We performed a comparison between Google Workspace and HCL Notes 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 initial setup is simple."
"Google Chat is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"The email is excellent."
"Valuable features of the solution are that it's simple and effective."
"The initial setup of Google Workspace is straightforward."
"It's easy to use."
"Google Mail lets you link a task to a specific email and add a reminder. That's helpful for reviewing your schedule. It's based on Slack, so you don't have these folders like in Microsoft mail. Using Slack instead of folders is a bit more intuitive. It's easier to find again a specific email than using Microsoft Suite. If you misplace things, it's much easier to find them because of Google's search capability."
"We value the collaboration levels that are offered. Having everything integrated in a single platform is a dream come true for us."
"The security and performance of the solution are good even though our platform is variable, except for the mail services."
"The initial setup was easy for me."
"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."
"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."
"HCL Notes is stable most of the time."
"The most valuable feature is the access that it provides to documents. This offers us an easy way to make changes."
"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."
"What needs improvement in Google Workspace is the Google Drive app, in particular, making the process of finding the shared and most used files and folders easier. The first time you get an invite to view a file or folder in Google Drive and you view that folder or file, it's pretty easy, but the next time you try to access it again, sometimes, it's a bit difficult to find what was shared with you. An additional feature I'd like to see in Google Workspace is the option to un-send messages in Gmail. Microsoft has a message recall feature, and this isn't available in Gmail, so it's the feature I'd like to be added to Gmail."
"There are times the plugins or extensions in the solution do not work properly and I need to disable and enable the solution."
"Everything is online, so you don't have a client on your desk. Working on email is online work, so can't do work offline and go back online. Sometimes it's not so intuitive. If you answer an email, it puts your answer at the bottom of the existing email."
"I believe that Sheets could have a more functional and user-friendly interface. Google Sheets currently lacks macros and cross file links which can be found in Excel."
"There are 120 different products and Google is ready to copy their competitors and vice versa. Some of them work, and some of them don't. There are many newer tools with no-code environments which allow for a leaner self-owned system, where I'm not tied to paying hundreds and thousands of dollars a year to another company."
"With Microsoft, you can use it on the web version, and you can use Microsoft Outlook. Google has the web version."
"And I think Google Translate could add more features. For example, it could be integrated when typing in a document or a web browser like Grammarly."
"The initial setup is not intuitive at all."
"The loading time can be excessive."
"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."
"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 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."
"We had trouble connecting this solution to the database from Microsoft. We have done it, although it can be easier."
"The interface could be more user-friendly. Some additional trainings could be added as well."
"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."
Google Workspace is ranked 2nd in Email Applications with 29 reviews while HCL Notes is ranked 5th in Email Applications with 7 reviews. Google Workspace is rated 8.0, while HCL Notes is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Google Workspace writes "It replaces a mishmash of different solutions with one fully integrated product". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HCL Notes writes "It's a user-friendly tool for knowledge-sharing applications with good backward compatibility". Google Workspace is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online, Amazon WorkMail, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon WorkDocs and Box, whereas HCL Notes is most compared with HCL Domino, Microsoft Exchange, HCL Verse, Zimbra Collaboration and Microsoft Exchange Online. See our Google Workspace vs. HCL Notes report.
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