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