2. Exchange servers crash all the time, leaving Outlook users for days without mail.
Can't comment on how often they crash. With respect to leaving Outlook users for days w/o e-mail: True, happened at a very large Telecom in Brasil, CIO ordered rip&replace of Exchange for Domino clustered on pSeries. They haven't looked back. Tells you how good the Exchange clustering solutions is.
3. Windows is a viable platform for running Domino but unfit for Exchange.
Obviously this depends on which version of Windows one is running. And if Exchange supports it. :) Rip and replace, buddy...OS included.
4. Migrations from Domino to Exchange are driven by incompetent or sinister top management.
no comment.
5. Exchange is proprietary. Domino is open standards.
No, Exchange just locks you in to an OS. And the forces you to upgrade that OS when upgrading to a newer Exchange version. No options, sorry.
6. The majority of Outlook users run against Exchange 5.5 servers.
No clue, no comment.
7. There are 130 million Notes users.
Who cares? I like the point about the Sharepoint users tho. And the outlook ones too...
8. Microsoft employees are habitual liars.
With respect to OOXML, or just in general?
9. Users hate Outlook.
People shouldn't hate. Period.
10. CIOs of Microsoft customers are incompetent.
no clue, no comment.
Do you people not have mail servers to upgrade/replace/migrate?
Why this 'my mail server is better than yours' pissing contest anyhow?
Who cares, use GMail!
End of story!
1) Migrating from Domino to Exchange is a waste of money. Migrating from Exchange to Domino is not.I know that Domino to Exchange is hugely expensive - only to be justified if there is a VERY strong strategic reason. Lotus have since the very early days been in the game of migrating from other systems to Notes.
2) Exchange servers crash all the time, leaving Outlook users for days without mail.That's what I've heard. Have no personal experience of this even though I worked at a Outlook shop for 10 months - just heaps of patches the whole time!
3) Windows is a viable platform for running Domino but unfit for Exchange.
Interesting. Dunno.
4) Migrations from Domino to Exchange are driven by incompetent or sinister top management.
That seems to be the case.
5) Exchange is proprietary. Domino is open standards.
Microsoft is manipulates with its proprietary offerings. Domino is not totally open but more so than Exchange.
6) The majority of Outlook users run against Exchange 5.5 servers.
Dunno. Don't care...yet.
7) There are 130 million Notes users.
Whoopee!!
8) Microsoft employees are habitual liars.
That's been near my experience - the .NET developers in my team though (and therefore by extrapolation probably the rest) are good characters and stand up very well under scrutinty. They do good work.
9) Users hate Outlook.
That's Gartner's opinion, as with Notes. It seems that users hate work email systems irrespective of brand - its probably the first thing they can blame if something goes wrong.
10) CIOs of Microsoft customers are incompetent.
That's rather harsh. Don't agree.
"Migrating from Domino to Exchange is a waste of money. Migrating from
Exchange to Domino is not."
It makes no sense that one way would be a waste of money and the other would not. You simply weight the pro's and con's of what each system offers vs. what you need and make a decision based on your business needs. There is no blanket answer to this.
"Exchange servers crash all the time, leaving Outlook users for days without mail."
This may be the funniest one of all. With all of the redundancy built into Exchange now, the only way users are stuck without email for any significant amount of time at all is due to poor planning by administrators. It must be nice to be able to say things like "Exchange servers crash all the time" without one shred of statistical data to back it up.
"Windows is a viable platform for running Domino but unfit for Exchange.
Migrations from Domino to Exchange are driven by incompetent or sinister top management."
Unfit for Exchange? Exchange was written specifically for Windows. Apparently it is so unfit that Exchange completely dominates Domino in market share. I guess that means 65% of all companies that run messaging software have "incompetent or sinister top management".
"Exchange is proprietary. Domino is open standards."
Exchange has its own propietary storage format and protocol (MAPI) as well as clients (Outlook), so does Domino. Both support open internet protocols for messaging such as SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 and other standards like MIME and iCAL. There is nothing that makes Exchange more proprietary than Domino.
"The majority of Outlook users run against Exchange 5.5 servers."
Clearly this is just because the list is old, as very few shops run Exchange 5.5 any more.
"There are 130 million Notes users."
Don't know about the raw numbers, just that however many Notes users you have multiply that by about 6 to get the number of Exchange users.
"Microsoft employees are habitual liars."
Clearly something made up by someone who was pissed off because support couldn't get his or her printer working. It's one thing to say that a sales guy lied to you about something a product would do in order to make you buy it, it's another thing entirely to accuse all MS employees of being "habitual liars". If all MS employees are habitual liars, then clearly an MS employee came up with this list.
"Users hate Outlook."
A nice generic statement with, again, not one shred of statistical data to back it up.
"CIOs of Microsoft customers are incompetent."
CIO's can be competent or not, it doesn't really matter what software they run. And considering that almost every CIO has to run at least some MS software, I guess that means that we only have a handful of competent CIO's left in the world. Like the rest of this list, a completely ridiculous statement.
Great weather, Marc.
