Re: Still some good things
agreed. Domino was great to administer from the back end and moving to Exchange meant having to find homes for other sorts of data Domino happily served up. Apart from a brief unhappiness running SLES8 which got fixed with kernel tuning, our install (2 Dominos replicating to each other plus one on Win32 to support BES) was pretty solid. Stuff like RSS enabled blogs brought to testing phase in an hour or two from receiving the templates.
Notes client largely a dogs breakfast of course and the failure to support roaming profiles for ages in the 8.5 code stream was a big minus. At least there was something you could do with the database look though, as opposed to Outlook's take it or leave it. Indexing was similar, great at the back end, nicely integrated into the DBs, but horribly at the front end, whereas Outlook/Exchange mostly reversed this paradigm in cached mode with Windows "Search".
Even now we keep one Domino spinning as we never fully trusted the quality of the conversion tools from Domino to Exchange, and it's good to go back to the "source" and see what the original looked like, plus now we have these enormous mail DBs where you largely hope they are in good shape rather than take a group of small ones offline and check them in Domino, or take the whole server down and leave the other machine take the load for a bit without much notice being taken. The other nice thing was the fix lists where you could make decent decisions about whether an upgrade was really worth it.
We had some unhappy meetings with our Dell Exchange 2007 consultant as he explained how replication worked in the MS world. A lot of "it really can't just...?" But we needed a Document Management System and the avalanche towards full support of Outlook/Exchange and a desultory implementation of Notes/Domino if at all had already started by then.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
