
Lotus Notes R5 Competitive Analysis (1999)
‘Everyone who’s interested in platinum should definitely check out "Lotus Notes R5 Competitive Analysis" on \\boweb \bodocs\Polar\jan25.
This is a comparison of platinum/pkm (the project code named tahoe) and notes R5 I’m about 1/2 way through and have found it to be fascinating reading It’s the best concrete document I’ve seen so far on some of the many cool things that the platinum store does and on why betting on platinum is a good move for the server extensions (because tahoe is taking competition with notes very seriously and adding features that compete with notes -’
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“In Platinum we’re making a big investment in web/filesysten/Office integration, in an effort to merge the way that users and corporations use and manage their documents, email, and web content. We believe that will represent a significant advantage, and one that will be very hard for Lotus to emulate.
The lack of a tightly integrated tools story for Platinum wall be a major competitive weakness that won’t be addressed until Visual Studio 7 & Office 10 (and even then only if we dramatically increase our investment). We are also investing heavily an NT5 integration, optimizing our product’s performance and administerability for this platform alone.
Along these lines, the Active Directory integration will be a mixed proposition in the near term, but will represent a big win for both Microsoft and customers in the long run. Our continuing strong enterprise-DS focus is both a strength and a weakness, though, since Lotus is taking a grassroots approach that will likely allow it to get de facto deployment in many of today’s heterogeneous network environments.
The overall Microsoft response to Lotus has been uncoordinated and uneven to date. Since Notes features touch many different product areas at M~crosofl, many teams feel that Notes is a competitor, and each of these teams are building features to compete with Notes and in some cases positioning their products directly against Notes.”