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While Microsoft Office is a great product, at $200-500 per desk Office can be a large part of a small business’s technology budget. Just consider a business with 10 desks will spend $2000-5000 just on Microsoft Office.
Understandably many small businesses are looking for alternatives. OpenOffice (free, open source) is the leading alternative and is quite suitable for many businesses…but lacks a product like Outlook.
There are many email/calendar products out there but few as unified and refined as Outlook. Perhaps most importantly Outlook when paired with an Exchange Server can share calendars and contacts with others in the office. This functionality in particular is hard to find anywhere else…
But where can one get such functionality? The newly released Lotus Notes 8 is a alternative well worth consideration. With its all new interface Notes 8 is definitely on par with Outlook for usability and now integrates OpenOffice to bring together in one package email/PIM, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Much like Outlook paired with Exchange, Notes when paired with Domino can share email, calendars, and contacts with others in the office. Domino also includes web access so you can access all your email, calendars and contacts from any computer with IE or Firefox. One of the other great features of Notes is cross platform support - Notes 8 currently runs on Windows and Linux and will support Mac in Q1 08.
Best of all with a NitixBlue Domino server, Notes is free. So instead of spending thousands just for Microsoft Office, small businesses can spend their money buying a server which will secure their network, give them remote access, centralized file storage and backup, and all the abilities of Notes and Domino. Seems like a simple choice for small business.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
September 12th, 2007 at 4:12 am
Hi, what is the cost of LotusNotes? You cite the Microsoft cost but could you cite the Lotus cost as well?
Thanks and good post.
Ramon Ray, Smallbiztechnology.com
September 12th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
As mentioned Lotus Notes licenses are included with NitixBlue, NitixBlue itself has a user licensing cost on par with Windows Small Business Server.
Notes without NitixBlue is about $100 - still a good value. But without the Domino back end its a nice package but OpenOffice is again worth consideration is groupware isn’t important.