Re: Domino Server Registration

I really didn't want to get into a debate about this because I know on a
Domino group people are going to be more biased to Domino. It boils down
to the fact that we are a small company and used to have a Lotus expert,
but they left a long time ago. Since then we've just sort of been getting
by. We had a major system outage not long ago and email was down for DAYS
(it was a server failure, not a Domino failure). This has the management
nervous and they want replicated mail servers but did not want to PAY for
replicated mail servers. The cost of replicating Notes was not only
prohibitively expensive, but we were also going to need to hire a Notes
expert or pay for training.

I don't expect everyone to agree with our decision because not everyone has
had our experience. I am not saying that everyone should give up Notes and
move to Google Apps. You need to consider it on a what you need. We
wanted to outsource our email and of the options we considered it seemed
that Google apps was the best fit.

I am not specifically a "Google Apps" expert, but I have quite a bit of
experience working with various web APIs to integrate our products with
other services. The Google Apps API is pretty straightforward. You can do
a lot more in Lotus Notes, but we use CGI and PHP to write our custom
applications. We MIGHT use the Google Apps API to pull down a email
message automatically or create a Google Doc from a program. Nothing
major. It was just nice to know that was an option. IBM's iNotes does
not do that. They have an API but they have not opened it up. So, we
wanted a hosted solution, but wanted to have the option to integrate if
need be. We have that option here. Google API will be easy to pick up
with my background, and I have looked it over. It's not brain surgery.
Also, hiring isn't as easy as you make it sound for a very small company in
a struggling economy.

And just to be clear- we WANTED to go with iNotes but Google was a better
fit for us, believe it or not. And "outages" are something we've dealt
with in Domino, and I am sure we'll deal with them with Google too.

Matt

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