Both could use work on debugging tools. The most significant differences between Lotus and Microsoft are in support for agents, the time it takes to develop applications, and support for relational databases required by the customer. Microsoft customers rated them highest in performance and reliability. Lotus customers are substantially more satisfied with scalability, rating it 0.5 points higher than Microsoft s customers did. Both Microsoft and Lotus customers feel they are getting the performance, reliability and scalability they need to extend the use of their Web servers to increasingly critical applications.
Lotus needs to work on monitoring and integration tools.
Microsoft needs to work on several areas to make IIS a better application development environment including maintenance in general, database synchronization, scalability and debugging capabilities. As your organization moves beyond electronic publishing, you ll want to look more at the application development, integration, maintenance and performance of the products you select. To help think about additional requirements, as your applications become more sophisticated, the chart below illustrates the different types of applications, design goals and Web services and tools required to create these new applications. Application Primary Design Goals Web Services and Tools Electronic Publishing Making information easily and widely available.