HCL Notes (formerly IBM Notes and Lotus Notes) vs Microsoft 365 (Office 365)

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HCL Notes and Office 365 are two widely used email managers, though Office 365 is gaining more popularity these days. The reason could be its advanced features and the convenience of the cloud platform. And this shift is growing day-by-day under the influence of Office 365 advanced features. Though we say about them together, both are two entirely different platforms in many aspects. So, it would be a right decision to know all the differences between Office 365 and HCL Notes before going to migrate HCL Lotus Notes emails to Office 365.

Brief Introduction of HCL Notes & Office 365

• HCL Notes
  It is an email client which saves its data in .nsf file on the local system. It is also available with an integrated server named as Domino Server which stores Notes data on the server. Other than emailing, Notes provides services like to-do lists, templates, journals, address books, bookmarks, tasks team-rooms, files sharing, blogs, user-directories, discussion forum, micro-blogging, instant messaging, etc.
• Office 365
  Office 365 is a cloud-based platform for storing all the data online and exchanging emails between users. It supports Microsoft Exchange Online and collaborative applications such as SharePoint, OneDrive for business, Skype for Business, and more. Users can work on Office 365 by a single login from any system at any place.

Below given are certain parameters on the basis of which we will be differentiating HCL Notes and Office 365 email services.

1. Anywhere Access:
   HCL Notes: Users can access the Notes application only on the system where it is installed. To use it on another system, the installation of this email client is required.
   Office 365: This cloud platform can be accessed on any system or mobile device.
2. Collaboration features:
   HCL Notes: There is no such facility for collaboration among users.
   Office 365: It is easy to share documents, files, etc. within a team, and thus, it enhances collaboration between team members.
3. User-Interface:
   HCL Notes: The GUI of HCL Notes is a bit complex in nature and quite difficult for new users.
   Office 365: In comparison to HCL Notes, the Office 365 platform is easy to work with.
4. Storage Space:
   HCL Notes: It consumes the system storage space as installation and storage of data is required. Also, the speed is dependent on your system resources.
   Office 365: As Office 365 is a cloud-based platform, it consumes no storage space of the system and the speed is dependent on internet speed.
5. Application Availability:
   HCL Notes: It does not include any extra applications for other purposes (all its features are integrated to the Notes application itself).
   Office 365: It integrates applications for audio, video-calling, instant chat messages, online meetings, file storage, document sharing, collaboration, etc.
6. Content Management:
   HCL Notes: No such added technique or application to manage content.
   Office 365: It has advanced SharePoint Online for content management. SharePoint Online has features for document management and collaboration.

These are the major reasons for Notes to Office 365 migration. Though Office 365 seems to have upper hand, it has some limitations too like storage space is limited to 50GB, it does not support IMAP (rather use Active Sync protocol). But these drawbacks are outweighed by its advantages.

So, now you know why many users are moving from HCL Notes to Office 365. But those who migrate usually don’t find good tools for Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration. So, we would like to recommend you an advanced, automatic migrator tool for HCL Notes, Kernel Office 365 Migrator for Lotus Notes. It migrates Notes and Domino Server data easily to Office 365 mailboxes. The choice is in your hands to move only the desired NSF items to the cloud as you can preview the file items before the migration. The best thing is it supports all HCL Notes versions and Office 365 plans.

Conclusion

With a quick introduction of the two different sorts of email client platforms – HCL Notes and Office 365, major differences in both of them based on different parameters like access, user-interface, collaboration features, application availability, storage space, and content management were discussed to reason out the migration of Notes users to Office 365 platform. For easy and efficient migration, an advanced, reliable, and secured third-party tool is discussed.