Ed Brill

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1. 1  Tony Palmer http://palmerweb.blogspot.com | 5/14/2009 9:19:45 PM

   Sounds like they just wanted email in the cloud - shame they didn't go with IBM's offering.

1. 2  Bill Geimer  | 5/14/2009 10:05:21 PM

   I wonder if the understand that with the data on the cloud, the data ownership becomes cloudy as well.

   500 seems like a low number for one server, but then you cannot do half unless you virutalize it. Okay, call it two if you cluster it (good idea). But I cannot make two servers come up to the numbers in the study, unless they were still running Notes 1. Licenses were a bit expensive 20 years back. But come to think of it, that company wasn't Hamilton Beach, was it.

1. 3  Gavin Bollard http://dominogavin.blogspot.com | 5/14/2009 11:00:04 PM

   I'll agree that it seems politically motivated but I at least applaud the fact that they've taken a decision to move to a non MS platform.

   It will be interesting to watch and see;

   1. If they can make good on their TCO

   2. If they get acceptable uptime on their services

   3. If they get reasonable response-time from google.

   4. If they really turned off ALL DOMINO Servers...

   It's my belief that Domino is so good a platform that no migration to any currently available offerings from any other vendor in the market today can be able to match it for TCO, Flexibility and Reliability - but I'm always interested to see people try new things.

1. 4  Steven Kennett  | 5/15/2009 6:04:54 AM

   Aren't the greater percentage politically motivated, otherwise why migrate?

   Sounds to me like they just needed a decent Admin!

1. 5  Stephen Bailey  | 5/15/2009 6:44:23 AM

   I'd be interested to know how they got on with their app migration. Did they have a tool to do it, or was this just a case of rip-and-replace?

   Thanks.

1. 6  Jim Casale http://www.jimcasale.net | 5/15/2009 7:20:49 AM

   "The whole "complexity" thing doesn't make any sense to me, either, since server upgrades for Domino are in-place and simple restarts, and clients aren't required to be upgraded with servers."

   I would qualify that with the statement that *some* environments might be complex enough to not upgrade every to every point release. What makes the environment so complex and not so easy to upgrade is all the third party addins some companies use with Domino. In these cases Domino is still a breeze to upgrade but it can be hard to get certifications from the third party vendors that their product works with the release of Domino you want to upgrade to. That being said it doesn't sound like Hamilton Beach was one of those environments.

   "We had so much e-mail, we estimated the upgrade might take more time than a three-day weekend to complete, with the email system shut down. So we took a look at Google Apps and found that it had all the enterprise features we needed."

   Depending on the volume of data I could see upgrading the ODS taking a weekend or longer...but who said it had to be done in one phase? From what I see they, don't have clustering so it goes back to back management and polices. The issue I really have is with the statement "enterprise features". Based on my current real time experience with Google at the enterprise level it does *not* have enough enterprise features. Recent outages would dictate some sort of failover scenario. Don't have that with GAPE. One can assume GAPE is a no brainer, that everything should work right out of the box. Not so with GAPE. Slow connections, inability to open attachments, failure to notify on new mail, no folders, no directory lookup, etc. And these are based on my *real world professional experience* not my personal experience at home with Gmail. As a matter of fact user feedback has been quite negative with many users wanting to get off GAPE.

   My opinion is GAPE is good for what it is - cheap alternative for local applications. Just remember, you get what you pay for.

1. 7  D. Lynch  | 5/15/2009 7:28:43 AM

   The use of an external provider like google, given their privacy policy, will add enourmous "hidden" costs related to the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure and e-discovery that make such a move a poor financial decision for any US-domiciled company, all of whom are subject to these federal rules.

   As you can read here { Link }

   google can

   "Access or retain information stored as part of your account, including your email, contacts and other information; and, Receive account information in order to satisfy applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request"

   This policy provides plaintiffs yet another lever to impose aditional FRCP burdens on defendants, and thereby will create a 3-way ediscovery dance and costs between plaintiffs, defendants and service providers, simply as a tactic to make settlement more attractive. A 3-way ediscovery scenario is incrementally more expensive than a 2-way scenario; having some extensive experience in this kind of thing, it has the potential of adding millions of dollars of cost, and more leverage for settlement, simply because of the idea that Google can retain information including email for an unspecified period of time, in an unspecified manner, for unspecified reasons.

   Retaining confidential information in this unspecified manner, which also may not be in conformance with your internal policies on data retention, is another legal nightmare, exactly what plaintiffs want to see to impose more expenses on defendants to manipulate the FRCP process towards settlement.

   For large corporations who are often the targets of litigation, the costs of ediscovery for one legal matter, can and do far outweigh the alleged cost benefit analysis that Hamilton Beach thinks is correct. Having lived in this realm for the past few years, the numbers are not trivial and they can exceed the costs to manage your internal systems for years.

1. 8  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/15/2009 7:29:35 AM

   "We had so much e-mail, we estimated the upgrade might take more time than a three-day weekend to complete, with the email system shut down."

   Two scenarios...

   1) They're incompetent.

   2) Since he said "...old servers that would need to be replaced..." perhaps the plan was to bundle a hardware upgrade with the Domino upgrade, and just buy brand new systems that would run 8.5. If so, replicating all existing mail to the new systems with an ODS upgrade and DAOS implementation might take more than 3 days. Of course, they wouldn't need to shut down email access during this period, so see point 1.

   50 bucks says they're not migrating their existing Domino mail to Google, so either they aren't shutting down the Domino servers yet, or they've just decided to force users to a clean slate environment.

   I think it's interesting that they flag "training for employees on the new look and feel" as an expense. Did they have to train Notes 6 users on Notes 8.5, but not have to train them on Gmail?

   I would point out that saving $600/user/year might be easy if they're moving ENTIRELY to GAPE -- because they might be ditching MSFT Office as well.

   All that being said, what you describe as an "emotional and political" decision might simply be that an IBM rep or business partner really pissed them off. IBM really needs to remember that as messaging becomes more commoditized, purchasing decisions become more an act of consumption than investment, and therefore decisions become much more emotionally motivated. You can't keep thinking you won't lose a customer just because you have a 20% advantage in ROI.

1. 9  Vitor Pereira http://www.vitor-pereira.com | 5/15/2009 7:53:58 AM

   You're probably right on all counts but maybe they haven't heard from IBM in the last 5 years.

   I went to an interview yesterday where they completed mail and IM migration to M$ 3 years ago but they're still running they're credit approval system on Domino+Workflow with a .Net front end (weirdest solution I've seen in 15 years). Guess what? They've never heard of ND7 or 8.x, know nothing about the Eclipse move and aren't aware of any benefits from the most recent versions or even that they exist. They make extensive use of web services in their systems except on Domino because they're running 6.5.

   You can argue that they should know all about this stuff, but I guess IBM PT (just in case you don't know, it's an hardware vendor here) are always too busy selling boxes.

1. 10  Giuseppe Grasso http://www.dominopoint.it | 5/15/2009 7:59:15 AM

   - maybe unrelated news -

   google down this morning: { Link }

1. 11  Kevin Pettitt http://www.lotusguru.com | 5/15/2009 8:11:19 AM

   Maybe I pissed them off when I dissed their blenders a while back: { Link }

   Sorry ;-)

1. 12  Ian Scott  | 5/15/2009 8:38:57 AM

   @4 - "Sounds to me like they just needed a decent Admin!"

   Something like that often comes to mind when I read these kind of things. Upgrading 500 users has to be a breeze.

   @10 - Maybe more information on that - { Link }

1. 13  Jim Casale http://www.jimcasale.net | 5/15/2009 8:44:03 AM

   @7 ""Access or retain information stored as part of your account, including your email, contacts and other information; and, Receive account information in order to satisfy applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request""

   I am not sure this applies to Google Enterprise". Can anyone clarify?

   @8 "50 bucks says they're not migrating their existing Domino mail to Google, so either they aren't shutting down the Domino servers yet, or they've just decided to force users to a clean slate environment.

   I think it's interesting that they flag "training for employees on the new look and feel" as an expense. Did they have to train Notes 6 users on Notes 8.5, but not have to train them on Gmail?"

   Correct on point one. That is what I am seeing here. I guess they lower migration costs by not migrating the old mail. Most users don't like that solution.

   You'd be surprised how many migrated Gmail users don't like Gmail for work because it is not what they are used to. I would not be surprised there would have to be some training involved for Gmail.

1. 14  Saqib Ali  | 5/15/2009 10:38:40 AM

   Hi Ed,

   Can please point me to the report that mentions the 900,000 number. I googled for it, but couldn't find it.

   Thanks

   Saqib

1. 15  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/15/2009 10:41:28 AM

   @14 sure, it's in here:

   { Link }

   "Hodge's team calculates that moving off Lotus Notes to Gmail will save about $500,000 in capital and operating costs over five years, and another $400,000 in labor."

1. 16  Eugen Tarnow http://avabiz.com | 5/15/2009 12:32:02 PM

   In exchange for their testimonial they may not have had to pay Google very much.

1. 17  Keith Nolen http://www.knproductions.com | 5/15/2009 12:34:23 PM

   Ed, I'm planning on attending that Webinar. I'll be very interested to see what comes up once they open for questions...

1. 18  Ken Yee http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf | 5/15/2009 3:22:50 PM

   Ed: how do we get to the webcast next week? Please post the info on how to get to it so we can ask questions as well ;-)

1. 19  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/15/2009 3:32:38 PM

   The information is in the linked entry on the Google enterprise blog. Forgive me for not wanting to link it directly here :)

1. 20  Heyward Drummond  | 5/16/2009 8:04:30 PM

   I tried to meet with them as one of the members of the technical team supporting them in the region from the IBM/Lotus sales team but they never would meet with me. We tried many times to arrange meetings and they never would. It was a very political and completely emotional reason. Their admins attended one of my ND 8.5 Upgrade Seminars and advised that management was keen on Google and would not let them explore upgrades at all. They were quite frustrated and wanted me to meet with management but management would not agree to meet with anyone.

1. 21  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 5/16/2009 8:45:10 PM

   Thanks Heyward - that certainly answers #8 / 9.

1. 22  Heyward Drummond  | 5/17/2009 11:11:29 AM

   Additionally, when the administrators attended my all day ND 8.5 Upgrade Seminar they took away my DVD that included 4 GB of data sheets, ROI reports, analyst reports (ones that are public and free), competitive presentations, end user flash cards, PDF files with help files for users, Admin help files to assist the admins, movies, etc etc etc. Most customers who attended these sessions loved them and appreciated the content I had put together. One customer stated he was able to stop the insane planned upgrade from Domino to Exchange based on these seminars and the DVD.

   Hamilton Beach, in my opinion of course, made their decision with little discussion or help from the IBM team such as myself. As a customer of their products, I was quite irritated that they would not allow us to have a discussion or team to help them through this decision using accurate and correct information.

1. 23  Vitor Pereira http://www.vitor-pereira.com | 5/17/2009 12:58:10 PM

   @20/22 Thanks Heyward, I guess there was nothing more you could do, unfortunately.

   I wish IBM had you on the local team here.

1. 24  Heyward Drummond  | 5/18/2009 7:53:46 AM

   Thanks for that. I too wish I was still with IBM but I was "retired" in February with the round of job actions and so I went to work for Sogeti leading their IBM and Open Systems services. I am still totally loyal to Lotus and the product line. I too wish the customer had agreed to study the topic further with me.

1. 25  Kevin Pettitt http://www.lotusguru.com | 5/20/2009 1:07:46 PM

   @20/22 - Based on that experience I would imagine stockholders might want to ask some probing questions about why management overlooked such obvious due diligence activities.

   Stockholder: "These numbers for Google look impressive, but I don't see any comparable numbers regarding an upgrade to the latest Lotus product versions. What sort of discussions did you have with IBM about that?"

   Management: "Um...yeah"

1. 26  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 5/20/2009 1:19:58 PM

   I think we're living in cloud cuckoo land if we seriously think stockholders ask such questions. They don't even ask about directors remuneration in most Annual General Meetings…

   So I can't see them getting specific about IT systems—strictly “below the radar” stuff I would have thought.

1. 27  Louis Gary  | 5/21/2009 10:33:05 AM

   The Hamilton Beach Lotus environment had been built and upgraded over 9 years with the direct assistance of Lotus authorized and certified consultants as well as IBM/Lotus support. The environment runs on IBM iSeries platforms dedicated to Lotus, as IBM recommends. It runs, is stable, and provides an excellent environment for mail and databases.

   However...

   60% savings are real dollars that will be eliminated from the budget, not soft savings. Not headcount. IBM (hardware) is tight with their customers. IBM/Lotus (software) typically comes late to SMB customers, it seems. Decisions are not made on emotion. If it was, we would still be on Novell.

   The upgrade from ND5 to ND6 took 72 hours. With that history, upgrading ND6/7 to ND8 was looked at with concern, in spite of IBM/Lotus assertions to the contrary. Anyone who does not question a vendor's assertions is incompetent.

   We train our employees in the use of new applications and significant upgrades. ND8 was to provide a great many enhancements that were being welcomed by the company, but these enhancements would have required training for the employees to understand how to use them. We train our employees to be more efficient with applications, including MS Office, Notes clients, CAD, etc. We trained on Google Apps.

   Servers do need to be replaced and should be part of any analysis of TCO.

   Any company who would accept the T&C's on a website without negotiation has incompetent employees.

   Your results may vary. You should do the analysis for your own organization and come to your own conclusions. This was the right decision for Hamilton Beach. Staying the course when logic and reason shows a different and better way - that is deciding based upon emotion. That was not done here.

1. 28  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 5/21/2009 11:39:10 AM

   @27 Louis Gary - How in the name of all you may hold sacred can an upgrade take 72 hours?

   SEVENTY-TWO!?!?!??!??!

   I upgraded two hub mail servers this weekend just passed. Each one took 7 hours. And that was a full belt-and-braces upgrade script I'd had passed to me by an architecture team from Head Office.

   It required:

   * a fixup/compact/updall of the system DBs

   * uninstalling the message capture software

   * uninstalling the antivirus software

   * uninstalling Domino

   * installing Domino

   * dropping in a pre-written new NOTES.INI

   * running an upgrade script that did a fixup/compact/updall

   * running an upgrade script that upgraded designs manually

   * testing the server (except mail routing/replication)

   * re-installing antivirus software

   * re-installing message capture software

   * testing again

   * enabling routing and replication

   This was a very low-risk, fully tested, incredibly conservative upgrade process.

   There are people who read this blog - trusted administrators with excellent track records - who upgraded to R8 just by making sure last night's backups were OK, then stopping the server and slapping the CD in to run setup.

   You can upgrade a server that way in about fifteen minutes. I'm somewhat surprised that it's not become a competitive event at LotusSphere for the geeks - a World Championship Upgrade Race.

   (They'll get round to it, I'm sure.)

   72 hours for an upgrade from ND5 to ND6 smacks of bad planning. They don't need to do the whole infrastructure (replication settings can keep designs intact on old servers if that concerns you), they don't need to upgrade in any specific order EXCEPT for doing their Administration Server first. And there are no client version issues.

   I agree that not questioning the vendor's assertions is a sign of incompetence. But not doing some preliminary tests - which would confirm what I've said here - smacks of it more.

1. 29  Louis Gary  | 5/21/2009 2:34:43 PM

   @28 My bad memory - it took 48 hours running on a fast for its time iSeries 400. Note this was ND5.0.11 to 6.5.3 with ODS upgrades for all mail files. Perhaps ND7.0.3 to ND8 would not have been so bad, but this was hardly the reason for our decision. Even if we could upgrade to ND8 in 5 minutes, we still had TCO issues to address.

   You and I know nothing about each other's environments, so it is hardly prudent to pass judgements on each others decisions. This was a decision that was right for HBBI. I think it could be the right decision for other companies, but probably not for yours. This case study was to show others that it can be done, that some find it the appropriate thing to do, and that it was not a trivial decision made in haste or based upon emotion. Ed Brill made it into a dump on Lotus issue, which it never was. It would have been nice if he had spelled my name correctly.

   Finally, all of the many solutions offered in this blog and its comments that would solve the problems we were trying to address with Google Apps would have added yet more cost and support requirements to our company. Yes there other ways to do what we did and stay under the IBM/Lotus umbrella. Sometimes you have to risk getting wet to move ahead.

1. 30  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 5/21/2009 5:14:16 PM

   Louis,

   Apologies if I came across too strongly. But I still think that something went wrong in the planning of that upgrade.

   My suggestion would be that the flaw was in doing ODS upgrades for all mail files. Best practice would say that you don't do that for a week or so at least, so that you know that the new server software works. That way you can roll back easily.

   (And in R8, it won't actually create new ODS databases - or upgrade them on compact - until you set an INI variable.)

   Of course, the long upgrade time might not have been the only problem. There could have been plenty of other issues.

   But I'm afraid my mind is already made up that a mistake was committed - that the ODS upgrade was done too soon. I'd usually prefer to wait a while, then begin upgrades on a schedule - doing small handfuls each night. It's easier on your backups, easier on the upgrade process, and causes less hassle.

   Much like you don't also rush to upgrade everyone's mail template at once - especially if you have lots of mobile users. Mail template upgrades should be well planned, and can often be done alongside the client upgrade.

   Still, having said all of that, I find it necessary to say I don't mean to attack you as I say these things. Nor am I saying that the decision to migrate was flawed because of this one issue.

   I merely think that the (slim) details you gave about the previous upgrade's problems reflect more badly on its planning than on the software itself.

1. 31  David Bell  | 5/21/2009 10:29:19 PM

   @29 - your move to Google started with planning in Sept and users were migrated mostly in March I think you said; so ~7 months in the making by my reckoning for 500 users. You could have done your Domino upgrade times over for a lot less money.

   You say you avoided cost and support by not doing online backup or clustering and instead chose to build a custom directory synch that you now need to support and maintain. And you STILL have to support a Domino environment for your apps.

1. 32  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/22/2009 7:34:34 AM

   Louis, thanks for coming by. I consider this a brave move for you, honestly...

   "The Hamilton Beach Lotus environment had been built and upgraded over 9 years with the direct assistance of Lotus authorized and certified consultants as well as IBM/Lotus support."

   Who were the "authorized and certified consultants?" Because you need to be demanding a refund.

   "The environment runs on IBM iSeries platforms dedicated to Lotus, as IBM recommends. It runs, is stable, and provides an excellent environment for mail and databases."

   An excellent, albeit expensive, endorsement.

   "60% savings are real dollars that will be eliminated from the budget, not soft savings. Not headcount."

   So as I speculated on another thread, does the 60% savings come by replacing MSFT Office with Google Apps? Because otherwise, we're all struggling to reconcile your numbers with MSRP for Notes.

   "Decisions are not made on emotion. If it was, we would still be on Novell."

   And saving you 60% by now, I'm sure, since their licensing charges for Linux versions have plummeted.

   "The upgrade from ND5 to ND6 took 72 hours."

   Wow. I don't think it's taken me more than 72 minutes before.

   "With that history, upgrading ND6/7 to ND8 was looked at with concern, in spite of IBM/Lotus assertions to the contrary. Anyone who does not question a vendor's assertions is incompetent."

   You're quite correct. Any properly run environment should question the assertions of a vendor. So how did you answer the question? By testing?

   "We train our employees in the use of new applications and significant upgrades."

   Then why did you list training as a cost of moving Notes versions, but not migrating platforms? Don't both require training? Or has Google elected to follow the Notes 6 messaging design pattern so perfectly that they just fall right in?

   "We train our employees to be more efficient with applications, including MS Office, Notes clients, CAD, etc. We trained on Google Apps."

   Ah, so you DID train on Google Apps. Was that a shorter training cycle than for Notes? Or Office?

   "Servers do need to be replaced and should be part of any analysis of TCO."

   Was your plan to replace the iSeries servers on which you housed mail in order to move to Domino 8.5? That would be interesting, since the constant effort since version 6 at least on the part of the server team has been to lighten the load on server hardware. Are you suggesting that effort failed? How did you reach that conclusion? By questioning the assertion of a vendor and testing for yourself?

   "Any company who would accept the T&C's on a website without negotiation has incompetent employees."

   Agreed. So did you negotiate T&Cs different from the standard Google offering?

   "Staying the course when logic and reason shows a different and better way - that is deciding based upon emotion. That was not done here."

   Absolutely agreed. Can we see the logic and reason to which you refer?

   "You and I know nothing about each other's environments, so it is hardly prudent to pass judgements on each others decisions."

   Well that's just completely untrue, Louis. Clearly I know quite a bit about your environment, as you've been describing to the press for months now. For instance, I know that your Domino mail environment was taken down on a monthly basis for backup, because you said so in the webcast. And I know from two decades of experience that this is totally unnecessary to do.

   "This was a decision that was right for HBBI."

   Two months in and you're already prepared to make that call? Impressive.

   "...it was not a trivial decision made in haste or based upon emotion."

   Clearly not. It looks to have been made on remarkably bad information, though. For instance, that it would take 72 (or 48) hours to upgrade a Domino server version.

   "Finally, all of the many solutions offered in this blog and its comments that would solve the problems we were trying to address with Google Apps would have added yet more cost and support requirements to our company."

   How? What did you save? You still point out that you're supporting Notes-based applications and a Notes-based directory. So you migrated and retrained your users on a mail client that's non-integrated with workflow applications, and saved zero dollars on licensing or directory management. So where's the upside?

   Or are you saying that you were already saving on the licensing? Was your Notes environment out-of-maintenance and you intend to stay out of maintenance?

   "Yes there other ways to do what we did and stay under the IBM/Lotus umbrella. Sometimes you have to risk getting wet to move ahead."

   Forget staying under the IBM/Lotus umbrella. IBM and others have clearly considered you lost as a customer. The question is about your public statements about comparative costs per platform. No one seems to be able to add up the numbers in a way that makes sense. We keep seeing this "60% TCO savings over 5 years" and trying to reconcile that with subsequent statements about directory maintenance and continued Notes applications. (And a 7 month migration period for 500 users!)

1. 33  Louis Gary  | 5/22/2009 9:25:57 AM

   @32 - Training was considered a cost to both directions. That we were going to have to train on Domino meant to us that the upgrade to Domino was not free.

   Lotus/Domino does not provide all of the needs of a mail system within its code. The cost of e-mail is more than ND licenses. For TCO, you should be including server hardware costs, server licenses (MS Windows Server), anti-virus, anti-spam, network capacities, hardware maintenance (iSeries), wireless phone costs associated with e-mail sync with the core platform. We have not saved any money on Lotus licenses, as we continue our database environment. The new client environment was also requiring upgrades to desktop hardware configurations to support the ODF functionality, a key benefit of ND8.

   No savings are expected for Docs as we are not eliminating MS Office.

   We have no problems with the workflow from Domino databases as the doc links work fine in Google. I find this argument in particular to be strange as there are many shops with Exchange as the e-mail platform for delivery of Domino workflow e-mails, and they seem to work just fine.

   The actual planning and migration to Google took about 4 months. The previous time was in the detailed analysis that led to the decision to make this change. If anyone out in this blogosphere is doing things faster, congratulations on having the staff and resources to do it that way.

   At this point, I really don't care if you can figure out how we saved what we are saving.

1. 34  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 5/22/2009 10:09:56 AM

   @33 - If avoiding desktop hardware upgrades was a key element of TCO savings, that could account for a lot. That would be a good thing to say. "We elected not to upgrade desktop hardware and instead move to Google Apps" is a clear explanation, that really has very little to do with Lotus.

1. 35  Brett  | 5/22/2009 10:41:27 AM

   We have discovered that training existing Notes users for R8.5 is not neccessary. A quick (in-house) tip sheet and a prepackaged web video is all that's needed for us. We were planning on doing all kinds of training when we began our 4000 user upgrade to R8.5 from R7.x. After discussing with two seperate pilot groups and management it was determined that training was not required or desired, and would be a waste of money.

   We upgraded 3 Mail servers in less than 2 hours (actually 2 Wintel mail servers and a shared cluster server for 4000 users!) We are using smart upgrade to automate the upgrade of the clients. It was an absolute slam-dunk. Smart Upgrade self reports with very detailed issue logging. Our success rate is in the high 90% range, and all the fails have been machine or A.D. issues, no actual Notes issues in the upgrade process. Only one person is required for all the support of the very few failures so far. Upgrading of the mail template is also automated by Smart Upgrade, immeditaely following the client upgrade - so no excuse there either.

   If someone said 72hrs or 48hrs to do the servers or anything longer than a few short hours (even IBM!), then the current Notes Admin should have spoken up and defied that statement. At least a test could have been run to prove it.

   I think you were duped...

1. 36  Brett  | 5/22/2009 10:46:40 AM

   @34 Of course Nathan's absolutely correct, if it was a client hardware issue then that's a whole different matter. If the decision was based on not wanting to upgrade the client hardware, then yes, I can completely understand.

   Best of luck.

1. 37  Scott Hooks http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/hooks | 5/22/2009 9:59:48 PM

   Louis. I must say that your participation in this discussion objectively and with such dignity. You have certainly earned my respect. It sounds like HBBI understands the value of Notes as an application platform, and I hope that IBM / Lotus continues to retain you business in that area.

   Not to pile on, but I feel obligated to respond since I contributed to the initial storm of skepticism on the real measurable value of your migration. I think the Lotus community just wants some clarification since Google is marketing HBBI as a success story for migrating from Notes to Google and most of us who have analyzed

   We simply question the whether the business results cited in the webcast are accurate and fair.

   60% savings: none of us can reconcile this #.

   Access - any time, anywhere: How about offline? And where can you access gmail that you can't access iNotes?

   Uptime: Gmail had global service interruptions just this month. And your on-site users are now dependent on your connection to the Internet. Does that have 100% uptime. Domino servers routinely have 99.99% uptime. With clusters, services can easily have 100%.

   Wireless sync - Blackberry applet with elimination of 3rd party service and no BES: You could have done the same with Domino.

   Call volume to Help Desk did not balloon: How exactly is that a benefit vs staying on Notes?

   In addition...

   It should not take 48 hours to upgrade a Domino server. Servers do not need to be replaced (quite the opposite when upgrading to 8.5) It is not necessary to have downtime to execute a backup (and how are you backing up your gmail by the way?). It would not be necessary to train your users how to use Notes 8 to do anything that they can do in gmail.

   From your comments here, it seems that perhaps the reasons you migrated should have been stated as:

   - We prevented PC hardware upgrade costs (by the way, are you not having to upgrade PC hardware for Vista and Office 2007? And if you're not upgrading to Vista and Office 2007, have you been paying Microsoft maintenance for the entitlement to do so? Also, a $30 memory upgrade would probably do the trick for most of your PC's, or you could run 8.5 basic with less resources than 6.5. And if gmail is good enough, why not just upgrade your servers and users' mail templates over about 6 hours, then have everyone start using iNotes, which is far more feature rich and $0 migration cost?)

   - We elimitated network, storage, facilities, and energy costs. Really though, did you? Be honest. And if so, could those same savings have been delivered by consolidating some Domino servers and taking advantage of the improvements in Domino 8.5?

   - We eliminated anti-virus, anti-spam costs, and wireless synch software costs. OK, you've got us there, and that should be part of the cost analysis. It should be noted that you were using a fairly expensive wireless sync package.

   Even then, consider all the functionality and management capabilities that you lost. Maybe you're saying you didn't use any of that (and maybe that is why the environment may have been costing you more than it should have).

   I can appreciate that we all have the benefit of hindsight. I believe that you believed it was the right decision to migrate when you made that decision. It is unfortunate that you may not have had all of the best information readily accessible when making that decision. The Lotus community just wants to ensure that other organizations do before making the same decision that HBBI did.

1. 38  Pedro Quaresma http://playroom3.wordpress.com | 5/23/2009 5:33:35 PM

   I'm missing something here... Louis mentions MS Windows Servers licenses, but that's only compulsory with MS products. For Domino, Linux is a better choice (and would also save on antivirus)

   Also, MS Windows Servers AND iSeries? Why?

1. 39  kw  | 5/26/2009 2:03:15 PM

   I am an IT VP who introduced Notes/Domino into my company way back. It has served us well, but various pressures are making me feel that it is time to move on.

   Gmail is an obvious alternative and I have been leisurely studying it for some time. There are a lot of attractive features to cloud hosting of services like mail, IM, video, photoes, etc. I really like the idea of being able to deploy all those functions in one blow and not having to deal with various products and options. Each of these items is a little project in itself, and I'd prefer one finished solution that could be rolled out around the world in very short order.

   Basically, I'm getting the feeling that moving to Gmail is an easier and cheaper way to achieve our goals than to upgrade our current platform.

   I am not really interested in hearing arguments about why one should not use a service like Gmail (at least not the standard ones that come from people who like a particular product like Domino, or who just don't feel comfortable having their data somewhere outside their direct control). I'm aware of most of those arguments, I think.

   What would be more interesting is to see someone directly address the question of why, for example, Domino is a better solution than Gmail. I really have not found or heard that kind of information. A recent demo by IBM left me wondering why we're even considering upgrading Domino. It just looks like a horrible mess with new web capabilities copied in an inferior way and mashed onto a legacy product.

   I fully understand the Hamilton Beach aversion to upgrading Notes. It's an expensive proposition for companies like ours which are spread all over the world with many locations with just a few people. No one on who comments here seems to be able to understand this, but it is a very real concern to me.

   Note - I do have an extremely capable Notes/Domino admin who has been with me on Domino the whole way (and who thinks like most of the commenters here so doesn't like Gmail).

1. 40  David Bell  | 6/3/2009 1:06:01 AM

   @39 - what is your extremely capable admin telling you ?