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Outlook or Lotus Notes?

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At work, we're switching from Outlook to Lotus Notes. Is this fantastic or awful? Anyone have experience with both? All I know is in Lotus Notes, emails are purged after 120 days... In Outlook, I currently have emails saved from 3 years ago :eek:
 
I have Lotus Notes at work. I has some good features. It has a calendar that you can share with everyone, your work group, or may be able to keep private except for your super. You can create a folder to keep emails safe from being purged. I still have emails from 1 or 2 previous versions of Lotus. There is a lot of things your IT people can do with that will be useful for the user. Our company has a forum set up on Lotus. It's not used as a discussion forum, but more like an in house Craigslist classified.

I would imagine prior to launch, you will receive at least a half day class on how it works. The trainer should be able to answer all your questions.
 
Run Away!!! Lotus Notes is the most convoluted, backwards system that I have ever used. My University used it for a number of years before thankfully switching to a Google based solution.

Granted, Outlook is not without it's own faults, but it is far better than Lotus. The only thing you can hope for is that the system accepts IMAP, and that you can use a desktop client (i.e. Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, etc) It definitely will not solve all of your problems with Lotus, but it will help.
 
We're using Domino Web Access Release 7.0.4 Build 296 here and it's a bit backwards, but once you get used to it, it's not that bad and I prefer it over Outlook, even on a roaming profile. As I am Legion pointed out, emails are usually safe from purging in a folder, but I do have an email in my inbox from April/08, so it may be part of the quota settings.

I just check it daily, forward anything important and not covered under NDA to a gmail account, as well as use google docs and calendar.
 
Lotus notest whilst a bit older looking and perhaps in the features it offers, is an incredibly powerful business tool one of which once you get used to the change you probably wont look back on.

Outlook/Exchange is great but has less features as they want you to go down the root of sharepoint etc...
 
Also a Notes user at work. I have no complaints other than the purging of old email, but then again, I don't really use it to its full potential so I might not be the best at pointing out its strengths and weaknesses.
 
Notes 8.02 at work. It is a mess. Granted, it is a bit better than the 6.xx we had before but it is still a nightmare to work in. But I would still rather have Notes then Outlook.
 
The purging of old emails by Notes is an option that is established by the administrators and policy setters of the company. The rules can be changed or completely turned off.

Tim
 
At work, we're switching from Outlook to Lotus Notes. Is this fantastic or awful? Anyone have experience with both? All I know is in Lotus Notes, emails are purged after 120 days... In Outlook, I currently have emails saved from 3 years ago :eek:

Lotus notes is the digital kick in the nuts every morning you will have to deal with. Email retention is something being dictated by the lawyers, there is nothing in notes that forces a 120 day deletion. Yes, Notes is powerful but.... The problem is that it has a clunker of a user interface that no one understands. Simple tasks take for ever or are buried in menus that really don't make much sense. I am no fan of Outlook/Exchange but it does beat Notes. Sadly your employer is going to take a step backwards with this move.
 

Luc

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I used both at work (different workplaces). I'm indifferent on how it worked or didn't work. They both did the job so no complaints. If I have to choose between one or another I would probably pick Outlook even if I'm not a big fan of Microsoft. Outlook is a bit smoother and quicker to run. However, Lotus probably improved as I used it last 8 years ago...
 
Lotus notes is the digital kick in the nuts every morning you will have to deal with. Email retention is something being dictated by the lawyers, there is nothing in notes that forces a 120 day deletion. Yes, Notes is powerful but.... The problem is that it has a clunker of a user interface that no one understands. Simple tasks take for ever or are buried in menus that really don't make much sense. I am no fan of Outlook/Exchange but it does beat Notes. Sadly your employer is going to take a step backwards with this move.

Dang. This is what I was affraid of. :mad:
 
Dang. This is what I was affraid of. :mad:

I have used Notes at more places than I have Outlook. Both have problems, but here is where the big problem sits. Notes does not have a free version that you can use at home to get your personal pop3 email, so no one has experience with it outside of work. Microsoft made the wise move of giving away Outlook Express and to some extent giving away Outlook. This got home users familiar with its products, not to mention that Hotmail looks and feels like Outlook. At least, in the future, everyone at work will be united it the dislike of Notes. There is a booming business for consulting firms doing Notes to Outlook conversion, but very little business for doing Outlook to Notes conversion. Just out of curiosity, how many people does your company employ?
 
Had a temp job last year were the client used Lotus Notes.

Just didn't like it.

Almost to the point were I wished for Microsoft Outlook.:cool:

By the way, if you're interested I have a "Lotus Notes for Dummies" book for sale. Never been used.:cool:
 
Without getting into details, the small yet national niche market company I work for was acquired by a gigantic company. This gigantic company uses Lotus Notes, hence the conversion.
 
Without getting into details, the small yet national niche market company I work for was acquired by a gigantic company. This gigantic company uses Lotus Notes, hence the conversion.

Makes sense. Notes has a decent market share with large(2000+) mailbox shops. When you have this many users and accounts it gets hard to do a migration without some issues - so many just won't attempt the migration. I worked on a project converting 2900 mailboxes from Notes to Exchange. Used the Notes web client, it's much faster and easier to use. I feel for you. I know what it's like to get that digital nut shot every morning.
 
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