Less than a week into blogging and I just got my first "flame" comment: Sean says “Next time you want to come at Notes, come up with something a little more plausible.”

It sounds like Sean saw my post, and maybe my blog, as a “SharePoint is better than Notes” statement and assumes that I want to have that kind of debate. It isn’t and I don’t. I have, in fact, always tried to avoid the “who is better” discussions because I know that there are no simple answers.

If you need some soapboxes to stand on, here are a few:

• The fact that Notes rich text format is complex and proprietary is horrible and evil.
• The fact that Notes rich text format supports tabbed tables and controlled-access sections is innovative and wonderful.
• The fact that you can replace hundreds of lines of LotusScript with a built-in checkbox approval process makes SharePoint a superior platform.
• The fact that Notes has the ability to flag an item as a “reader names” field whereas in SharePoint you have to design a workflow (and possibly write some code) to achieve the same thing makes Notes a superior platform.

Each of these points has a very interesting technical aspect, but I would prefer to leave the religious arguments out of it.

I do, however, recognize the large volume of people who have decided that they want to re-platform complex applications onto the Microsoft platform.  The bulleted issues above are exactly the types of things that those people deal with every day.  I have chosen that niche as a place to make great tools and maybe offer a little advice on the side. If you are not faced with these issues and these topics do not interest you, there are a lot of other blogs out there to read.