Choose between Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook

The world and its needs are rapidly changing. Today people look for specific contents and result oriented products. If one is bothered with only email and calendaring service, then there is no point in paying extra for other services. Yes, I am talking about emails clients and choosing the one that suits your business needs has become an important question recently. Clearly, there is comparison among only two major contenders, IBM Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange. Before choosing one or planning to migrate from one of them to another, you must be interested in researching and determining how the two leading messaging server offerings compare.

Primarily both are excellent messaging service providers and both has its own pros and cons. Supporting Lotus Notes, it is a favorite of many since it gives a lot more than mere messaging, calendaring and organizing contacts. Instant messaging, IBM Web Sphere Portal, Tivoli Directory Integrator, Web sphere Application Server are few complementary services that IBM Lotus Domino customers can avail for while using Lotus Notes. You can manage databases with Notes and get management and replication capabilities. Also, upgrading to a newer version is easier without involving much cost.

Microsoft outlook is becoming the choice of the mass. People migrate from service to another in every industry, in the messaging domain; Outlook seems to be the winner. Outlook seems to be the favorite as it provides a better solution than competitors for a wide range of messaging, collaboration, and other business computing needs. It is extremely user friendly and has an interactive GUI. You need no training or technical expertise to master Outlook skills. Notes on the other hand, has clunky interface, complicated menus, and just can’t do certain things. Notes also has a high maintenance cost but again offers more features. Therefore, if you are looking for just messaging and day to day communication service, MS Outlook is the perfect choice.

Existing Lotus Notes users can try Kernel for NSF to PST if you wish to migrate to MS Outlook. It is a complete solution for migration process. It converts all existing Notes NSF files into Outlook PST files. It also converts the server side data. It migrates Domino server user mailboxes to new account in Exchange Server or as .PST file. The converted data can be viewed in Text or RTF format. A free trial version of this convert NSF to PST tool is available to check the software capabilities but it limits you to convert only one NSF file and save first ten items of every folder existing in the .nsf file. It supports version 8.5, 8.0, 7.0, 6.5, 6.0 and 5.0 of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino Server. Along with, it supports MS Outlook 97 and above, and every version of MS Exchange Server.

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