Exchange Server 2010 vs Lotus Domino 8.5

Whenever an enterprise needs to deploy a mail server, planning, preparation

and requirement analysis are the top priorities on their mind. An enterprise

needs to decide upon a system that blends well with their  strategic business

challenges. For instance, the technology director needs to deliver secure and

compliant communications tools to support a highly distributed workspace.

Reducing hardware costs and operational overheads are the priority points for

the IT managers.  Globally distributed customers and partners, communication

overload, increasing security and the high cost of communications are just some

of the connectivity challenges that the enterprise might face. Thus, protection

and compliance, ability to access anywhere, flexibility and reliability are some

of the features integral to a messaging solution which may lead to its adoption

in that enterprise. A messaging server should be optimized for software and

services.

Bases for choosing mail servers



Deployment strategies: Planning an Exchange Server or Lotus Domino or any

other  mailing solution, the deployment part must be carefully analyzed. An

enterprise often has to deal with budgets and other challenges before they are

ready to deploy it fully. As it is more targeted to larger organizations, it

therefore stresses on a distributed deployment plan with lots of individual

servers. Depending upon the enterprises one can either opt for the Standard

Edition or the Enterprise Edition of Exchange Server.  However, larger

distributions deployments might be bit expensive considering both hardware and

software standpoints but these may be negligible or accepted when compared with

the service they provide.

Evaluate your existing environments: An enterprise decision maker must take

out time to do a thorough evaluation and capture the baseline of the existing

server infrastructure. This will help them to better understand and compare how

the upgraded environment would be beneficial to him, if at all. Documenting the

pre-existing conditions and problems and all the mandatory resources available

would do the enterprise a world of good in making the leap to a newer and better

environment.

Prediction: The enterprise needs to get a clear idea of what the

probable economic or managerial problems they could face and be prepared to

tackle the predictable problems beforehand.

Interoperability and customization:  Exchange Server being a single unified

communication system was designed to be run as a part of the Windows eco-system

& requires a 64-bit architecture. It is pretty much a straight out of the box

software product.

Lotus Notes, as the part of Domino platform, is highly customizable and if

the developers need to integrate some custom components, there are some modules

available. They also provide support for the integration of  “mashups” which are

the Web Apps that help you in integrating the data from multiple sources into

one single interface.

Deploying the mail servers:  Installation of both the servers was

pretty much smooth as the architecture on which we deployed give us an extraedge.

The deployment was on the Dell's 'Power Edge M710' blade server  with  144 GB of

RAM with Intel's Xeon processor 5500 series. We installed the trial versions of

both the mail servers on the Windows Server 2008 R2, Enterprise Edition.  There

wasn't much issues with the Lotus Domino installation but there were some

concerns regarding Exchange Server. For Exchange server, most of the problems

came with the Hub Transport Role and Mailbox Server Role.

Comparing the installation part for both the mail servers, once the ADS,

roles, features and other necessary services are configured, then everything

goes very well with the flow. For, both the mailing servers only the problem

arises when you don't have a dedicated domain name. So, the best solution we

could find was to deploy it locally with some basic configurations.

Feature set: The following table lists some of the features that

describes the new, upgraded and advanced enhancements bought by both the giants.

Pricing: The following table shows the information about the different

prices for both the servers. For more information on prices and licensing FAQ's,

you can log onto the following link

http://bit.ly/bfTtvr

Coming to the pricing and licensing details of IBM's Lotus Domino family,

there are three primary ways in which one can acquire licenses: Client and

Server Licensing, Per User Licensing and Processor value unit licensing. For

price details please refer to the table. For more information on the pricing

details of IBM Domino family, you can refer to this link: http://bit.ly/bEc2oK