New Notes migration casestudy was published today …
LG-Nortel, founded in 2005 as a joint venture of LG Electronics and Nortel Networks, provides communication equipment and networking solutions to a global market. Recent rapid growth required the company to implement a new groupware environment to replace its existing Notes-based platform and to support projected capacity. It needed independent e-mail and communication systems; it wanted to synchronize its business processes with its IT systems; and it wanted an easy-to-implement system that would offer a robust IT infrastructure to support business capabilities. LG-Nortel opted for an in-house groupware environment using Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 to satisfy its requirements and increase internal and external communication capabilities. The new platform enables LG-Nortel to create a foundation for internal communication innovation.
Download full Document : Microsoft Download
Now this is funny.
The authors of the paper seems to have had a private bet amongst themselves: how many times can we insert the word “groupware” without actually mentioning any groupware features? Well there’s email, and there’s email, and then again, there’s email. Oh, and did I mention there’s email?
The case against Notes so vague as to be meaningless. Such as:
“scalability was the feature for which Exchange Server had the highest comparative advantage to Notes.”
Bull! Where’s your data to support this?
“The existing environment failed to accommodate the changing business environment that LG-Nortel faced. One clear example was the e-mail system.”
What luck! The “one clear example” just happens to be the one comparison that anybody can actually make with Exchange: email! Because email (ok, and Calendaring) is all Exchange does.
“LG found it difficult to scale the [Domino] server as problems occur in performance, due to the configuration of all instances on a single system”.
Say what? “All instances on a single system”? What does this mean?
“Notes uses its own script language in application development, and thus requires a specialized expert not only for development, but also for program maintenance”
True. (Although Notes’s “own script language” is not a million miles away from Visual Basic). Also true that Exchange requires no such “specialized expert…for development” because, guess what? YOU CAN”T DEVELOP ANYTHING IN IT!!!! For that, you need Visual Studio, and Sharepoint, and SQL Server and few others that I’ve forgotten. No “specialized expert” to do groupware then: just an army of them!
cheers,
– Mike
Mike,
“All instances on a single system”? What does this mean?
Domino partitioning most likely. Now the question is what server platform they’re running that on.
We do it on System i all day with no issues. Fun stuff.
Mike,
Thank you for the through analysis of this casestudy.
I do agree that some of the quantitative “evidence” you are looking for is missing, but this is often the case in in casestudies. I not saying that is good, but that just the way they are written, this goes for Microsoft casestdudies as well as IBM’s or others.
Bottomline remains, that yet another client chose Microosft over Lotus Notes, that was basicly the point I wanted to make 😉