I work for a 15k+ organization, and we stopped our migration to Exchange, in part because of the costs to migrate, but also because we found out we could save money moving to Domino 8.5. Our application developers are excited about Domino as a development platform again, and that alone will prove to be a huge ROI.
We stopped the move to Exchange
By Anonymous on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 4:04pm
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We didn't stop the move to Exchange
It was an expensived transtion for us. About 8 times as expensive with all the things that needed to be replaced. Exchange is a less capable platform in terms of overall capabilities. With Outlook, you loose all of the other integrated Notes capabilities and have rebuild/replace them with other products. It is not just about email. The email and calendaring is OK for the avarage users. The addressing/contacts/GAB is much less robust than Notes. I see less use of calendaring due to lack of features. Yes, we read the instructions. The most vocal Notes critics are now the most vocal Outlook critics. Overall comment across the company is "why did we do it?" It was not "thank you we needed that." One last comment about this whole numbers "but everybody is doing it" focus. That is something I hear from my teenagers. Save your money...
On-premise switch makes no sense but cloud does
People have lots of options today and they need to look at this multiple ways before making a choice.
First, if you're just looking at email, it's never a good choice to switch. But if you're looking at platform migration (Notes, Quickplace, SameTime, etc to Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, Live) then there are some compelling reasons to switch.
Whether IBM likes it or not, most people today run Windows machines. Thus, the Microsoft platform is much more integrated and has capabilities that surpass the Lotus platform. Not to mention it's more visually appealing and user friendly. Lotus Connections is a good tool, but doesn't make up for the fragmented platform that IBM has built. What's the deal with Quickr anyway?
The other factor to consider is the "cloud" option. Whether you plan to go the SaaS option or hosted option, there are significant cost saving opportunites in this space. During our analysis we found that the Microsoft hosted model was about 70% cheaper than on-premise Notes all things considered. IBM's hosted model was comparible in cost, but much less capable than Microsoft's. Here you can truly see how fragmented the Lotus suite is. Such a shame really.
Overall, if you're considering switching vendors on-premise, then it makes for a very difficult sell. There isn't a clear winner. But if you're looking into hosting or exploring SaaS, then Microsoft is a winner by a long shot. Unless IBM enhances their weak LotusLive offering, there's just no contest.
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