What to tell a CEO who wants to migrate off Notes?

There's been a lot of useful stuff published over the last few years about how to best counter the "Move to Microsoft" mantra that sometimes comes down from senior management. I figured it would be a Good Thing (TM) if all of that information was readily accessible from one place.




Filling the application with useful links is the hard part since I won't be writing much of this stuff myself. My emphasis is on providing links to other peoples work (with proper accreditation of course). If you've got some information you think should be available through this application then please send me a LINK (not the original material) via email: gdodge at bcd dot net dot au.


BTW I did consider writing this in XPages but code re-use won out over innovation and the whole box of dice wound up taking only a couple of hours to recode from an existing application. I'll look at making it look pretty further down the track.
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How do you measure productivity in Lotus consulting work?

IMHO John Cook's blog about why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity sums up the major problem in the IT consulting industry. The problem (restated) is that IT consumers have no easy way of determining the productivity of their incumbent Business Partner. Here's an example:

Last month I was called into a customer site to help fix their Domino cluster. Their previous Business Partner (who had also been providing PC support services plus new hardware plus anything else they could sell the customer) had been unsuccessful in setting up the Domino cluster and that had been the last straw for the client who showed them the door and then set about getting new service providers for Notes and networking and everything else. I was one of the Partners recommended to him by a Big Blue friend and so I got the Notes work.

Now reinstalling a Domino server and setting up a Domino cluster isn't rocket science. I'm sure 90% of the readers of this blog could have done the same job without any fuss, but this job was clearly beyond the skill set of their previous supplier. So why do customers continue to pay good money to incompetent Business Partners?

My guess is that customers have no easy metric to measure IT tasks. You can tell a Postal workers that s/he must deliver xxx letters per day or a brickie that they must lay yyy bricks per day but how do you measure the productivity of IT workers? In old-style programming you could ask for zzz lines of code per day, but how do you create a similar metric in XPage web components or in system admin work?

I believe the trend towards System Integration has accelerated this problem. A traditional Lotus Partner takes pride in their product and their skill set and associated Lotus certifications, and has no problem in declaring comparative ignorance in (say) Windows networking issues. They would rather stick to their knitting and are happy to see other IT work go to other specialist IT providers. On the other hand the non-specialist 'System Integrator' has no clear boundaries on what they will sell to a customer and has the temptation to work towards grabbing the customers entire IT budget and then finding a way of providing lower cost services (while still charging at the original skilled rate) in order to maximize their profit. If Lotus consulting services aren't making a profit then they might consider reskilling their people in Sharepoint and getting their technicians to multitask with Lotus and Sharepoint consulting work. If the volume of Sharepoint work is increasing then maybe forget about doing Lotus work entirely (but keep demanding the right to sell annual Lotus license subscriptions to existing customers).

The problem is that (apart from failing their certification exams) there is no obvious bottom line for a consultant when maintaining their technical skills in Lotus software. The atrophying of their Lotus skills happens one day at a time and their customers don't notice that they are receiving a sub-standard consulting product because they have no external 'nnn-bricks-per-day' IT standard with which to measure their supplier.

I've blogged on this topic before, but this time I'm asking a question:

How do you show your own value-added technical superiority in Lotus software to a customer when the customers doesn't have sufficient Lotus technical skills to see through the smoke-and-mirrors they are being fed by their current incompetent incumbent?

Or, in John Cook's terms, how do you demonstrate that your productivity with Lotus software far exceeds that of your competition?
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No more Mister Nice Guy

We've had an interesting 24 hours with the CMSWatch saga since Carl Tyler first broke the story about the Adriaan Bloem's assertion that IBM was phasing out Notes.

Adriaans response was completely inadequate - he complained that when he wrote 'fact', people thought he meant a 'fact' when actually he didn't. Then his colleague wrote a weasel word retraction claiming that Adriaan 'mis-spoke' when the truth was that Adriaan just didn't bother to check the truth. Now (in comment 13 of Carl's original post) Adriaan is asking if he can borrow a VM Image of Notes to get some experience with the product.

So how can CMSWatch consider themselves competent to write and sell IT industry reports when they have such an enormous chasm in their staff's education. These guys position themselves as vendor-neutral technology experts (I quote from their website: "CMS Watch™ evaluates content-oriented technologies, publishing head-to-head comparative reviews of leading solutions."), yet they seem to have paper-thin technical expertise with regard to Sharepoint's biggest competitor and (apparently) don't have any in-house Notes resources who can help sort out Adriaan's confusion.

So well done Carl for putting CMSWatch on the spot so they could get the caning they so richly deserved. It may not change their product bias but it will make them think twice the next time they want to regurgitate the old Microsoft mantras. I suggest the same 'Boots And All' treatment is applied to any other professional publishers who take the same shortcuts. NOTE: I do not condone abuse or other unprofessional behavior - I am talking about flooding offenders with accurate comments to show where they are wrong and not putting up with weasel word replies.

No more Mister Nice Guy!

OK... OK... the Horse is dead. I'll stop flogging it.


EDIT: The intrepid Michael Sampson has pointed out to me the difference between CMSWire and CMSWatch.

• CMSwatch is the analyst house who penned the Sharepoint Report and also hosted the writings of Adriaan Bloem.

• CMSWire is a totally different organization founded by Brice Dunwoodie.

I have, at times, confused the two - mea culpa. I apologize to CMSWire for my mistake.
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Evaluating a Consulting company based on their website

Here are some rules for evaluating IT consulting companies based on their website. The idea is to give the work to the supplier who has the highest score at the end of this process:

• Start each company with a score of 100.
  
  
• Subtract 1 for every meaningless (ie unprovable) adjective on their website - look for words like "passionate", "committed" and "highly skilled".
  
  
• Subtract 5 for every graphic on their website depicting a person who doesn't work for their company.
  
  
• Subtract 10 for every client reference on their website where the consultant(s) who did the work are no longer employed at that company. If possible, use Linked-In etc to track down where those top-gun consultants are currently working and include their new employers on your list of potential suppliers.
  
  
• Subtract 20 if their website lists a technology (eg Lotus Domino) without identifying a specialized skill set within that technology (eg System Admin v. Application Development v. integration with SAP v. software upgrades)
  
  
• Subtract 50 if the staff they want to assign to your project don't have current technical certifications in any of the technologies listed on their website.
  
  
• Automatically disqualify any supplier who outsources the care and feeding of their own website to another IT company.
  

Then pick the three companies with the highest score and mention to each of them that you're going to run your shortlist past the Vendor and ask for a recommendation. If any of them offer you a free lunch or other bribe at that point then take it and subtract 10 from their score.

... or you can just pick the supplier who gives you the cheapest quote. That seems to be the way most customers work.
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Methodology v. Advertising

Julia White (Director of Exchange Marketing at Microsoft) has been having a bad week. She was smacked down by Ed Brill regarding her overly creative use of statistics and now I'm going to do the same with her attempt to rewrite the laws of economics.


THE BACKGROUND:
Julia suggests...

"With Notes, the skills are dwindling and expensive. With SharePoint, they are booming and in-demand."

Julia's mantra is that companies are deserting Notes in droves so therefore the demand for the Notes skill set must be dropping rapidly. Classic supply and demand theory holds that price drops when there is an oversupply of goods and services - so if Notes skills are no longer in demand then the price paid for that service must drop. But Julia claims that Notes skills are expensive so either:

A) the supply of Notes skills is falling faster than the demand, or
B) she is talking out of her butt.

Since Lotus Notes has been around for around twenty years so there are plenty of people who have Notes skills in their resume. Even if some of them have been seduced by the Dark Side they have the experience to maintain existing Notes infrastructures so those skills are still available to the market. Hmmm... I think I'll go with Option B.

EDIT: There is always option C... the possibility that customers aren't deserting Notes and any decrease in available Notes jobs is caused by mature corporate infrastructures requiring fewer Notes administrators to manage the same environment after they have upgraded to R8.5.


THE QUESTION:
Julia claims that Sharepoint skills "... are booming and in-demand.", so the price of those 'in-demand' Sharepoint skills will be increasing which will drive up the cost of supporting that infrastructure. How can we reconcile that situation with her claim that Notes is more expensive than the comparable Microsoft solution?


THE ANSWER:
Julia acknowledges that Microsoft shops need two separate products (Exchange and Sharepoint) in order to play in the same ballpark as Notes but she relies on a survey about the cost of supporting an email infrastructure to make a cost comparison. So she includes Sharepoint as one of the components in the MS solution stack without adding in the costs of running that Sharepoint infrastructure. D'Oh!!! Who needs a methodology when you have an advertising budget?


I'll bet Julia used Excel to add up the numbers. I don't expect her to respond to this post. After all, the USA does have a constitutional provision against self-incrimination :)
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OT: Has Bing lost its Bling?

When Microsoft Bing was released I decided that I would set aside my instinctive avoidance of all things Evil and so I reset my home page from Google to Bing. After all, my major dislike for Microsoft is based on their abuse of their monopoly power (...and their marketing lies and their bad operating system and their Rip-and-Replace contempt for the customer etc. etc. but lets stick with abuse of monopoly power at the moment). Therefore it's a natural progression for me to now turn against the Google near-monopoly on Search and support the underdog.

Before you ask, I've just never felt good with Yahoo so they never got a chance in my choice of Search providers.

I'm now struggling with the temptation to reverse my decision. The problem is that Bing just doesn't have the reach of Google and when you're looking for esoteric technical information sometimes you're lucky to get half a dozen hits. Over the last few weeks I've found myself searching on Bing and then checking the results on Google... and Google invariably delivers more hits. I know that my personal strategy isn't going to count for zip in determining search market share and it's certainly costing me billable time to double check my results.

Maybe Bing has a search filter that is set to randomly ignore sites that talk about Lotus software. Maybe they just need to send out more bots. Either way, I think I'll be heading back to Google for a couple of months and give Bing a chance to build some bigger indexes.

Does anyone else use Bing to search for technical info? How do you find it compares to Google?
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Application Design: "In the long run, we're all dead"

A recent post over at edbrill.com got me thinking about design philosophy. 'Jason' was talking about his role in migrating existing Notes apps onto the MS framework and declared...

" ... most Notes apps start out poorly designed, have tons of little bells and whistles added over time and as it becomes unscalable developers bandaid the whole thing together with scheduled agents and buttons and all sorts of nonsense. It's hard to just migrate that mound of crap overnight. If a company does it right, they'll spend the time they should have spent originally with the Notes app project and put together a sound design and data model...."

Now there's all kinds of emotive language tied up in his post but lets skip over that for the moment. Of the millions of Notes applications in use today there will be a high percentage which either were built decades ago using Notes R1 / R2 / R3 / R4 or R5 development tools and reflect the technical limits of those tools, or were built to serve a particular need and were so successful in that role that they 'grew like topsy' to fulfil other roles.

Jason's beef seems to be that those Domino applications don't map to his definition of a "sound design and data model". I'd say Jason is falling into the trap of taking a subjective set of criteria (in this case, the capability of the MS toolset) and using it to judge the business value of the existing application. It's a classic IT beartrap - seeking to define the success of a business application using non-business criteria.

When designing applications it's certainly important to pay attention to accuracy of data modelling but its also important to ensure that the application is affordable and available. Unless a business is already far advanced with their implementation of a Business Maturity Model then it's highly likely that their data models and workflows will not fit neatly into Jason's definition of a sound design and data model. Sure, you can take a long term approach and stall the database development until the business gets all of its Ducks in a Row, but in the long run, we're all dead. Incomplete design models and ever-changing business specifications are a fact of life. The Power of Notes is that it has always been capable of helping a business 'where the Rubber meets the Road' and providing good IT applications for the Here and Now. Perhaps Jason should just upgrade his toolset to Domino Designer 8.5 and see if his problems are still insurmountable.
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Is Lotus Foundations better than Cloud Computing ?

I've been very quiet for the last six weeks, not because there's nothing to say about Lotus Foundations, but because I've been involved on other projects. This will change over the next month and this blog will start bubbling over again. In the meantime, take a look at this article from Ferris Research...

I think Nick Shelness is right on the money with this one. Cloud Computing might be fine for the large corporates but its a big step into the unknown for the little guy. IMHO most SMB want to see their server physically sitting in the corner of the office where it's permanently accessible and not costing them hosting fees. They might want to arrange an automated fail-over into the Cloud Computing environment if their appliance falls over, but that's probably as far as it goes.
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Here's one way to spend 1,500 euro...

Got 1,500 euro to spare? You might want to get a copy of this report titled "Lotus Foundations: first steps towards the lower end of the SME market"

It's written by Ovum, the people who suggested that Foundations should not have been branded as a Lotus product in the first place.

Probably mandatory reading for the IBM Marketing Manager types but I think I'll give it a miss.
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Microsoft mantras...

It's amazing that the Microsoft fan base still chant the same mantra:

Most small businesses still need a Windows server to be the foundation for their file and printer sharing.. not all.. but many do.

So why do you need Windows if you want File and print sharing? That's as dumb as saying you need Microsoft Office if you want a spreadsheet or Word Processor.

For File and Print you can use Lotus Foundations Server or Linux with CUPS.

For spreadsheet / Word Processing you can use Lotus Symphony or Open Office.

All without paying any money to Microsoft.
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Before you migrate to Microsoft's SBS 2008 ...

... you might want to consider these issues:

"EVERYTHING starts on the C: drive. You can move it later but it starts on C: so have a big C: drive."

"Also have LOTS of RAM. 4 GB is the minimum. The more the better. Obviously a good fast CPU(s) is (are) best."

"Seems the Microsoft migration takes quite a long time because it has to do a MOVE on each Exchange mailbox from SBS 2003 to 2008."

"It also changes the original SBS 2003 box so there is no roll back in case there is a 'problem'."

"The SBS MVPs attended a week long deep dive training on SBS 2008 just before the conference and the consensus was allow 4 days for the migration."


Of course, the cost of the migration is in addition to the cost of the new hardware and SBS Server Licences and Client Access Licences so even an entry level system for SBS 2008 is starting to look like a $20,000 investment.

So tell me again, why would you want to do this?
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Shootout between MS Exchange 2007 and IBM Domino 8

ITComparison.com have published the results of a comparison between MS Exchange 2007 and IBM Domino 8. This comparison was last updated a month ago. Either I missed the Lotus community blogging about it or the entire Lotus community missed blogging about it. Either way, Good News can always stand a second reading :)

Here are some of the highlights:

• IBM Lotus Domino has implemented replication for ages to be one of the most reliable and efficient replication methods available.
• MS Exchange 2007 is the first Exchange version to support replication. The replication was not reliable in the RTM release and got a bit better with SP1 but still not the best. In addition, Exchange 2007 replication is not efficient and requires a large amount of dedicated bandwidth which can be expensive.
  
• IBM has kept again the Install & Forget approach. After Domino has been installed you only need to visit the box if you need to add or enable a feature. It does not mean administrators will lose their job, but will have an easier life.
• Microsoft as usual has kept their product maintenance quite time-consuming doing updates for exchange, operating system fixing failures and recovering data stores. It seems they are trying to help administrators look busy to keep their jobs.
  
• IBM has release Lotus Domino 8 as a solid product fully tested and ready for production, but was a bit late to market.
• Microsoft as usual early to market with half raw product at the RTM version of Exchange 2007 with many bugs and features missing few examples:
• - Public folders Management GUI
• - Replication was not working unless implemented directly by Microsoft with some secret hotfixes.
• - Single Copy Cluster was not working unless installed with certain hotfixes in certain orders which was not mentioned any where on Microsoft website and not applying the fixes will make the cluster resources jump from a node to the other.
• - Note: these were few of the issues Microsoft fixed with SP1, but even SP1 had its own issues that Microsoft admit in the release note of SP1 and the installation of SP1 has not been smooth for many customers.


• Exchange 2007 get to be cheaper only if you calculate the initial licenses for non redundant setup. In all the other calculation and TCO Exchange 2007 will be in a loss situation. Exchange 2007 require newer 64-bit hardware and more servers (at least 6 server in case of redundancy) where Lotus Domino can reach full redundancy with two servers only, this is due to the new roles Exchange 2007 came up with. More servers means more licenses and clustering with Exchange require windows enterprise licenses which not required with Lotus Domino. All this give Domino an initial setup advantage when you look at the full setup cost. In addition, if your setup require features like forums, portal, and instant messaging you will have to pay for an extra three separate products with Exchange where all of these are integrated into Domino server for free. All that Make Domino the TCO winner.

I thought this crowd was an IBM front until I read some of the other comparisons these guys have done:

• VMware VI3 VS MS Virtual Server 2005 R2
• VMware VI3 VS Citrix Xen Enterprise
• MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 VS Citrix Xen Enterprise
• Microsoft Windows Hyper-V (WSV) VS VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5
• HP Blades vs IBM Blades
• Double Take vs XOsoft WANSyncHA
• Mac OSX Tiger/Leopard VS Microsoft Windows Vista
• Ubuntu VS Microsoft Windows Vista
• Mac OSX Tiger/Leopard VS Ubuntu

Now I'm just waiting for the Lotus Foundations v. Essential Business Server shootout to appear.
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When do we see Foundations and SBS go Head-to-Head?

In my last Poll I included an option to vote for ‘Technical Bake-Offs’ as a technique for marketing Lotus Foundation Server. That suggestion polled poorly but in that doesn’t mean that it was a bad idea – merely that the other options were better (or at least more popular) ideas. Some head-to-head comparisons of Nitix and SBS from past years past are available.

PCMag compared SBS and Nitix in 2004.

A more in-depth review from 2004 with some TCO numbers is available here.

In 2006 CRN put Nitix into equal first place with Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2003 R2 over Xandros and Novell. Note that this was before Nitix integrated Lotus Notes/Domino and Lotus Symphony into its product stack so I would expect Lotus Foundations Server to easily win any rematch which used the same testing regime.

Finally, if you’ve got USD$195 to spare you can invest in the ‘Small Enterprise Workgroup Server Software: Product Comparison Report’ from Infoedge.

I’d love to see a more up-to-date comparison, specifically one that maps Lotus Foundations Server directly against SBS but maybe the PC magazines are all waiting for SBS 2008 to hit the streets before they start the next round of comparison tests.

Hey IBM, how about giving those IT reviewers a prod with a pointy stick?
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Microsoft Channel Partner site looks at Foundations

Here's an article about the SMB Market that was published on 'Redmond Channel Partner Online'. Despite their tag line of 'Driving Success in the Microsoft Partner Community' and their self-proclaimed mission to provide a "... focus on the strategic and practical needs of Microsoft IT professionals" I found the article to be well-balanced and surprisingly devoid of adjectives.

The article compares the SMB offerings of Cisco, Oracle, HP, Dell, IBM, SAP and Microsoft. It only gives a paragraph or three to each vendor but it's a good snapshot of what the different players are doing. I'd already 'been-there-done-that' with what they had to say about the IBM and Microsoft products, but I did learn a thing or two about the plans of the other vendors.

I've got the site bookmarked to see what they say about Foundations in future issues.
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