Lotus Notes and
MS Outlook are the two most widely used email applications. However, there are
many users, who prefer using MS Outlook as compared to Lotus Notes. As a
result, you can find more Outlook users as compared to Lotus Notes. MS Outlook
is an email client from Microsoft, which aims at providing an effective and
secured mailing platform. In addition, there are several other benefits of
using MS Outlook as compared to Lotus Notes. Some of them are mentioned below.
Economical and Easy
to Maintain
MS Outlook is an
independent application. However, it also forms a part of the MS Office suite.
On the other hand, Lotus Notes can only be used as a separate application. The
advantage of MS Outlook being a part of the MS Office is that, you just have to
pay for MS Office to get the benefit of MS Outlook along with other
applications. In addition, the cost associated with maintaining MS Outlook is
less as compared to Lotus Notes.
Single Login for
Multiple Accounts
With MS Outlook,
you can use a single login window to manage multiple accounts like Gmail,
Yahoo, etc. at the same time. However, you need to have a separate login for
each account in case of Lotus Notes. Having a single login for multiple
accounts is a great feature in MS Outlook, which saves a lot of time.
Features
Since, both MS
Outlook and Lotus Notes are email clients, they both offer a basic set of mailing
features like Contact, Calendaring, Messaging, Database Management, etc.
However, MS Outlook provides some better advanced features to cater the
business needs.
Graphical User Interface
MS Outlook is
the most popular email client among the users. It uses a very simple and
interactive interface. Thus, it avoids any need to have a technical expertise
to use the tool. On the other hand, Lotus Notes lacks some key features, which
make the interface very complicated to use. Moreover, due to the fact that the
Lotus Notes is not so popular, a new user would take the time to understand the
unfamiliar interface.
The above-mentioned
points are generic with most versions of MS Outlook and Lotus Notes. However,
you can find few specific advantages or limitations while working with any
specific versions of MS Outlook and Lotus Notes.
Consider a
scenario, where you are working with Lotus Notes 6.5. While working with Lotus
Notes 6.5, you might face the following challenges.
1. With soft
deletes enabled, you cannot restore an email from the trash to the Inbox, by
just drag and drop. Instead, you need to use the restore command.
2. If you would
send an email to the people involved in an unscheduled meeting, you will get a
message saying ‘You are not authorized to perform that operation'. You can also
get this message if you select 'Send memo to all invitees' menu command in
Lotus Notes.
3. With an every
new mail, you will get a display message asking you to refresh your Inbox.
Rather, it should have directly updated the Inbox with the new message.
4. While the Notes
is displaying the Trash folder, and you create a new email from outside Notes,
you will get the Trash folder command asking you to restore the new email
before sending it. However, in a normal scenario, you will get the ‘Restore’
and ‘Delete’ command options if the email is in the trash. For any other
folder, you will get 'Reply', 'Reply To All', 'Forward', etc. commands.
5. To delete a
document from the current view, the Notes displays it in a view, where you
again have to press the delete button. In addition, it gives the following message,
which looks very illogical.
‘The document
could not be deleted because you currently have the same document open in the
preview pane. This document will now be closed so that it may deleted from the
current view'
6. While scheduling
a meeting, you might face some repeating functionalities. In case of repeating
meetings, you need to cancel the meeting and reschedule it. While doing so,
Notes informs all of the invitees that the meeting has been cancelled. This
could result in an accumulation of many meetings and cancelled meetings notice
in the Inboxes of all invites.
7. At times, when
you press ‘Delete’ after selecting some text in a message, nothing would
happen. However, if you would deselect the text in the message, and hit the 'Delete'
button again, the text would get deleted. There is as such no logic behind this
issue, but you might come across this problem while working with Lotus Notes
6.5.
From the above comparison
of Outlook and Notes, it is clear that the MS Outlook is far better email
client than Lotus Notes. So, if you are working on Lotus Notes and want to
avail the benefits of MS Outlook, you need to access your Notes data in
Outlook. Since, Outlook uses a PST file format and Lotus Notes uses NSF file
format, which are very different from each other, it is required to convert
data from NSF file format to PST. This can be done, by using a migration tool to migrate from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook. Since, there is no such in-built
mechanism to migrate from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook; it is recommended having a
professional tool to do this task.
