Some typo corrections - sorry. -----Original Message----- From: Dupler, Craig Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 2:47 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Comment on Notes and Exchange
I agree with much of what has been posted, especially about the cost of switching, Notes not being horrid, and Exchange being more about . . . well that's where I started to disagree, since the phrase that was used was "e-mail system." So I thought I would throw in some basics that are very old, very boring for most, but perhaps informative for anyone that is currently involved in a Notes vs. Exchange battle/discussion. What is Notes? You have to answer that in context. In 1989 when version 1 first came out, it was a workgroup collaboration tool. It did not do e-mail. It could not connect to the Internet (most LAN e-mail systems couldn't) and it could not connect to X.400 service providers. None of those things were central (or even peripheral) to what Notes was about. It was about helping small groups of professional people work together without having to physically meet all of the time. It is also worth noting that in 1989, Windows was still in version 2, Word Perfect had just unseated WordStar as the most common word processor on DOS, and that was where the heart of the market was. So the ideas that there was a universally accepted user interface design for PC's and that there was a universal .DOC format were still alien. That world had not yet arrived. Also, it was still a pre-NDS Netware world. So in order to accomplish what the Notes team wanted to do, they had to build their own client U/I with its own style. They had to build their own directory. And, they had to build their own document sharing file format and integrate it into a database. Notes has continuously evolved from that seed. What is Exchange? That also has to be answered in context. But let's be clear, it is NOT an e-mail system. It is a messaging system. When the first development project that that eventually became Exchange was started, Microsoft had just purchased Network Courier, which was located in British Columbia. Also, cc:Mail had just been purchased by Lotus Development. Microsoft and Lotus had decided to use their purchases to buy a seed market share in the LAN mail or messaging business, while they set about to build a real messaging system from scratch. Part of what both companies got was a talent pool. Here is the first critical difference between the two products. Microsoft moved most of their Network Courier talent to the Redmond campus and used it to help build its next generation product. Lotus left cc:Mail in California and did not use its talent pool. Two very different products started to emerge - though this was not immediately clear. In fact, most of us (myself included) started out assuming that Lotus would win and become the dominant player in this space. cc:Mail had a larger installed base, and its talent pool seemed to better understand the issues going forward. Also, the cc:Mail game plan was excellent. They proposed to build a new common messaging server (combination MTA and store) for both cc:Mail and Notes. It was to be called LMS or the Lotus Messaging Server. They gave lots of presentations on this strategy. However, because they did not integrate the two companies after their purchase, the team that could have built the product was not assembled. In fact, many observers thought that there was more negative competition within Lotus between the Notes team and the cc:Mail team that there was between Lotus and Microsoft. A lot more people left the two Lotus teams to join Microsoft than moved either from Cambridge to Mountain View, or visa versa. Notes 4 sort of had an MTA concept, and sort of didn't. It did not have group calendars, and its messaging interfaces were weak. But, its collaboration environment was a lot stronger. But, alas, by this time the world had moved to NT, with its security system which was on track to become THE LAN services directory, which with the release of the AD it really has. IBM bought Lotus just before Exchange shipped and just before Notes 4 came out, but really did not start to influence the product until Notes 5, and well after the cc:Mail fiasco was ancient history. To their credit, IBM has fixed many of the problems that the new Lotus Division came with, but they made one choice which is still problematic. They decided that they needed the Notes server to be multi-platform, and thus kept the directory separate. For some, this is a huge issue and created a terrible "non-integration" mess. For others, it was better. It sort of depends on whether or not you think that messaging is a core network service or just an application that belongs in server rooms. That gets back to the business of Exchange not being an e-mail system. When the Electronic Messaging Association (EMA) was formed back in about 1980 or so, they set about to define a highly standardized general purpose messaging standard. It was not about e-mail, or voice mail, or fax or any other single message type. It was generic. Think of it as SMTP without the simple message text, and 100% of all data stored in typed MIME attachments. That is what X.400 was about from the beginning (1984). And, Exchange was developed to embody this very generic approach to messaging. Anyone that suggests that when unifying messaging that somehow there is an advantage to having voice, fax, e-mail, and other type of messages stored in separate stores, frankly has simply not thought through the implications of that separation. The fax industry recognized that they were headed in a wrong direction with their standard for using fax to transmit digital data, and merged their association and standards body with the EMA. However, voice did not get integrated at the standards level due to two unfortunate turns of events. When Octel bought VMX, they gained such a huge market share in the voice mail business, that the Octel Users Group in effect became the industry forum, thus wiping out any chance of an independent standards organization from emerging. There was nothing out there to merge into the EMA to finish coalescing the messaging standards world. The other thing that happened was that because of its close affiliation with ISO, and not the IETF, the EMA started out with difficult relations with those committees in the IETF that were working on the messaging RFC's. The final disaster occurred when MIME was not mapped into X.400 body part 15, typed attachments, but were deliberately defined as body part 14 untyped attachments (for X.400 purposes). This created a situation in which, even though the Octel monopoly was coming apart with the emergence of LAN voice mail and UM systems, there was no standards body to guide its integration. So despite the fact that both Notes and Exchange have very fine message stores that can handle any message type, there are far too many people that don't see them that way. So which one (Notes or Exchange) is better? I'm a network guy that strongly believes in the need to bind network name resolution and caching services to upper layer directory and security systems. From my perspective, non-integrated directories are worse than bad, but a huge mistake that must be stamped out. From this perspective, Exchange is a lot closer to being crafted with an acceptable directory story than Notes. Also, despite its incredibly important and almost revolutionary contributions to collaboration and web services, Notes should not achieve what it does by bringing its own document concept to the party, IMHO. What we need is for all documents, spreadsheets and the like, to have finely grained Notes-like properties. The only chance for this to come about is for products like Office to make a much finer grained use of the AD, which is not a trick that Notes can learn. So I'm pretty negative on Notes as a strategic direction, even though I'm very bullish on the ideas that Notes has contributed, especially the whole notion of a "web pump." Those are ideas that should be copied by a lot more products. _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
