Red Bull Realities

There's been a lot of talk recently -most notably on Paul Mooney and Ed Brill's sites- about Microsoft's recent announcement about the launch of a new suite of tools to assist with migrating from Domino across to Microsoft-equivilent platforms.

Paul's analysis of the analyzer tool is pretty thorough and, I think, accurate. I would add that in my own experience with Domino customers (my own employers 1000+ dbs included) the majority of apps are based on out of the box templates. Last time we did an assessment there were only 20 apps that were discovered as 'complex'. CLearly there are different findings on this from different people. We're not a big on Domino consulting so it may be that our customers fit a certain Domino profile (big users of mail and doc repositary's with LoB apps being handled elsewhere by SAP, AS/400 etc) whereas others who are more significant Domino consultants may have customers who fit a different profile where Domino is leveraged a lot more widely. Clearly, one of those profiles is a lot better fit for what MS is offering.

Now, certainly the analyzer is going to scare the hell out of a lot of customers who rely on a lot of custom Domino apps. Others with a small amount of complex apps are going to be pretty interested. Paul points out that complex apps are "not easy to migrate" and that there is no "easy magic migrate button".  The point is though that these apps are actually easier to migrate than you might think. Even though these tools are pretty limited we have to remember that Microsoft strategy for these migrations is to use the Casahl tools which, however complex the apps are, makes it dramatically easier by automatically converting the Domino forms and views into their Sharepoint counterparts, as well as making a stab at converting Lotuscript to VB. That is a significant reduction in the dev time, even more if you use the original Domino developer team to assist in the recoding. This is all a hell of a lot better than the original app conversion tool. Sure there's a cost for acquiring the toolset but from what I've seen it more than pays for itself in reduced dev time and risk.

As usual for announcements like this, comments on Ed's site boiled down into why would anyone want to switch to a huge stack of MS server products to replace Domino, there being no value in such a move, Microsoft being evil and having products that suck.

In terms of moving to a massive stack of apps its worth remembering that these are o/s, database, portal and mail server. With the exception of Exchange this is pretty much the n-tier architecture everyone, including IBM Workplace, endorses.

Mainly though, in my experience, the reasons organisations are looking to move to a Microsoft infrastructure are:

• Getting to an integrated policied environment, with a single base directory, single sign-on that works.
• Continued uncertainty around IBM direction
• Integrated Mobility
• Massive third-party support, particularly in the ever increasing Archiving market
• And by far the main one is the client. Most users just don't like the Notes client and they're constantly reminded of this by using Outlook at home. Power users love the whole seamless roaming, no replication setup or location changing. Admins love the low bandwidth support, no-vpn, no port 1352 and reduction in support desk calls.

Bear in mind that for the majority of these orgs apps are not a major issue, they want mail, with the other LoB apps living elsewhere. Once they've got XP, AD and Exchange, of course they're going to look to Sharepoint and LCS as their strategic collaboration platform

Of course a lot of these (those that rely on apps) are looking to migrate just mail. Bill makes a lot of valid points about the complexitites of migrating Domino Apps. I know of plenty of places which still have a DB apps server kicking out doclinks to Exchange through the ever creaky Notes Connector.

I guess the main point I'm trying to make here is that there are a lot of customer who are interested in moving to Microsoft (out of the 9 Domino systems I have put in at this employer, 5 have expressed an interest in the last 12 months and 3 are definitely going.) Its not fair to suggest that they're doing this because of Microsoft FUD, marketing or just a personal preference of the CIO. In todays climate more than ever the cost and benefit justifications have to be made to do these changes. And these guys are making those cases successfully. All customers are different and they don't all fit the profile that is familiar to us. For a lot of people staying with IBM is the thing to do but there are also others that can make a clear case for moving

One thing that should please the Lotus community. I recently heard a MS Product Manager state (in a public forum) that they had an 18-month window to move customers to Exchange, after which the Hannover wave would be giving Domino customers such a clear roadmap that they would have no reason whatsoever to move.

Comments

[Nathan T. Freeman]

Nice points, Al. While I'll agree that a lot of the responses include the "MS products suck" statement, I think the majority of Domino advocates protest migrations more simply because they don't have any ROI. Two years ago when IBM muddied the waters by implying Websphere migrations, we said the same thing. Migration generally doesn't pay.

Now, you are pointing to some valid business reasons why a migration might make sense. That's actually the first list of real drivers that I've ever seen.

Lotus could do better in integrating with Active Directory and providing better SSO solutions. We should be aware that this would probably only be achieved by wrecking the Notes PKI. That's a big strategic decision that I wouldn't care to make for IBM. What they ought to do, IMNSHO, is ship more of their own products that integrate with the PKI in the first place.

Uncertainty around IBM direction, well you address that nicely in the last paragraph. :-)

I'm not sure where you're coming from with integrated mobility, unless you're just thinking along Blackberry lines. Yes, you do have to turn to 3rd party support to get that kind of link out of Domino, but those are pretty good tools at this point from what I hear.

Archiving market is rough all over, but yes, it's stronger for Exchange. Then again, you need purely stronger tools for Exchange because it doesn't have the out-of-box capabilities that Domino has. A good Domino mail archiving solution is to simply use the capabilities that Lotus already provides. Unfortunately, almost no one understands how to set these up... and that's sad.

I'm not clear on how using Outlook eliminates the need for VPNs, where using Notes creates them. Last time I checked, anyone permitting outside access to an Exchange mail infrastructure was pretty dogmatic about using VPNs, and anyone doing this with Notes just opened 1352 and clicked "Encrypt" on the server's network port. Maybe that's just my experience, but it's been that way in about 15 different companies.

As far as client preference goes, the latest versions of DAMO pretty much wrap that up. You don't have to run Exchange servers to cater to your Outlook fans in the company.