The best feature of HCL Domino is that you can use Notes for messaging plus application, not just for messaging. It's not a main system only, okay?
Another good feature is that the HCL Domino server is supported in all platforms, e.g. AIX, Windows, and Linux. Microsoft Exchange only works on the Windows server.
In terms of stability and security on the server side and applications, I also find HCL Domino very strong in those areas.
HCL Domino needs to be more user-friendly, as end users prefer Outlook over it, because they find Outlook easier to use.
We've been working with HCL Domino for the past year.
HCL Domino is strong, stability-wise.
I find the technical support for HCL Domino very helpful.
Deployment of HCL Domino is easy. You can deploy a Domino server in 10 minutes, e.g. no preparation, no domain preparation is needed. With Exchange and active directory, you need to extend the schema, but because HCL Domino has its own directory service, there is no need for this. It does not rely on Active Directory. You can integrate it with Active Directory, but you do not need to extend your Active Directory schema, and you do not need to add the object, unlike what you need to do with Exchange.
HCL Domino has reasonable pricing. It's not expensive. If you compare its price with Exchange, they have the same product pricing. They are within the same range in terms of pricing, but Microsoft played it another way.
Microsoft went to the customers and told them: "We can offer you ELA for a price agreement, and you can get Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Dynamics for free," so the customers made the decision of reducing their investment in HCL Domino, for them to get Exchange for free. This is the reason why customers are willing to migrate from HCL Domino to Exchange, plus there's also more customer familiarity from Exchange than HCL Domino.
We were able to evaluate Exchange.
We've been dealing with different HCL solutions: HCL Domino, HCL Notes, HCL Domino Volt, and HCL Basics. We're a partner of HCL. We're working with the latest version of HCL Domino: version 12.0.
The HCL Domino market is very small, e.g. there's not a lot of customers, or the segment using it isn't large, because Microsoft recently went to the customers and told them IBM already sold the product, and internally, IBM will use Exchange. When you migrate the HCL Domino environment to Exchange, there's a new IBM ELA deal where you can get Exchange for free. The HCL Domino segment then shrunk, so the number of customers using it is very small. The big customers have now migrated to Microsoft Exchange, and the rest will migrate eventually.
We don't have many support facilities in Egypt now, so customers transferred to a different product, e.g. Exchange for the market segment. It's really different, especially in an Office 365 model and Teams collaboration, e.g. using Teams, the competition was not fair.
My suggestion to people planning on starting their use of HCL Domino is to mix it
with other applications, rather than comparing it with Microsoft Exchange as a messaging tool, or just using it for messaging, because HCL Domino is a collaboration tool. With it, you can offer applications to different departments, build applications and share it with different departments, etc. It's more preferable to utilize HCL Domino plus messaging, than just using it for messaging only, then comparing it with Exchange.
My rating for HCL Domino is a ten out of ten.