IT trade mag Sm@rt Reseller tried outsourcing its email with a New York-based ASP that hosts e-mail and other applications. Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports that despite the provider’s enthusiasm, ASP did not work as advertised. The problems seem to have come from the interface with Lotus Notes. Vaughn-Nichols reported that reading messages was “as slow as running a marathon on crutches.” Worse, the ASP client lacked essential features such as spell-checking, cutting and pasting and login and password use was awkward.
painfully slow
Sm@rt Reseller’s advice to Notes-based ASPs is to stick with the native Notes client, because Lotus’ Java-based browser client was “painfully slow on even our fastest 500MHz Pentium III with 128MB of RAM and T1 connections to the Internet.”