Advantages of Outlook compared Lotus Notes

Can somebody brief me the advantages of Outlook compared Lotus Notes. Or is Lotus Notes superior to Outlook by anyway? Our requirements are that of a large corporate... calling meetings, conducting surveys etc... other than mailing.

rgds

johnjohns

I'd been using Notes for Calendar and Mail functions for about 5 years until November last year and have just switched to Outlook.

From a basic user point of view I'm not sure that there's a huge difference if Lotus is implemented well. We had a lot of the features that Outlook offers plus some (document databases mainly) but it never quite felt like a package that had the polished feel that Outlook has and is definitely not as user friendly.

I would say the advantages of Outlook are:

- Better integration with other Microsoft products which I assume you use
- Reduced training requirements due to people being more likely to use Outlook outside of the work environment
- Built in functionality does pretty much everything you would require for a corporate solution
- Much easier automation using VBA
- IMHO it's a better product

I don't know much about the technical side of Lotus but I think it is probably a more configurable product but with that comes the need for the expertise to do that.

I'm still getting my hands dirty with the more technical aspects of what is possible with Outlook but in a couple of months I've already far surpassed what I was able to do in five years with Lotus.

Dom

Johnjohns,

my experience with Lotus Notes is a few years old, but back then, the strong point of Lotus Notes was the Groupware aspect, i.e. easy setup of new databases to share discussions and documents. The email and calendaring were just another type of database, really, but overall integration with MS Office was not too great.

These days, in an environment where email is managed by Exchange and Outlook, and the corporation may implement Sharepoint or MOSS, I think the Microsoft solution has definite advantages.

The way that Lotus Notes developed with Domino and follow on versions enables the design of databases for web publication, but, again that is more about information sharing than about email.

I used to be very much in the Lotus Notes camp, having been brainwashed by their slogan "an email solution you will never need to 'exchange'" but in the last years I have definitely moved into the Microsoft camp.

For what it's worth, from a strategic point of view, I feel that MS Office offers the better basis for integration of corporate solutions, with platforms based on .NET, Sharepoint, TeamFoundationServer etc.

But maybe this just reflects my current brain-wash ....

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