Server-side integration
To approach Microsoft's communication and collaboration solution for the corporate enterprise, as differentiated from home and academic users, it is necessary to strip away the countless client-side bells and whistles and to examine Microsoft's Back Office server products. These include Windows NT Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and Microsoft Certificate Server. Microsoft Exchange Server is of course the bulwark of Microsoft's competitive messaging and groupware strategy.

The features and administration capabilities of Microsoft Exchange are well integrated within the product and the Exchange Server itself is tightly integrated with Windows NT Server and with the NT directory and NT domain structure. The Microsoft Exchange Server provides email, news (discussions), calendaring, Web access to email, and other information sharing tools such as public folders that can be replicated across servers. Like Domino, Exchange 5.5 offers a full suite of Internet protocols to support access from any standards-based client application. The access protocols include HTTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, and LDAP access to directory information.

Exchange Server implements secret key encryption by default and, historically, has not been well integrated with public key security technology which has become the standard of choice. Prior to version 5.5 SP1, Exchange offered only a crude interface with the Microsoft Key Management Server. Current versions of Exchange interface with the Microsoft Certificate Server but this integration is not comparable to the tight integration of digital certificates (Notes IDs) and directory services (the Name and Address Book) in Domino--where a single administrative interface manages both digital certificates and directory information. Similarly, Microsoft requires multiple servers to provide this functionality while Domino is a complete solution in itself.

Exchange, of course, supports only Windows NT, which sharply limits its power and scalability as compared with Lotus' cross-platform server strategy. In theory, this goes a long way to explain why Microsoft has been unable to gain leadership in the groupware market despite their strong client application lineup. Outlook Express does not use the MAPI interface and is thus not extensible within Microsoft's own development framework.

Microsoft has linked the success of Exchange to that of Windows NT Server and this somewhat constrains the applicability of Exchange as a solution to very large companies because it drives up the overall cost. Domino, on the other hand, runs on all the major implementations of UNIX and thus has access to cost-effective high-performance hardware platforms, such as Sun and HP servers, which far outperform the fastest Intel-based servers.

Development environment
The relatively weak integration of Exchange Server with Certificate Server and again of Exchange Server with Web applications generally makes developing groupware applications in the Back Office environment somewhat more complex than developing Notes applications. At the same time, while Microsoft offers a wide range of industrial-strength development tools, Exchange Server does not represent a development environment comparable to Lotus Notes and Domino. In many cases, programming applications that integrate with Exchange require more general programming knowledge and familiarity with Microsoft's general-purpose development tools. This is partly because the Microsoft programming paradigm for Exchange is to employ existing general purpose programming tools to reach into Exchange through a set of APIs. The Notes and Domino programming paradigm is exactly the inverse.