Tuesday, January 22, 2008

migrating from Notes with Microsoft-Transporter .... better not :)

My first post this year is going to be an advice (I think it's the second one on this blog, I'm too lazy to look into my own posts): if you're considering migration from Notes, think again: it's not worth it. It's worth investing and migrating to newer releases (should you still run Notes 4 ... doh, or Notes 5, or Notes 6).

And if your user's workstations start with 1GB RAM, it's more adviceable to migrate to Notes 8 (though Notes 8.0.1 might reduce the decent reqs. for workstations to 512 MB RAM, so I've heard).

This advice came to mind reading again, then looking at Microsoft-Transporter announcement, starting 3rd times in a row when Lotusphere conference kicks off, in a pathetic attempt to persuade customers that Exchange + AD + SharePoint + .... (probably a bunch of other products) would perform and deliver better than Notes/Domino.

I think the M$ marketing strategists for the "forget Notes and pay us to migrate to Exchange" should review their practices as they are starting to look stupid with their "easy tool to migrate from Notes to Exchange". And frankly, this is damaging the Microsoft image, otherwise having some clever folks on their boat.

There's nothing easy to a migration, there are no bulletproof tools for migration. You'd be better advertising the idea of "coexistance, integration between Exchange and Notes". If mail migration is one thing, APPLICATIONS are NOT !!!!

You executives out there, take this piece of advice from a former MS fan boy converted to IBMer with more than 10 years of tech. experience.

On the other hand, perhaps IBM's strategy for small shops will pay off this time, the former attempts were rather unsuccessful. Looking and the Notes 8 client, you might deliver the Notes clients for free and the Domino server for 500 bucks for companies less than 100 employees. Put this on linux and you'd have the competitive advantage on messaging in SMB :) Then, Micro'fost' would sell only desktop Windoze to SMB, the only thing they're good at :)

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