Lotus Notes swaps customers with Microsoft Exchange
IBM is crowing about its increase in Lotus Notes licenses to 145 million, up five million in the past year. That's nice, but I'm willing to bet that Microsoft could issue a similar press release, and probably could claim even more Notes/Domino emigrants to Exchange.
In fact, for the past few years Microsoft has been doing exactly that.
If one looks to neutral analysts to be the line judge in this discussion, the water becomes even murkier, as eWeek points out:
Market share estimates vary widely for Exchange and Lotus Notes. Gartner Dataquest's most recent report from 2008 shows Notes narrowing the gap on market leader Exchange, with IBM's Notes owning 40 percent share worldwide and Microsoft grabbing 48 percent for Exchange.
IDC's annual market share analysis of collaborative environments puts Microsoft's market share at 52 percent, with IBM's market share slipping 5 percent to 37.7 percent. A Ferris Research survey of 917 organizations worldwide found Exchange in 65 percent of those shops.
In the land of the big incumbent software vendors, it's really a matter of customer ping-pong, as SAP and Oracle's back-and-forth suggests, without significant market share gains at each other's expense.
When open-source Zimbra/Yahoo! claims to have gained five million licenses at either IBM's or Microsoft's expense, that will be real news, because it will represent real market share gains for a competitor. But this sort of PR from IBM? It's really just saying, "We nabbed five million seats from Microsoft while it was stealing five million from us."
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I have never encountered and more cumbersome pile of corporate trash than Lotus Notes.
Really sad.
Prior to Outlook 2003, the old "ANSI PST" files were limited to 2GB. Of course one may have multiple PST files so this isn't much of a concern in practice. The only problem would be a single message > 2GB in size... but other parts of the email infrastructure wouldn't be able to support that anyway.
Since Outlook 2003, the "Unicode PST" format can support 32 TB (yes, terabytes). There is a "soft-limit" of 20 GB by default but if you want to have multi-terabyte files, that's up to you.
It's now 2009 so if anyone is still using the old format then don't blame Microsoft. There are numerous utilities available to convert old files to the new format.
- by serhart June 18, 2009 11:54 PM PDT
- I'd much rather use Lotus Notes. At least you can do something with it if you don't like the interface - add a little code, a button or two, do some address lookups in a corporate or shared address book. With exchange you get what you get, like going back 10 or 15 years. Act! was ok in '95, I liked it, better than dbase or foxpro MAYBE, but certainly not as good as being able to write a little code like you get w Lotus Notes - not even hard code. Besides, if a user has problems w their mailbox, you just restore one mailbox w Lotus Notes, not 50 or more like with exchange. Jeez, what are people thinking? Look past the ms hype, please, and past the shops that haven't upgraded for 5 years. Learn what you can really do with Lotus Notes.
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