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Lotus Notes Alternatives

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by curtdirt00

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I have recently started at a tech company that uses Lotus Notes for the typical email and calender use as well as databases. There are hundreds of databases being accessed by thousands of employees and my boss is interested in seeing if there are any reasonable alternatives to LN. Any information would be greatly appreciated, especially from you tech gurus.

4 replies

by seanferd

Evolution?
http://www.google.com/search?q=Lotus+Notes+Alternatives

You may have to find several applications/servers to replace Notes - most application suites do not have functional mirror images competing. If you provide more explicit criteria, you'll probably get better suggestions. Databases that do what, in general? What parts of Notes do you need to replace*? Why don't we want to use Notes any more? What platform/environment is Notes running in?

The competition as seen from IBM:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/notesanddomino/competitive.html

*If you need a bit of mental framework to describe how you use Notes, and what you actually need in a replacement, this might help:
http://www.nsftools.com/misc/WhatIsNotes.htm

Consider also the migration factor if you want to replace Notes. It will likely be interesting times when you do the migration.

by curtdirt00

The databases cover a broad basis of purposes. There are databases that store the past returns of products, store information on clients, sales and purchase orders, supplier and vendor network information, and a large part are databases that have "documents" that are template documents for policies, procedures and processes for how things should be completed based on different specifications provided off the user needs. It's difficult to explain without going into specific details, but the company likes to keep any detail confidential. Most replacements seem to be very dominantly aimed towards an email substitution with a calender function.

by seanferd

Any DB can be programmed to perform similar functions, but no DB works quite like Lotus.

Have you considered any of the other questions? Importantly, what is the reason you want to replace Lotus?

Mostly, you will be looking exactly at "an email substitution with a calender function. ", plus collaboration software (if you use Lotus that way) plus a database which will have to be programmed to do what you want. You're probably looking at 2 replacement solutions, at minimum.

I'd suggest getting comfortable with an open source DB that can be had for free, and see if you can do what you want with it. After that, look at whatever seems to be a good email and calendering fit.

The more questions you can answer, the more likely it is that people with heavy experience can advise you further.

by nln

The best way to look at this is what Lotus Notes provides and what are your alternates. Lotus Notes provides
a) Messaging
b) Collaboration
c) 'Platform for citizen developers and IT developers' to build biz apps

Many organizations are moving to Google for the above. You should search for "Gone Google" in Google. Sorry for so many googles.

Messaging is fullfilled by GMail.
Collaboration is fullfilled by Google Apps
Partners like OrangeScape provide the 'Biz Apps' platform on top of 'Google App Engine' which make it a total unified solution.

Full Disclosure: I am part of OrangeScape.

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