Gregg Eldred

ChannelWeb has a comparison of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 and Microsoft Outlook and Exchange 2010. In the review, they looked at five areas for comparison; installation and deployment, interoperability and customization, feature set, performance, and pricing. The products were running very close until ChannelWeb looked at pricing:

Consider a 100-user shop. To deploy the Enterprise Edition of Exchange 2010, you will need to purchase the software for $3,999. CALs will be another $3,500. That's about $7,500.

To deploy Domino Enterprise Server in the same-size organization would be $137 per user. That's a total cost of $13,700. But wait, as they say, there's more.

It would seem that IBM's pricing far exceeds Exchange. Yet, considering Domino is a platform upon which Notes and virtually limitless applications can run, it is economically reasonable. Also, the fact that Domino and Notes can run in an open-source environment can really reduce the amount an organization would otherwise have to spend on operating systems and other proprietary software licenses.

By the time an enterprise has purchased Exchange and the CALs for it, plus the Windows Server license and CALs for Windows Server, costs begin to snowball.

The edge in pricing, when all is factored in, goes to Lotus. You simply get more bang for your buck.

I can't help but wonder how the numbers would stack up if they looked at the cost and time to upgrade to the latest releases.

Link: ChannelWeb: Take a Message: It's Lotus Vs. Exchange

Comment posted by Charles Robinson06/22/2009 03:15:42 PM
Homepage: http://www.cubert.net

Upgrade times from the revision-back to the latest release would be similar, mostly because I don't trust in-place Domino upgrades anymore. I'm uninstalling, reinstalling, then using replication to push everything over, the same as I would with Exchange.

As for costs, I'm not sure. What would you consider to be an upgrade-only cost? Despite what Lotus tells you, you don't have to buy new hardware to upgrade from Exchange 2007 to 2010.

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Comment posted by Gregg Eldred06/22/2009 10:59:09 PM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf

@Charles: I may be playing with fire, but I have never done the uninstall/reinstall path with Domino. Always have had success with installing the new over the old. I recently did 7 servers in 2 hours, and most of that time was waiting for code to be copied to a remote server. But your method is just as valid, and worthwhile.

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Comment posted by Charles Robinson06/23/2009 09:22:48 AM
Homepage: http://www.cubert.net

As long as it works for you, go for it! I never did an uninstall/reinstall of Domino until I started testing upgrading 7.0.2 to 8.0. It failed far too frequently and an uninstall/reinstall fixed it, so that's what I added to my own SOP.

Upgrading from Exchange 2007 to 2010 is going to be a comparatively painless event. Exchange 2003 to 2007 required a whole new OS, but you could just detach the mail stores and reattach them, which sped up the process (comparatively). For Exchange 2007 to 2010 you can't do the mail store move trick, you have to recreate them, which pretty much means you must use clustering and adds significantly to the migration time. For me the Exchange 2007 > 2010 migration isn't much different from Domino 7 > 8.

I can't speak to the licensing costs. That's a black art I have not mastered on either side of the equation.

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