News

Microsoft Offers Outlook Connector for Domino

• By Scott Bekker
• 01/02/2003

The announcement late last month pairs the newest version of Outlook, 2002, with an older version of Domino, Release 5. IBM recently put out Release 6 of its Domino server and Notes e-mail client, which competes directly with Outlook.

"Many of our customers with Domino servers have told us they would like to give their employees the opportunity to use the latest version of Outlook," Ralf Harteneck, corporate vice president of the Communications and Meetings Services Group at Microsoft, said in a statement.

IBM, which partners with Microsoft in many areas and competes with Microsoft in a few others, applauded the development. "We are pleased to contribute to the Microsoft Outlook 2002 Connector. It really gives companies greater flexibility to meet their messaging needs," said Ken Bisconti, vice president of Messaging Solutions for Lotus Software at IBM, in a quote provided for Microsoft's announcement.

Domino competes directly with Microsoft's Exchange server and most companies choose a unified stack -- either Exchange with Outlook or Domino with Notes. Mergers and acquisitions, however, often make for mixed environments, and forced migrations from one platform to another result in unhappy users. IBM has made its own efforts to lure Outlook loyalists to the Domino platform with software called iNotes.

The connector is a free add-in for Outlook 2002. It can be found here:
www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/journ/outxpcon.htm.