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."HCL Notes is stable most of the time."
"The product is very stable and scalable."
"It is easy to integrate the product with other services."
"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."
"The initial setup was easy for me."
"The solution is practical, good interface, and performs well."
"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."
"Support is very good."
"I find the Outlook client very valuable. It allows me to connect to the Exchange Server and send and receive emails easily. The graphical interface is user-friendly and has a good look and feel."
"The initial setup is quite a straightforward process. I don't think it is a very complicated solution. Plenty of things could be more complex, but the ordinary, general settings are quite simple."
"Communication is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"Exchange is very scalable, it's one of the most important things about this software."
"It is stable."
"It has a feature that allows you to retain an email and recover it as an administrator. When you activate this feature, even if a user deletes an email, the email is still in the system, and we can retrieve it as an administrator. It is a very useful function. We turn this feature on for some of the mailboxes because we need to keep all the records. I like the way emails are classified in this solution. It makes it really easy to take a look at the most important messages. This is a really good functionality. Some of the emails directly exchanged with you are marked as important and shown in one tab, and everything else is in another tab. We usually don't have any issue with Exchange. It can be integrated with different solutions."
"The deployment is a plug-and-play process."
"Some people complain that they want something more modern and jazzy."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with other solutions."
"Notes needs a major upgrade for the UI."
"I love this product. I have used it for many years, and I have been a developer for it. If anything, it can be faster in the client version. The client version is a little bit hard. It is not fast. This is the only problem I see. Otherwise, it is a very good product."
"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 solution could improve by adding some more features."
"The pricing could be better, and it could have an easier implementation."
"There are issues when you add your domain to Microsoft Tenant, and you try to create that. Which is a problem for me."
"The default storage capacity is too small."
"The platform could be more user-friendly."
"The main problem with Microsoft products is that we're constantly required to install patches and fixes."
"The desktop version of Microsoft Exchange receives emails a little slower than the online version."
"Microsoft could improve on Exchange's hybrid deployment or HCW. They need to improve on that because I was having many issues with HCW in our environment at times."
"From a reliability perspective, they need to improve the search engine, it is not very powerful."
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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