As a consultant working with both Domino and Exchange I see four main advantages to Domino:

• integrated infrastructure;
• groupware development;
• knowledge management;
• return on investment.

Mature integrated infrastructure solution
Compared with Exchange, Domino provides a more tightly integrated infrastructure, a more coherent user experience, and a consistent administrative framework. Through a single set of servers, Domino delivers an intelligent combination of messaging and online discussions, calendaring and scheduling, directory services, security administration and access control, intranet and groupware applications, database and database integration facilities, Internet standards-based technologies, forms and workflow; and application development capabilities. Domino delivers all these services through a single, tightly integrated server infrastructure and a single client application.

The breadth of capabilities and the depth of integration offered by Exchange is markedly less comprehensive. This is understandable given that Exchange is a less mature product. The concept of integrated infrastructure solutions is relatively new to Microsoft. Microsoft's Back Office suite of servers is, in marketing terms, a duct tape bundle. The only thing the servers have in common, outside of a few APIs, is that they all run on Windows NT. Also, NT itself may not deliver the performance or the scalability needed for large messaging systems.

Other examples include public key infrastructure technology (PKI) and database connectivity. Microsoft has almost no plan for the integration of PKI technology with Exchange while Domino already supports X.509 certificates in the NAB. Domino has the ability to integrate with a variety of back end-database systems using enterprise technologies such as DECS as compared with a non-scalable workstation-side API such as ODBC.

Robust groupware development platform
From the development perspective Microsoft offers industrial-strength, general purpose development tools and attempts to link these with Exchange to create a groupware application development environment. With Domino, specialized development tools, a rich and powerful set of built-in functions, and native APIs expose the workflow and database capabilities of the Domino engine directly to developers. Despite their myriad development tools, Microsoft remains far behind Lotus in this area.