Comparison between Lotus Domino and Ms E

i can't give you the roi figures you probably want. but i administer Domino 5.11 and have also been net admin in an Exchange environment. here is my 2 cents:
we are blissfully free of most security challenges found in Exchange/Outlook environment. that is, we are not plagued by the worms and email viruses to which Outlook is susceptible. that is very nice. otoh, admin is much more difficult, imho. Domino is not relational and it is quite a bit harder to develop in, imho. there are several scripting/programming languages to learn. some things can only be done in some of the languages. the on-line help is good but you have to read and read. we bought support direct from ibm and it has not really been worth it. for the basic questions i had,they mostly said, sorry you need to get a consultant. our sole consultant in this area is very arrogant and $200/hr and not worth the money. i have not been given any training or budget for learning the system. i have managed some development but much much easier to learn Exchange. when i ran the exchange system, i groped my way thru some very useful VB code fairly easily by using the wonderful examples in the help for VB. say what you will about microsoft, i love the documentation and on-line help available. beats Domino/Notes all to heck. For example, hardly any one on techrepublic ever answers lotus questions, in my experience. but plenty of great help is available for exchange...
one good thing about domino is that it will run on linux. i have actually managed that without help. it just works. i believe any savings you see in domino will be outweighed by extra admin/support costs. on the other hand, the system has been extremely stable and robust. we run applications server. hopethis help some...

I would agree with the previous answer. I have administered GroupWise, Notes, and now Exchange. I prefer GW, but there you go. Notes is much harder to administer then Exchange. Many of the automated tasks in Exchange have to be done manually in Notes. That said, Notes has many groupware functions than can be very handy. It's easy to create and share forms and flat file databases with Notes. We hooked up to a large bank that had a nationwide database of properties and forms relates to them so vendors like us could process all our work on line. Nice! But that took a lot of work to maintain. If you don't need the database functions, Notes is way too much work for simple e-mail.

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