I just read that Coca Cola Amatil has dumped Lotus Notes for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). Their technology manager said that they made the switch to reduce costs and “smooth out” the fragmentation associated with Lotus Notes.

They claim that upgrading Lotus Notes was a continual exercise and that, from a business point of view, created significant capital spikes for them so every two or three years when they did upgrades to get the new features set.

They started the BPOS migration process with a ‘pilot’ phase for the 180-members of the IT department, using it to learn, and “experience the pain” before offering it to the whole company.

Then they extended the product to about 90 non-IT volunteers who helped “champion” the change, who were taught about the product and then helped to “spread the word” to the rest of the employees.

It would seem to me that an organization that would deploy this type of evangelical effort to migrate to BPOS could have easily done the same thing to facilitate their Notes upgrades with minimal cost and pain.

So now they have email in the cloud. Congratulations! I would be interested to see what their cost structure will be in the long run versus what it may have been had they decided to put the effort into leveraging their Notes investment.

Does anyone have an idea how to frame this debate for other organizations looking to do the same migration?

1. Dubr09/16/2010 10:07:53 AM

Many good comments to a good article.
If you’ve already built a high-availability environment the ROI to switch to BPOS is already less appealing. How do you factor in the BPOS August outages (Google for details) that further weaken the argument for this solution?
Every company has its outspoken MS proponents but what will the established business Notes users say when they get Outlook? – IT pilot users dare not complain. It remains to be seen if BPOS price of $10-$20/month/user will cost-effective. We have many general purpose Notes mail accounts that have specialized processing agents.
Lot’s more to look at including trying to put a price on personalized service current Notes IT staff gives business users to improve their productivity. Also, how about opening access to corporate data to MS BPOS employees & consultants?

2. pada820909/14/2010 02:02:29 AM

:- How about framing your argument from an "infrastructure" view, .i.e., by that I mean the number of servers required to house an MS solution as opposed to an IBM solution, Outlook/Exchange v Notes/Domino.

In my last role as an admin in a Government site, we extensively reduced the number of physical servers required to accommodate 14000+ email users and associated application servers. From about mid 2005 we moved all of these mailboxes from around 60 Windows servers onto 3 SOLARIS servers with clustering and failover and disaster recovery all accommodated easily.

Also we moved MOST of the application servers onto a "virtual" environment with little or no degradation in service to users.

Hope this might provide some insight.

3. Peter Burroughs 09/01/2010 02:31:34 PM

great post. Let's check back in with them in a year and see what their oveall "pain" amounted to.

4. REL08/30/2010 07:08:13 PM

I 2nd comments previously made on this topic, the decision maker is usually CFO or CIO and NOT the administrators or systems support persons who would absolutely choose to remain/focus attention on the Lotus Notes platform.

I think one item we must incorporate into WHY companies convert? Lotus/IBM is HORRIBLE at marketing the product. Majority of people think of Notes as an email platform and barely know the full capabilities of Sametime. Microsoft can offer the entire suite of products (Sharepoint, OCS, and Office suite with a small product called Outlook) for a bundled price and market all of its features as one enterprise solution (which isn't accurate but that is how it is sold) centered around Active Directory.

I feel the conversation on this topic is no longer about products and functionality (because it is clear what is a superior offerings with a smaller footprint) but marketing, pricing and brand recognition heavily favors the "integrated" Microsoft suite. I think the latest versions of Domino/Notes and Sametime 8.5.x are the best products released in a while but, IBM sometimes delivers too late and unfortunately misses the boat.

5. Joseph LeMay08/30/2010 01:51:10 PM
Homepage: http://www.joelemay.com

Usually when companies switch from one to the other, it's because the decision maker doesn't understand Notes, and doesn't want to be bothered learning. The manager you quoted doesn't understand. He said he wants to "smooth out" things, which translates to "I don't know what's wrong with it, so, rather than speaking about specific issues I have, I'll make a platitude." One glitch, and the hands get thrown up and someone wants to switch to the thing they're used to. Also, some organizations use it for nothing more than email and calendar, and, if that's all you're going to do with it, then you almost may as well not bother. Not that it's not an excellent email client, but the whole selling point of Notes is the groupware/collaboration/ability to work disconnected aspect of it. Am I wrong?
If their only goal was to get email in the cloud, then there have been lots of various Domino hosting services available for the last 15 years (you didn't have to wait for Lotus Live). It will be interesting to see if they're happy with their decision 5 years from now. What I'd like to know is what they're going to do with all the applications they've presumably developed for the Domino server. If they've made the investment in developer time to write custom applications, then that functionality will have to be duplicated elsewhere, probably at significant cost. If they haven't made that investment, then they'll probably be fine with the Microsoft platform.

6. Mike D08/30/2010 01:43:45 PM

I would consider myself a Notes evangelist. Have been programming and administering it since 1993. However, since IBM purchased Lotus, the product has been steadily declining (almost exponentially lately) in reliability and stability. Years ago, it was rare that I would discover or encounter a bug once or twice a year. Now it's more like at least once a week. The days of the Balabans and the Kaufmans and the Devendorfs and, of course, the Ozzies are long gone, as too is the quality of the product. And you can thank IBM.

7. heather martin08/30/2010 12:13:52 PM

"Does anyone have an idea how to frame this debate for other organizations looking to do the same migration? "

yeah, boycott Coke!

8. Ken Belitono08/27/2010 04:48:36 PM

Not really sure how to frame the argument, but their decision makes no sense to me at all. EVEN if upgrading on premisise Notes was too much work for them, LotusLive Notes was ust announced and they HAD to know that was coming.