Let’s ask the experts.
Yesterday I got a phone call from an old customer I haven’t heard of in years. He is going to retire, sold his company and wants to take his contacts or probably the whole CRM with him AND he wants to use his iPhone for mail and calendar. Now he asks me, how to do it.
He is still using Notes/Domino 7 (the darn did run without me all those years).
His CRM is pure Notes (written by me)
He is no fan of the „cloud“.
My first thought was to give him a small Domino Server with Traveler, something like Collax Office Entry. The Advantage is, that it is extremely silent. Backup, Postfix and all that stuff is included and it does not cost a fortune, but Domino would not be supported.
I am not sure, that it can manage the load with Domino and Traveller and for one or two persons running their own server is a bit overdoing it. And he should use a fixed IP, which costs, too. I am no fan of DynDNS anymore since mail servers tend to get blocked after a while.
My second thought was LotusLive Notes. I don’t know, if it is available in Switzerland, but does anybody out there have any experience with it?
It would have the advantage to be much less expensive, I suppose you can have your own mail domain and he could still run his CRM localy.
Any opinions or other suggestions?
You DynDNS comment would only be true if you set your Mail MX records to your DynDNS address. But often you can use the mail servers of your domain provider instead. Works fine, you just have to configure the mail server as a smart host.
The mail server checks the IP address of the connecting host against the DNS MX record. In this configuration this is never the IP of your home server.
I use an atom server with 4GB RAM and 2 laptop hdds in Linux software RAID (the former generation even only just ran with 2GB because Intel did not allow more). As the box also has to do almost everything that your Collax box does it is quite busy but runs very stable. I am using Debian which normally runs fine for a period of at least 4 years (then it would need a major release update). I have customers running this kind of configuration and less than 1 day per year for maintenance (and I can ssh into the box as long as it is online). As the box can also store local files, the music and film collection and can provide web and/or Domino applications it is quite a powerful solution. And the hardware cost less than 500 Euro and lasts for 3 years and longer. True still more expensive than some cloud solutions but not as expensive as many would think. And if you don’t like Linux you could probably use Windows Home Server too.
Of course Collax should work too. For such configurations I don’t need IBM support either. In theory Lotus Live could work too but I am not so confident about this product. IBM is a company that is used to have high margins in software and services which Lotus Live probably cannot deliver today (at least not for Micro SMB).
You could check with Group Business Software http://www.gbs.com/
They do Notes hosting, at least in the „big northern Kanton“
Host his app for him on your server and charge him something reasonable. This is what we do for one off mail files or db’s.
@Keith
Officially there is no suitable license I am aware if for doing this.
You can test Lotus Live for 60 days and there are also hosting providers like http://prominic.net .