We performed a comparison between HCL Notes and Microsoft Exchange Online 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."Notes is a perfectly adequate front end. It's clear and straightforward."
"It is one of the best products in the world for workflow applications. It works very well for workflows or decisional processes where a task needs to be first approved by someone. After that, the task moves to the next or final stage where another person approves it with some notes or attached documents."
"The most valuable feature is the UI."
"The most valuable feature is the access that it provides to documents. This offers us an easy way to make changes."
"The product is very stable and scalable."
"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 security and performance of the solution are good even though our platform is variable, except for the mail services."
"The solution provides great security."
"Microsoft Exchange Online has great functionality."
"I like that Exchange Online is easy to use and that I do not need to maintain the previous Exchange Server. I also do not need to worry about the security of the Exchange Server. If there are any issues, then it will be the service provider's problem and not mine."
"Tech support has been great, when necessary."
"The most valuable feature is being able to assign an individual a task."
"The solution is easy to use and the cloud version has taken a lot of challenges away from the user."
"Microsoft Exchange Online is an easy-to -use email solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integration with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams for shared calendars."
"Exchange Online's best feature is its webmail platform."
"Notes needs a major upgrade for the UI."
"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 interface could be more user-friendly. Some additional trainings could be added as well."
"There is a chat component but it does not work properly."
"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 loading time can be excessive."
"The solution could improve by adding some more features."
"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 efficiency could improved."
"For example, recently there were some spam incidents that Microsoft does not currently mitigate because they have another paid solution to do so. It would be nice to integrate the security and the anti-spam (i.e. the fake links, etc.) along with the Exchange Online default."
"We'd like to have the ability to recall emails on the web. I'm not sure if that is available yet."
"Also, I think the mobile app on the forms you can improve a little bit more."
"This product is too complex to use."
"When we need to purchase additional licenses for additional users, the process is slow."
"Microsoft Exchange Online could improve the management usage, it should be more user-friendly."
"The solution could improve with the integrations with some of the known applications is still not possible, there must be more connectors."
HCL Notes is ranked 7th in Email Applications with 13 reviews while Microsoft Exchange Online is ranked 2nd in Email Applications with 85 reviews. HCL Notes is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Exchange Online is rated 8.6. 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 Online writes "Helps reduced IT operations, scalable, and simple setup". HCL Notes is most compared with HCL Verse, Microsoft Exchange, HCL Domino, Google Workspace and Zimbra Collaboration, whereas Microsoft Exchange Online is most compared with Google Workspace, Amazon WorkMail, ProtonMail, Zoho Mail and OpenText GroupWise. See our HCL Notes vs. Microsoft Exchange Online report.
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