The Difference between SharePoint and Lotus Notes(2)

"Notes/Domino comes with a mail server"

Domino doesn't come with a mail server. It IS a mail server. And a Database server, And a Web server, And an Instant messaging server, and ...

"There is no way to do a JOIN with Lotus "tables" (they're called "views" in Domino). Really. It's impossible to do a look-up in a list field to another field in another list."

Yes there is, they're called XPages, and it is most certainly possible to do lookups and joins with any Data source, either from the current database (nsf), another database (nsf) or an external source (even SQL). On the same screen. A Sharepoint developer must perform feats of magic and witchcraft to pull data from a non-SQL source.

"They're also notoriously difficult to maintain once the original creator has left your company"

Bad developers in any environment are able to create horrific structures and follow worst practices. This is not a problem restricted to Domino development.

"SharePoint is much more developer friendly; Visual Studio is a very capable development environment"

Domino Designer exposes all features of the Domino Object Model, with the ability to code in Formula, LotusScript, Java, JavaScript, HTML and CSS natively, while also drawing on ALL of the functionality available on the integrated Domino server (Mail, Web, IM, DB, SQL, etc - as above). Really, how does this make it "comparatively basic"?

"And on a very technical level: the Lotus NSF "databases" are not relational"

Horses for courses. Care to explain the popularity of CouchDB or other 'NoSQL' data stores? I've seen developers trying to emulate Lotus Notes applications with a relational back end failing miserably. One example: a 3 week 'spare time' project created by an Admin following a 3 day designer course was eventually 'replicated' in the parent organisation with a .Net app that took over 9 months and almost 100k to build.

Happy to help you out with any future list you compose, just to make sure you're looking at the right tree in the orchard while comparing the fruit: about.me/matnewman