About to Pull the Trigger on Microsoft Exchange - HOLD ON!
Brian M O’Curran July 17 2009 10:35:51 AM
I got a little intel this morning on a customer rumbling about looking at Exchange. There's lots of tire-kickers right now to be sure. There's lots of options for messaging. People get stars in their eyes when they think about doing something new or being part of a project full of shiny new objects. That being said, it's common knowledge there's no ROI or business-case to rip-out an optimized on premise messaging solution. So, if you can remove the wanderlust from the equation - and that's not always possible - you can talk about facts.I got this as part of an e-mail and thought it was so well crafted I'd share it with you. Thanks Lisa. You're great!
Here's some bullet points. Microsoft must be telling customers that since they have to upgrade Domino they might as well migrate it will cost the same and that of course isn't true. Based on Ferris Research numbers a migration between email systems costs $300/user. A Domino email upgrade will cost about $35 a user. Also many customers don't realize that they do NOT have to upgrade their workstation hardware to upgrade to Notes 8. We have a basic client option that will run on whatever desktop hardware they currently run Notes on.
Also some other points if they are also considering Sharepoint....
- Lotus Domino and MOSS are similar in that they are both application frameworks, and they both have a rich client. Our rich client is Lotus Notes and Microsoft's rich client is Microsoft Office/Outlook.
- When a company makes the decision to go with Outlook and Sharepoint they are locking themselves into Microsoft technology for everything. They must use Windows as their operating system (and intel hardware) because Windows is their application server, must use AD for the directory, must use Microsoft Office for document editing, must use Windows on their workstations, must use SQL as their database, must use IIS as their web server, must use .NET for development. They are locked in. Not so of Domino - you can run against any LDAP directory (for the web components), on any server platform, with any client workstation including Mac and Linux, our collaboration services allow you choice of database and choice of web server and standard Java development.
- Both Domino and MOSS support development of web applications
- Development on Domino is done with Domino Designer and Java Tools and MOSS development is done with Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer and ASP.NET tools
- Domino has always provided backward compatibility for applications, you can run applications written for Version 3 on Domino 8. In the MOSS world, applications always need to be reworked/re-written for an upgrade
- Upgrade costs for Notes/Domino email are generally $35 a user. Gartner has published numbers that the Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007 upgrade cost companies $244 per user.
- When upgrading Domino you just install the new software in place on the same hardware. When upgrading Exchange or MOSS you are required to set up new servers and move the data from the old server to the newer server.
- The number of servers you need for Exchange is a lot. One customer recently moved from Sendmail to Lotus Notes for 8,000 users. With Domino they needed 4 servers with Exchange it would have been 44 servers.
- We have customers who migrated from Notes email to Outlook and end-up running dual infrastructures because, even though Microsoft says its an easy task to convert applications, it is not. After wasting millions of dollars trying, they don't get the ROI they originally thought and are paying for TWO platforms.
- Our Portal, Sametime and Connections products are common in Microsoft shops. The reason is eventually Microsoft customers hit a wall and have application requirements Microsoft can't meet. They'll need the application integration, scalability and personalization features a true enterprise Portal provides. Lotus Sametime integrates well with Office and Outlook and can provide instant messaging with a single server which is not possible with Microsoft's Office Communication Server. Most customers realize Sharepoint creates silos of information and they can implement Connections to provide access to people and information enterprise-wide.
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