We performed a comparison between HCL Notes and Microsoft Exchange based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Email Applications solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature is the UI."
"The security and performance of the solution are good even though our platform is variable, except for the mail services."
"Its security is absolutely stratospheric. In an application, you can lock down to field-level security. For example, I could log in and see a field in an HR database with salaries. When you log in, you see exactly the same database, but the field with the salary just isn't there. So, you can literally have field-level security on it, and you can also have secure encryption. For example, I could give you that database allowing you to see the salary, but a calculation that shows how much they get per month in another field is encrypted. So, you won't be able to see that because you don't have the encryption key. You can implement high-level security very simply."
"Notes is a perfectly adequate front end. It's clear and straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the access that it provides to documents. This offers us an easy way to make changes."
"The solution is practical, good interface, and performs well."
"HCL Notes has fantastic built-in security. The email and personal communication components are excellent, but they are some applications provided by HCL that Notes previously provided when it was under IBM and Lotus. Everyone wants email, so that's just part of the product. However, more savvy users can build their own solutions for managing information, and that's the great thing about it."
"The solution provides great security."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Technical support is good."
"The best features are that Exchange is very customer-friendly, its interface is self-explanatory, it doesn't hang, and it keeps evolving."
"The solution can scale well."
"The deployment is a plug-and-play process."
"This solution handles all of our primary functionality including email, message delivery, message archiving and calendars."
"It's user-friendly."
"It's a very user-friendly application. The mail server is also valuable when compared to other services like SquirrelMail."
"I would like to see integration with other solutions."
"It is a heavy program and uses more resources than an email client should."
"I would like to HCL update Notes' development tool and make it more attractive like Microsoft Visual Studio and similar products. For example, there's a programming language that I used for my product Woodpecker called LotusScript. LotusScript has been available since around 1995. When LotusScript was released, it was like the original Visual Basic, but it has improved since then."
"The only improvement that we're planning to do is that all our applications are still designed in the layout and format of Notes version 4, and our plan over the coming years is to modernize their look. One of the things they're developing or considering deploying is a program to automatically upgrade the look and feel of databases. If they deploy that, that will be revolutionary. In other words, we decide on a corporate look and feel for our database and press a button. We've probably got 50 different applications in Notes, and it would just go through the whole lot and upgrade all of them to look the same."
"The solution could improve by adding some more features."
"There is a chat component but it does not work properly."
"The interface could be more user-friendly. Some additional trainings could be added as well."
"Web support is very old and needs an upgrade. We can handle a different password for the client to access the mail services, compared to the web services. We need to implement many other components to get access to the web access. There could be a feature to interpret if the web access is available from any end-user equipment."
"The default storage capacity is too small."
"In terms of Microsoft Exchange, I think maybe what can be done is to make it more user-friendly."
"One thing for improvement would be to have an offline version of Exchange available for use if our connection goes down."
"Deployment should become a bit easier, the process is a bit complicated. You have to have done it one or two times before you get it right. The first time you do it, it won't be perfect. There are a lot of complications compared to Gmail For Business, which is a bit easier when it comes to configuration."
"Its search functionality can be better. It is currently not really easy. It has the capability to search your mailbox, but it has some restrictions in terms of the number of results that you can retrieve. You can only get around 250 results. If you want to do a deeper search, you need to use different functionalities of the product. The policy that we have for handling emails is that we do not delete emails at all. If I insert the text that I am searching for in the Search field, it only retrieves a limited number of emails. To search for an email from 2010, I need to use different search functions to find what I am looking for. Microsoft can also improve its licensing for its products. Microsoft's licensing is not very easy to understand. It can sometimes be really complex to understand what you need to have in order to comply with Microsoft licensing."
"The solution should be easier to deploy."
"There can be occasional challenges during the product's implementation phase, making it an area where improvements are needed."
"The solution is stable, but it could improve. It's crashing if there is a big mail database. The Zimbra solution is better in this area."
HCL Notes is ranked 7th in Email Applications with 13 reviews while Microsoft Exchange is ranked 3rd in Email Applications with 78 reviews. HCL Notes is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Exchange is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HCL Notes writes "Accessible from any device, good support, and works very well for emails, document sharing, and workflows". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Exchange writes "Very stable with an easy-to-use email management system". HCL Notes is most compared with HCL Verse, HCL Domino, Google Workspace, Microsoft Exchange Online and Zimbra Collaboration, whereas Microsoft Exchange is most compared with Zimbra Collaboration, KerioConnect, HCL Domino, Open-Xchange and OpenText GroupWise. See our HCL Notes vs. Microsoft Exchange report.
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