Microsoft and IBM are two main competitors in Enterprise Collaboration Tools Market with their Exchange/Communicator and Domino/Sametime Respectively.
While the users opinion on which is better varies, we thought of getting what Microsoft has to say
Below is an article about why you may want to switch from IBM to Microsoft
The link to article is http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/vi/vn/notes.aspx
Now more than ever, organizations need adaptable and cost-effective communication tools. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 helps you achieve new levels of reliability and performance by delivering features that simplify administration, help protect communications, and delight users by meeting their demands for greater business mobility. Microsoft Exchange, the cornerstone of the Microsoft Unified Communications solution, has long been the choice of organizations to support rich and productive collaboration among its users. With the latest release of Exchange, users are assured the widest range of deployment options, the richest user experience, and integrated protection and compliance capabilities for their information. These features combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available. Come join the almost 13 million strong who have decided to switch to Microsoft in the past few years to take advantage of rich capabilities, reduction in costs, and better total cost of ownership across our platform!
Because of pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing economic conditions, you must be agile and invest in solutions that provide you and your organization with choice. Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment to your unique needs and provides a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.
Microsoft and IBM are two main competitors in Enterprise Collaboration Tools Market with their Exchange/Communicator and Domino/Sametime Respectively.
While the users opinion on which is better varies, we thought of getting the Microsoft has to say
Below is an article about why you may want to switch from IBM to Microsoft
The link to article is http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/vi/vn/notes.aspx
Now more than ever, organizations need adaptable and cost-effective communication tools. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 helps you achieve new levels of reliability and performance by delivering features that simplify administration, help protect communications, and delight users by meeting their demands for greater business mobility. Microsoft Exchange, the cornerstone of the Microsoft Unified Communications solution, has long been the choice of organizations to support rich and productive collaboration among its users. With the latest release of Exchange, users are assured the widest range of deployment options, the richest user experience, and integrated protection and compliance capabilities for their information. These features combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available. Come join the almost 13 million strong who have decided to switch to Microsoft in the past few years to take advantage of rich capabilities, reduction in costs, and better total cost of ownership across our platform!
Because of pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing economic conditions, you must be agile and invest in solutions that provide you and your organization with choice. Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment to your unique needs and provides a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.
With Exchange, you can choose from on-premises deployment with Exchange Server 2010, a Microsoft hosted service with Exchange Online, or a seamless mix of both. Microsoft’s commitment to Software plus Services ensures that you can decide on your timeline for taking advantage of the flexibility and power of both without interrupting or changing your users' experience.
Microsoft Exchange Server has always provided and continues to provide you with the choice of a wider range of storage hardware options than any other solution. These options range from traditional Storage Area Networks (SAN) to low-cost, desktop-class Direct Attached Storage (DAS). In the latest release, continued innovation in the Exchange mailbox database means that you will experience up to a 90% reduction in disk input/output per second (IOPS) compared with Exchange Server 2003 and greater resiliency against data corruption. All of this means choice for cheaper storage options from Exchange that allow you to give great storage capabilities to users.
Microsoft Exchange 2010 helps users get more done by giving them the freedom to securely access all of their communications—e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more—from virtually any platform, Web-browser, or device through industry-standard protocols. Enhancements in the latest release of Exchange provide users- access to all of their communications from a single location as it makes it easier for them to collaborate with each other and their business partners. With these enhancements, you can
Offer your users a premium Outlook experience on the desktop, on the Web, and on mobile devices, including Outlook Web Access support for even more browsers, including Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.
Unify access to e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and text messages, so your users can pick the best way to communicate no matter where they are.
Add native support for virtually every mobile device, including a premium experience with Windows Mobile, through Exchange ActiveSync.
Share free/busy information with external business partners for fast and efficient scheduling, choosing the level of detail you wish to share.
The volume of e-mail continues to increase. so the need to systematically preserve and discover this information has become critical—whether your motivation is to improve storage management, meet regulatory requirements for data retention, or lower the cost of satisfying electronic discovery (e-Discovery) requests. Exchange Server 2010 introduces integrated e-mail archiving, retention, and discovery capabilities that help simplify and automate the process of protecting and preserving your business communications. These built-in tools can help you preserve and discover e-mail without changing the way your users or administrators work with and manage Exchange.
Microsoft Exchange continues to deliver the leading messaging experience for end users and deliver on the business needs of IT. IBM Lotus Notes and Domino continue to work to add features and functionality to their software that are native to Exchange. Exchange differs from Lotus Domino in the following ways:
Superior User Experience: Don’t take our word for it, take our customers’. In a recent case study by Brinks Home Security, Rob Trotter, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Brinks Home Security, said, “Users understood the advantages of moving to the 2007 Office release and Outlook 2007 from the very beginning. In fact, when we first announced the move from Lotus Notes to Outlook 2007 at an all-managers meeting, we got a standing ovation and cheers.” Exchange 2010 delivers more for the user experience than ever before with an enhanced conversation view for mail triage, speech-to-text transcription for voice mail and MailTips to improve messaging efficiency and avoid accidental or unintended e-mails. Although recent versions of Notes updated the user interface, it lags behind in key user’s features and the addition of Eclipse as an underlying structure has increased both the memory and disk footprint that has required, in some cases, new hardware to take advantage of the new release.
The Road to Enterprise Services: Microsoft delivers multi-tenant scalable solutions that provide advantages in total cost of ownership, flexibility, and IT control. Services isn’t just about taking an on-premises server and putting it in a datacenter; it’s about building in scalability from the beginning, and Exchange Server 2010 delivers that architecture natively. IBM does not offer this full range of deployment choices but provides only limited outsourced solutions. And their LotusLive iNotes offering is based on their acquisition of Outblaze, a consumer grade e-mail offering that creates a separate messaging experience for those users. This calls into question IBM’s ability to scale Lotus Domino to millions of users while maintaining low costs.
A Single Unified Communications Platform: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 continues to address users’ needs by providing new capabilities for unified messaging, integrated e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging (IM), Short Message Service (SMS) text messages, and mobility management. All of these capabilities are provided within a single Exchange product compared with the multiple, disparate products that an IBM deployment requires.
Built-in Enterprise Mobility: In Exchange Server 2010, mobile users can access their messages from a truly universal inbox with SMS text messages, e-mail, voice mail, and saved IM conversations. IT administrators can control the devices that connect to their networks though a block/allow list to ensure that only approved devices connect to the Exchange Server messaging data.
The best part of mobile access in Exchange Server 2010 is that it is all built into Exchange Server. You do not need to buy extra servers and client access licenses (CALs) from third-party providers or manage another, separate system for mobile access.
In contrast, Lotus Notes Traveler, Lotus’ mobile experience for Domino, which was recently rewritten to provide support for Exchange ActiveSync, provides only a basic mobile experience that analysts have said should not be deployed without “a third-party security and management offering.” Exchange has 47 mobile policies to manage and protect information and security of the devices that connect to your network.
Single, industry-leading directory interoperability: The Exchange team built the first native active directory application, Exchange 2000, almost nine years ago. IBM announced this feature for Domino 8.5.x releases, and by the time it is shipped, Exchange will have a ten-year head start on interoperability with the leading directory service in enterprises today, providing rich, powerful experiences to end users and IT Pros alike.
Storage, Archiving, and Retention: Microsoft Exchange 2010 addresses the needs to specify what data is stored and for how long with native e-mail archiving and robust retention policies that provide the tools you need to meet increasing compliance requirements. Exchange 2010 also enables powerful cross-mailbox searching capabilities that can be delegated through role-based access control, to ensure that the right people have the right tools to protect your organization. Domino provides only limited archiving and in most cases requires third-party products, with additional cost and complexity, to achieve the compliance capabilities that Exchange 2010 delivers natively.
With Microsoft Exchange 2010 customers can choose cheaper, lower-cost storage types including DAS, SATA, and JBOD without sacrificing reliability or performance. IBM provides Domino attachment object store (DAOS), but customers are not provided with a true range of storage options to reduce costs for all users.
Delivering Tools for the Global Economy: Microsoft Exchange 2010 includes the ability to share calendars with users outside your organization and associate permissions that you are comfortable with. In this release, secure messaging is not only supported within your organization, but for external users as well. Microsoft Exchange 2010 now enables secure communications with vendors, partners, and customers who previously required third-party tools or separate account management.
As you can see, Microsoft delivers innovation and capabilities that are well ahead of our competitors in many areas, and provides real value to customers.
