Content area
Full Text
When making any purchasing decision for an agency or department, particularly infrastructure or platform products, buyers always want to have a good comparative checklist. Although this review is not intended to serve as a full-blown product comparison, here is a look at the key competitive points between the latest releases from the market leaders in the messaging space, Lotus Development Corp.'s Domino Release 5 (R5) and Microsoft Corp:s Exchange Server 5.5 (with Service Pack 2).
Although Domino and Exchange compete in many of the same areas, the platforms were conceived to solve different problems. As such, the strengths that stem from each platform reflect each product's initial design goals and architecture.
Domino originally was designed as a messaging-enabled, collaborative database application platform. Transforming the platform into a robust messaging platform was not the obvious evolution for Domino, based on early releases of the product. As a result, Domino's most competitive advantages remain its integrated services platform architecture and its robust integrated design client, which is tailored to support rich application development on that architecture.
As Domino has evolved, the platform gained support for openprotocol messaging, discussions and directory access. However, the most significant shift in direction for the platform was the addition of the Hypertext Transport Protocol rendering engine in Release 4.5, which...