System i Addict

So I am back from the first day at the “New Job” and they use Exchange and Outlook for Mail. I know this is going to kick most of you in the soft spot between the legs but I still think Outlook has Notes beat all day long. It’s much easier to use and is so less clunky thank Notes, but with that said I still see the power of Notes and what I can create, but after you look a the integration with AD and then back at Domino with it’s lack of integration and the ID files and HTTP Passwords you start to know that most of what MS puts out is FUD, but there might be some truth to it at least at the user level.

I used to be an Exchange Admin and I hated it, but being an Outlook user is actually fun right now.

The guy I am working for has a 16GB mail box….yeap 16 GB on the server. Outlook handles it fine, and I knew in that breath that Exchange had Domino beat. I had a $700K iSeries running Domino and it you had a 1 GB mail box you could choke both Domino and Notes. I guess that one is easy to see.

I know there are going to be the people that think I have gone crazy but if a company just wants to run mail I can’t help them not at least consider Exchange & Outlook, but if a company needs an App Server that also does Mail then Lotus is your cup of tea.

I will keep my eyes on both sides of the fence but today alone has shown me the power of Outlook and how far Lotus has to come with Hannover to make it stick to the kitchen wall.

I listened to what Ed had to say, but unless Hannover had “IT” you might as well hang “IT” up and from what I have seen of Notes 8 it’s close but I don’t think it going to stand up to Outlook. Just my 2 cents as of today and if you know me I will be picking Outlook apart in no time.

BAD EXCHANGE : Ok so I said I would find things that Exchange did badly. It does not support Mac or Linux using OWA. If you need to use OWA from a Mac or Linux you are up the turd creak without a paddle. You can’t even use IE for Mac to get it to work and Entourage is just a joke and constantly has problems connecting via the Mac to Exchange. Go figure.

So when my wife whom is in school and the school gives her an OWA to get her mail there since she works there too sehe can’t from home since we are all using Macs. So there is one tick for you aginst the all mighty Exchange. No really support for anything other than Windows and IE6.

Update: After what I think is about 2 months of using Outlook it’s not bad. It does mail and calendars just fine. I think some of the hard parts are just getting to know the lay of the Address Book, but other than that it seems ok. We have an outage in the UK Mail server, and marketing person emailed a fairly large file and choked the system, they added some disk and everything was OK. I thin it’s on a blade/SAN in the UK as well as in the US.

There are some things I miss about Lotus Notes, but the majority of them I don’t.

I don’t miss User.id files. Who was the idiot at IBM who thought that was a good idea.

I don’t miss the ugly client.

I don’t miss the Dot releases every 3 months from Lotus

I do miss the ability to create applications and DB on the fly.

I do miss the easy way I could create and edit forms and such.

I do miss the idea that I am using an outdated client that is hard to find a job doing….oh right that would be on the other side of the coin.

Oh well for now. I am an email user and not an Admin and I have to say that is the one thing I don’t miss.
-David