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Tuesday 30 July 2013
7/30/2013 08:19:00 am 0

Why to migrate from Lotus Notes to Exchange?

Microsoft Exchange is a reliable adaptable and cost-effective Email collaboration & communication platform. Its varied set of powerful features makes the task more mobile and ways for business domain users.   
With the release of newer versions it’s getting more popular among the users as it provides rich deployment options and productive collaboration features. Side by side the easy to user functionality and integrated data security and compliance policies makes it more admired popular among users. 

List of common Exchange features:
  • Cloud network support:  
The Exchange provides you the facility to move to the cloud. It limits user disruptions from mailboxes over different environments and thus, provides easier calendar sharing, meeting scheduling regardless of the mailbox environment.
  • Easy management and control
To provide powerful Exchange management and delegate tasks, Exchange provides the features such as:
    • Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and site mailboxes for administrators to manage from the Exchange Administration Center (It is a web-based administration interface). 
    • Role-based access control for those who don’t have full administrative rights (i.e. helpdesk and specialist users).
  • Flexible and Reliable: It provides the better deployment options and flexibility to the administrator for an easy deployment according to the needs of organization and for users. It also provides you various hardware storage support options such as for Storage Area Networks as well as for desktop-class Direct Attached Storage. It provides reduced disk input/output per second for mailbox data and aids & mechanisms for protecting mailbox data from corruption.
  • Mailbox archiving feature: 
It provides the user the facility to archive their mails by maintaining the specific mails into a primary mailbox and the rest into a separate In-Place Archive.
  • Powerful retention policies: 
Exchange provides a better way for fulfilling your storage and compliance demands by offering flexible and powerful retention policies.
  • Let you communicate across multiple devices: 
    • It provides intuitive, touch-enabled uncluttered inbox. 
    • It provides ‘Site mailboxes’ that let the user to work better in a team.
      • Allow your users to: collaborate work on projects, share information among the team members.
      • Exchange Provides document access & messaging and Co-authoring, document storage, and versioning is handled by SharePoint.
    • Let you integrate Outlook and Outlook Web App. 
It allows you to easily access to web-based apps within both Outlook and OWA. This feature saves the user time to switch between apps as it let you access multiple apps with single sign in. 
  • Better privacy and security:
    • Protection from Email threats by strong filtering, anti spamming and anti phishing features.
    • Provides better authorization by incorporating powerful internal compliance policies that prevents users sensitive Information protected from unauthorized access. One of such feature is Data Loss Prevention (DLP) that performs a deep content analysis while a data is being sent or received and prevents it from any policy violation or unauthorized access.DLP works on basis of PII and PCI and other authorization policies & regulatory standards
    • Let the user perform run In-Place eDiscovery that is it provides a single interface to the user for working in compliance with different environments Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync.
  • Support for industry-standard protocols that provides ‘Anywhere Access’ to the mailbox data and besides emailing it also other interactive Email communications features such as voice mail and instant messaging
Exchange vs. Lotus Domino/Notes: 
Microsoft Exchange is widely used because of various functionalities such as emailing, calendaring, and contacts management on computer, mobile or web, this provides you means for getting connected with each other and to keep your data synchronized. Comparatively Notes let you work in context and provides integrated collaboration functionalities such as emailing, calendaring, and contacts management, instant messaging, IBM Lotus Symphony etc as well as it let you access other Domino databases and applications. 
  • Exchange 2010 provides creating a complete unified messaging solution for creating a complete unified messaging and is you see same case of for Lotus Notes then you have to install some additional IBM products in order to achieve the functionality. In this aspect, Exchange is preferred over Lotus Notes.
  • With the help of Exchange you can integrate voicemail into OWA .It also provides support for SATA hard drives. Notes provides you some enhancements such as the functionality for the auto email address completion, mashing up the calendars, support for and receiving vCards. In spite of these newly added features ,  it still lacks somewhere due to the old look and feel as compared to Exchange
  • Due to ease of use and easy GUI, the Windows operating is used in majority as compared to other operating systems. This is one of the factors that make Exchange popular because it is the best compatible mail server to be used with Windows; it provides awesome compatibility and support with Windows based systems. Though Lotus Notes provides a faster installation but Still Exchange wins in that aspect as the installation process is less complex and glitch free.
  • If you look at cost factors Exchange provides better flexibility, and IT control as compared to Notes at the same cost. Exchange also provides better deployment choices as compared to Notes.
  • Exchange provides native Storing, archiving, and retention capabilities but in case of Domino these are limited and require additional cost and complexity if needs to be enhanced. Exchange also provides support for storage hardware such as: DAS, SATA, and JBOD. Though, Domino provides Domino attachment object store (DAOS) but still it isn’t that much efficient as compared to Exchange.  
  • With improvement in feature set from the previous versions of Exchange to newer, it has also achieved a higher performance graph. The performance has been gradually improved from version to version. Exchange 2010 is about 70% in high performing as compared to exchange 2007. This is not the case with Notes; it is there is no such point able performance improvement seen. 
    • Exchange provides Innovative tools and capabilities for the global economy: Exchange provides the calendar sharing ability with users inside your organization as well with those who are outside your organization and also implies several permissions and securities so that no unauthorised or unintended access can be done to the data.  
  • Exchange provides Built-in enterprise mobility to the users that is the user can access his mails form a truly universal inbox. Truly universal inbox stores the user mail data, SMS text messages, voice mail, and saved IM conversations. Network administrators have proper rights to decide which device is allowed or blocked to connect to the network. You need to purchase additional servers and client access licenses to implements this feature, everything is inbuilt within Exchange .Exchange also manages the mobile data security by implementing various data protection policies. In contrary, Lotus Notes only provides a basic mobile experience to the user.
  • Exchange provides a better user experience by incorporating new capabilities such as:
    • enhanced mail conversation view
    • Speech-to-text transcription for voice mail
    • Improved Messaging and restrictions for unintended e-mails with the help of MailTips to improve messaging efficiency and avoid accidental or unintended e-mails. 
Though, on basis of the above comparison we can’t conclude that Exchange or Notes, which one is better. It’s just a through comparison between the two Email applications. Each of the two mail clients has its own benefits and flaws. So, it would be wrong if I deny the use of one as compared to other. There can be some situations where Notes server can be better than Exchange or vice versa. The selection totally depends on personal needs and sometimes organization preferences. Under certain circumstances, you may require to perform a migration from Notes to Exchange or Exchange to Notes. So that, user can avail the functionalities of the other mail application.  

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