Friday, May 18, 2012

Can anyone cite a successful (large) migration of Notes to Exchange in Australia ?

I am aware of a large number of migrations over the last 3 years, but the striking feature in all of them is Domino is still active and running. In some cases Notes clients are still on all the desktops running apps. In just about all cases the TCO has increased and so has complexity.

I wonder why the IT media or analysts never talk about this ? I suppose it is just not trendy.

Anyway if you have a glowing example let it be known.

3 comments:

Tim Tripcony said...

Reminder: there is no such thing as a "Notes to Exchange" migration. It's a delusional construct. You can migrate Domino to Exchange. You can migrate Notes to Outlook. Anyone trying to migrate Notes to Exchange doesn't understand what they already have or what they're trying to replace it with - or both. And, as Yoda would say, "that... is why you fail".

Unknown said...

There's been quite a few discussions in the Lotus blogosphere about organisations still running Notes / Domino after migrations to Exchange or Google Apps. It really doesn't surprise me that some of these organisations are still running Notes to serve apps which haven't been replaced yet - we all understand that Notes apps are very difficult to replace at a reasonable ROI.

I would like to add a small caveat to your question, Adam. Of these organisations who are still running Notes / Domino after a mail migration, how many of these are still maintaining their Domino licensing?

I know of several organisations in the Europe and US who migrated their mail elsewhere, but still run Notes for some apps without maintaining their licenses - customers are at liberty to do this under the standard PA agreement.

If IBM aren't making money from these guys, I'm not sure what the question proves!

Ethann Castell said...

You really need to determine your criteria for success before you assess how successful something has been. In regards to glowing examples, you could ask the same questions about SAP implementations, CRM migrations, and so on. Large scale change is always a big challenge.

Anecdotal evidence is that many companies in Australia have migrated their email from Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange and that many end up running Domino apps for a considerable period of time after the email migration has finished.

However I think the key question is that once a company has decided to move their email off Domino, what does that says about their intentions for their Domino apps? My experience would suggest that, with a few notable exceptions, once a company has moved off Domino for email that they no longer see Domino as a strategic app platform and/or implement a policy of NOT developing any NEW apps on the Domino platform.