Company Bans Notes, What Next?
In an attempt to cut down on the number of gaps in my blogging I am looking for other sources of inspiration. Mainly my inbox. I get asked lots of interesting and challenging questions. Some of which I can't answer or that may be better answered by a wider audience. A case in point is the mail I got earlier this month. It was from a lady working at a company planning to rid itself of Notes:
> I posted this question on LDD today (anonymously, because it has not
> been announced company-wide yet). I was just informed that Exchange
> will replace Notes next year and that we should look for a replacement
> software for our Notes apps. The decision has been made, no debating
> allowed.
> From your experiences thus far, do you know of software that may be
> comparable? (The terms Team Track and MSInfo pack were thrown out
> there by the higher-ups in this meeting)
My reply was non-committal and simply asked what the replacement should provide. How similar should the functionality be? How easy should data migration be? Apart from this I was lost.
Apparently things are complicated (simplified?) by the fact that management want no IBM at all. Everything needs to be on one platform, which I guess is Microsoft, to "tighten things up".
Anybody know the answer? Please let's not discuss the decision itself and focus instead on alternative technologies, to which they can migrate. Who knows you might be in the same boat one day.
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Nothing in here then? {Link}
They may well find this initiative from MS usefull
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Sorry - this is an updated article about the same MS program
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Without trying to sound anti-MS, the company in question will be spending more money to go to Exchange, this is proven and known. If they are willing to spend that kind of money, looking at 3-tier choices may be the way to go. It would, though, put them in either the position to compromise on their 'all MS' approach or in the position to home-grow a lot of stuff in .net.
So far, the only way to comparably get all the functionality of Notes that I've seen with the same ease does not lie with MS choices, but rather with things like Puakma, JBoss, and higher horse-power suites like Peoplesoft, which runs on Oracle quite nicely and has lots of tools for building forms with workflow, all table (database, not html) driven.
As an aside (trying very hard not to break your rule not to discuss the decision, Jake) if they are heavily invested in Notes for things other than email as a past client of mine was, they may find it hard to justify spending money to replace applications developed in Notes that are working just fine now. They'll be faced with apps that use mail to promote a workflow and therefore will need to retain a mail server or two and the licenses for the users involved.
My past client spent 3 times the money once said and done to put Exchange in place... and Notes is still there. With any small hope, her company may not be able to afford completely ditching Notes... it's a long hard decision to come to, but when your faced with spending lots of money for no reason other than to standardize, the cost of upsetting the business of divisions using apps, the cost to replace the apps, and the cost to cover the transition far outweighs just keeping the piece built in Notes.
We have around 50 notes applications in production. One was migrated to a siebel/oracle platform, it took over a year for a team to build a comparable solution, with not a 100% of functionality migrated. Part of the procedure will still include some tasks for the notes application to do.
I worked in the past on the Lotus Notes division of a consulting firm that had a team of developers trying to build a "Notes like" application to handle process workflow on an MS Exchange platform. They went out of business after 2 years of trying and after millions spent.
I haven't seen any succesful migration of that kind.
I have had great success converting Domino to J2EE using XSP studio from Trilog {Link} however this product has nothing to do with Microsoft. The trick is converting 80+% of an application and 100% of the data, this leaves a little bit of additional work rather than re-coding the entire application. I do like the work Gary is doing now at Microsoft, integration is a much better route, IMHO, but many CEO's who do not understand Domino most likely feel the same way about integration, they just don’t get it!!.
What a shame on her!!!
They want to move away from Lotus to Microsoft, and they want that people that is expert in Lotus tell them how?
No way, tell the miss that call Microsoft, Jake.
.::AleX::.
Not to defend the decision to move to MS, Alex, but I had the impressionne that la seniorita was not the decision maker, but rather is suffering with it and trying to make the best of the situation. ■I'm sure in that light, you'd agree she deserves help?
I wish I could spend 30 minutes with those decision makers!... just to let them know a few facts of life! But anyway... Its interesting that they want to go exchange. I guess this is for mail routing?? as we all know that exchange can't do what Domino can do. I've had clients go this route, and if they hadn't said " want no IBM at all" then the utility server is an interesting route. You don't need mail routing via domino, just route it to the exchange box instead(there are various ways to do this, from relaying in the server configs,to java-mail) Utility Server allows you to run apps, move mail to exchange (if you have to) that way, you can run the 2 environments and co-exist, without the pain of trying to find an alternative apps environment. ( you'd have to consider apps in the browser though, as utility server is for domino web apps, not client.) I hope this might give an alternaive perspective. Your contact should fight for the apps, allow the mail to go, but you keep the jewels.!
Since we're talking about "tightening things up" into a Microsoft product range, you might want to consider Microsoft CRM.
MS CRM also hinges on Microsoft Exchange and of course Microsoft's .NET initiative. It can be multi-tiered, and uses Microsoft SQL to store business data.
On top of that, MS CRM has been gamma tested in the field by the first wave of buyers.
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Check the whitepaper at the above URL for a tech spec of MS CRM.
In my humble opinion, data migration from Notes to anything else is do-able; IF the Notes application doesn't hinge on Rich Text, or anything worse, like Rich Text with OLE embedded objects.
FYI: I have no experience in MS CRM. The product however is very intruiging.
>> In my humble opinion, data migration
>> from Notes to anything else is do-able;
>> IF the Notes application doesn't hinge
>> on Rich Text, or anything worse, like
>> Rich Text with OLE embedded objects.
But this is precisely _why_ most people develop notes applications. Notes is a rapid document- and attachment-centric application development tool. Workflow and email and security are all easy to implement on any platform - but the embededed attachments, response document heirarchies ... ouch. The old adage is still true. "Lotus Notes : Difficult to program; Impossible to replace!"
It is easy to replace Notes to Exchange, if Notes main use is sending and receiving mail.
For the apps, a small code in Notes, sometimes pages of code in any other enviroment. And I doubt that there is any other software that can fully replace Notes.
In real life, I have seen examples, mail clients are replaced, Notes applications freeze, no version upgrades are made, but Notes simply keeps on existing. In many cases for years. Servers may be reduced. But just it. In the long run, I don't think that anything might be achieved with that change. :-(
Serdar has nailed it. I was tasked with, amongst other things, working on "Decomissioning" Notes for a client. The email aspect was (fairly) straightforward.
But now, 2 years later, I am still being asked for input for Notes Client-based app problems - ie they haven't "Re-Platformed" the apps in 2 years.
They are going pure MS here, so I reckon a lot of it will be done with shedloads of VB/ASP. In the words of Mr. T....
"I pity the fool..."
Easy, replace it with Domino. No more Notes Client and easy migration of yout "Notes" applications ;)
I truly understand her pain, as I'm in kind of the same boat. I was informed last week that we are killing ALL Lotus Notes / Domino. We are migrating our mail to Exchange, and everything else to some "yet to be named" thing. ALL Notes/Domino development is to cease as of the 1st of the year, and all clients and servers are to be uninstalled / decomissioned by September 30, 2005.
I'm pretty certain that the decision is purely political. Somebody very high up with decision-making power, but lacking in either experience or complete information made the call, and we are not allowed to question it.
I still don't know what we are going to migrate our apps to. I've heard some talk of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, P -what the heck is the P for??), but I'm not betting on anything yet.
-Devin.
The P is for PHP Devin.
I'd love to have a job where they paid me to stick around while they moved platforms and cross-trained me while they were at it.
So the consensus seems to be that migration can be done but that it will take ages and cost a fortune. I suppose the weapon of choice is irrelevant. There's nothing like Domino out there. So, whatever you move to, it's going to be a complete nightmare! you just have to hope that it's a platform worth your learning. Will it be around for the next ten years and can you plan a career in it? These are the questions you should ask yourself before considering job hunting.
Thanks for everyone's input! (I'm the fool to pity)
Some really great leads were introduced here that I plan to follow-up on. I had not heard about GaryD's workshop and MS Dom/.NET "reach-out" plans.
Our change-over is now out in the open at our company.
Thus far, we have had demos for:
-Team Track (cool, but web access...not so much)
-InfoPath demo by Microsoft (looks something like Notes dev, and I'm sure the coding is going to be quite an education, but AGAIN, web forms can't be edited!)
I am eternally grateful to Jake for posting this and to all you guys taking the time to write your opinions and offer help.
Companies often go through this gyration because of the "Popcorn Notes" effect, which is really a problem caused by a historical lack of enterprise standards coupled with the ease of Notes rapid app development. Couple that with hyper-aggressive Microsoft marketing and it's war!
If you can step back from being a Notes geek and look at the app landscape as a bunch or function points, you can improve the Notes apps as well as get an estimate on the Lotusectomy.
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Carleen, Team Track and InfoPath are 'Form' tools, i.e. fill in the form and save, maybe do some approval. I can't believe anyone in their right mind would think this would be a replacement for Notes, unless all you do with Notes is forms based routing. InfoPath BTW works great integrated with Notes.
I was involved in an analysis of a global companies notes environment consisting of around 3000 notes dbs (approx 800 templates)... The company wanted to move to Microsoft to reduce suppliers or something. We put MS Sharepoint Portal Server forward as a replacement platform for a large number of the apps as they were quite simple and it appeared to be capable. The more complex ones we recommended .NET / SQL server.
I left the country after the initial analysis and migration costings were delivered and don't know what eventuated but my guess is once they looked at the figures it would have been hard to justify the change.
I've worked at a few different companies where they've decided to ditch Notes and replace it with something else. A bunch of MS or Sun apps integrated was the usualy solution.
Years later I'm still in contact with people working at those companies. Not one has been successful in migrating a single app (except for mail).
We migrated couple of apps from Domino to asp/sql server. The users wanted the categorised/twisty functionality and it was a pain to implement with asp. We delivered the apps with less functionality but better UI.
I dont mind if the company wants to spend money and migrate apps and the new apps are not even 70% of the original apps, atleast we are paid.
Not much to add. I've worked on a small site that had decommissioned Notes mail, and it was trivial to add hooks in the Notes applications to trigger Exchange messaging for a rudimentary work-flow (no extra Notes-centric advanced mail features; no mail-in databases).
I am yet to be convinced that it is possible to migrate Notes applications to another platform. I agree with Charles Ross: better standards, policies and procedures in the development cycle is a better investment than basically re-inventing all the applications in another platform.
That said, you might be able to use Lotus Workplace as an intermediary migration, in a two phased migration. (Heck, if they're going to Microsoft then obviously money is no object ;-)
My best advice would be to go to Websphere. As they don't seem to want IBM, then I would only agree that Oracle or Sybase might be able to extract the data from Notes (never done it though). The M$ .net platform is not defined, clearly signposted or fully functional.
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A lot of people here simply seems not to get that the decision of a management to switch dev platform is a longterm decision.
It doesn't matter so much if converting some departments pet notes app coded in 6 years by different flavours of developers with the common lack of documentation takes 2 years ( reunderstanding all the notes app and architecting/designing/coding it from scratch in .NET).
If .NET is way cooler architecture the decision will pay off in the medium to long term.
Part of my job is maintaining really big Domino apps. And this part often really sucks big time. A lot of the local admins don't know their overcomplicated job properly. Today we had to shut down an important server for 5 hours to run some phonky compact -B (or how its called) over a Domino app close to 2MB on OS/2. Other customers believed IBM that DWF is a stable product. Others bought LSI (a most "brilliant" thing invented by IBM Germany).
Other part is j2ee (I like much more) and .NET is quite high on my agenda, because Microsoft invested a lot of money in it.
Its completly beyond me, why people are not thankfull to management for such a switch decision because they are going to learn new interesting stuff, instead of hoping to continue their "Notes is better than Outlook"-war until retirement.
Axel
axel: i think that your problem come into existence from your and your "local admins" domino competence. coming to point when "important server" is 5 hour out of order, giving me some look of what "important" mean for this company managment.
ive build, mantain, and dev. many notes networks. not so big in american standards /in this moment one server with about 400 hundred heavy users. in this moment during migration to double machine cluster/. i cannot see any purpose to MIGRATE from domino. in my current company. with set of network responsible linux machines, oracle cluster, domino5 on nt, and sybase. having little but knowledge-full team /about 8 people with deep knowledge of domino, php, perl, c, linux, delphi, java, oracle & some more.../ we do not use in our it department words like "impossible". there is of course a problem of always-be-prototype applications. but detailed knowledge and possibilities of customization, giving power.
can someone told me, that know a better way to maintain on a single ibm eseries machine /forgive me non detailed specification //two little xeons, 1GB RAM/// 400 about 1GB maildatabases, 60.000 monthly incomig e-mails, completely company documents workflow and not-so-small&simple-web based intranet? when you already have this machine and this soft and knowledge about it? i dont see reason to migrate from domino. i only can to see reason to migrate from any MS.
/by the way, most of with-domino-server accidens i saw, was because of OS, or hardware, or people un-knowledge problems/
i saw many companies where the only one about lotus notes idea was "mail server", or loving telephones, or cellulose smell... they can go to exchange or post office, or whatever. be happy. i stay where i can make my users pleased
Think it is typical for people who live and think in a heavily proprietary environment to resort to question skill level of those who do have serious doubts regarding their pet platform.
Btw. for me some things are impossible and other things does not make economic sense. Am no superhuman.
What makes me angry is the total lack of criticism inside Domino community. This spirit of bile blog and others we do have in Java :-)
@pjes: If you have a larger organization , apps which have been started 6 years ago, you do have lot of hard to maintain/understand legacy code, not-so-good administered servers, etc. And those are my "real problems" with Domino and that's why I prefer a cleaner "layered" architecture typical for .NET and J2EE.
Axel
I always have to laugh when someone refers to Domino mentions 'heavily proprietary', belittles the fact that skills are required and talks about .Net and J2EE. Well Axel I hate to be the one to burst your bubble but high skill levels are required for any development environment. I am sure others will chime in on poorly written applications, whatever the underlying technology written or maintained by the un-skilled or under-skilled. I share much of the code I developed for proprietary Domino with our .Net and J2EE developers. We use common Javascript, Java, CSS and design philosophies between the different development environments. If you look over past blogs here you will see that there is no ■total lack of criticism inside Domino community■ everyone here seems to have voices their concern at one time or another about portions of Domino we do not like or would like to see changed.
I think the hard parts should all be made by open source code :-)
No serious. I think we are talking about different things, which might have to do with my over-agressive discussion style.
I am just quite firmly convinced that world will be better with less-heroe-more-engineering style approach to software projects.
All this OOP, AOP, Layered Architecture, Refactoring, Patterns, Test Driven Development, use proven Open Source code etc. stuff goes in this direction.
Doesn't matter if its .NET or J2EE.
Axel
The customer i've been working for 3 years now is moving to Exchange.
They are considering Sharepoint/MCMS and WSS as the next portal tools. Complex applications will be one after another migrated to ASP.Net/Oracle (the database used for business applications).
The decision has certainly to do with the way IBM sell their products and explain the future of their platform...
I mean many of us have been struggling to understand the workplace and websphere/domino evolutions. As a result many customers see the future of Notes (new client, j2ee, websphere), which will require migrations, as complicated as a move to exchange.
And as Microsoft bundle everything : office, infopath, windows, exchange, sharepoint in "cheap" packages, it surely looked like the easiest way out.
Jerome,
Microsoft does neither have cheap packages nor is it the easiest way out but I have heard those statements too (and I at least understand why it still is an attractive offer). It is the migration with the lowest business risk and you get the possibility to restart nearly from scratch (which is nice in some way). But what is wrong with IBMs message? IBM is moving everything towards J2EE (at least what IBM considers as J2EE/Open Standards) and if you do not like it, you can still use the good old Domino stuff as you did through all those years or move on to something else. That is not the best solution for every Domino shop but it definetely is what the Fortune 500 requested.
I work in a fairly big company that made this decision about 2 years ago.
Some of you have commented, along the line of "What a great opportunity for you, think about all the stuff & technologies you will learn!"
Forget it! The cost of migrating both the application portfolio and the developers are too large, the only way to get rid of it is to starve it to death.
Stop all new development! Ensure that everybody in the organization knows that the platform has received the death-mark so they do not invest in new functionality for the exiting applications.
Lifespan of most Notes/ Domino applications are short, in a few years you will have a more manageable portfolio. Meanwhile do not invest in competence for the Domino developers, but keep them occupied with maintenance and integrating existing applications to new infrastructure (mail platform for instance). This will ensure that they leave the company steadily. With some good managerial work you can synchronize the decay of both the application portfolio and the developer group. After a couple of years this leaves you with a skeleton crew maintaining the rest portfolio, at a gradually lower service & competence level.
Hire new developers for the new platforms. Fire & hire is cheaper, especially if you can get the developers to quit at they own accord.
According to a recent Gartner seminar (where my boss went to), the "way to go" at this point in time (especially if your company is going the "Microsoft-all-the-way" route) is:
* .NET
* XML and related concepts
* SOAP / Web Services (which .NET is quite good at) and concepts like UDDI and WSDL
* Visual Basic (with .NET), which should prove little problem for those used to LotusScript (at least, going the other way, I had no problem at all).
* Learn to appreciate IIS (the MS web server), ASP.NET and Exchange. Exchange can do more than just serve e-mail (just like Domino can), and Outlook can be used as a "blended" Web / client application. Look at MS CRM or MS Outlook with Business Contact Manager for what can be achieved (the last one does not work with Exchange, though...)
At our office we are going from Lotus Notes to MS Exchange. The change is due, i guess mid 2005.
I've been around since R3, but what a waiste the past 2 years. Now i'm on MS and C# and hope that MS has any RAD-alike in the pipe. /=)
I think that IBM should sell Lotus to MS, maybe that could change the deadlock!
Just wondering, has anyone got an experience of a company doing the reverse and moving from Exchage to Domino?