This afternoon I took a little time out to listen to the TechRepublic Webcast case study of Hamilton Beach’s migration from Notes/Domino to Google. Among the other odd statements made by Hamiton Beach during the call (my comments in parenthesis): -Google allows us to provide remote support to all of our users which we did not have in Lotus Notes (if only Notes had something like replication) -We no longer have downtime to back up our servers (don’t ask me I didn’t say it) -We still have Domino Applications and we still register Domino Users (you mean not everything is migrated to Google? and you still create Notes IDs) -Google outages only affected some not all of our users (well thats better then clustering and failover in Domino) So lets review, Hamilton Beach is saving tons of money having migrated from Notes to Google while hiring not one but two consulting firms to work on their migration, and still maintaining Domino Servers, and registering users for applications. On the bright side Google solved a bunch of problems for them that should have never existed in the first place in a properly managed Notes/Domino environment. I asked during the webcast how many Domino Servers they are still running, the only answer I received was that they decommissioned 4 mail servers, I really wonder how many they are still running now that the migration is complete.
It’s the same old spin about Gmail. I got the same list of benefits when my school email was switched to Gmail.
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Amazing how misinformed some IT Teams can be, and spend money on unnecessary projects, rather than sit down and learn from the business-side what else they can do to make their users happy, while ensuring from their Lotus rep of whether Notes can do this <insert_task>. Heck, even RTMF would have addressed much of their justification bullet–and saved a significant sum. Amazing.
Lack of training or knowledge about what Domino & Lotus Notes can do is IMO the biggest problem with Domino (not from IBM) but from the teams that run it. And instead of finding out the answer or obviously going to the wrong people, they choose to run from it.