This was in my draft for quite some time and finally released today.
In the early morning today, i was thinking of day to day situation where as a PM, i need to know what my team members are working on today and how much of that is already completed.
I will be using this information in the regular status meeting with the customer, so that when the action items coming out during that meeting i can easily visualize when can it be accommodated considering the current work load. The customer also will be able to see exactly what the team is working and which resource is doing what. This will be particularly good when the whole team executes the project in the customer site which we did for one of the migration project recently ( more will come soon on that)
Eventually, one would come to know what are the activities we did for the complete project and who are the people worked on those. And this data will be really helpful when we bid for the next project.
MS-Project would probably help me out if the information is required only for me and of course with the help of Project server, i would be able to share this information with others. But i am not sure how complicated would that be. And i doubt they have something like a local replica which i can carry across to my meetings all the time. Even in this era of connectivity all the time, there are definitely still places where a local replica is going to help you a lot.
In those situations, IBM Lotus Notes will help address the needs. You can build a functional application in few days time using the Lotus Domino Designer which is free.
There are some very good products that are already available in Lotus Notes and Domino platform. For eg: Genius4Domino is a very good product for project management tool for a project group available as both Lotus Notes client and Domino web based application.
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Tuesday, April 20, 2010
SOEasy is NOT SO Easy
Singapore government's plan to standardize the desktop and network components is underway and we all know the analyst firm Gartner has some doubts on the feasibility of achieving the kind of savings that government is trying to achieve (SGD 500 million).
Part of this initiative is also the migration of Lotus Notes to MS Exchange platform. I am very keen in exploring this area to see what would such initiatives finally bring to the table.
If this portion of the project is successful that will mean the government agency users will start using Outlook as their email client instead of Lotus Notes. As such it's only messaging nothing beyond that and this part is not difficult.
But Lotus Notes client is much more than a email client unlike MS-Outlook through which all the business applications can be built and accessed. Now the issue starts there, to convert all the Lotus Notes applications / Domino web based applications to MS platform.
There is no easy way to convert these applications to rival platform as much as MS touts (even it does at the end of it you are going the same functional application in the MS platform). Recently, i have encountered a customer scenario where they want to convert a Lotus Notes document repository application to MOSS and expect to work in the same fashion. The LN application contains lots of rich text data and MS architect team tried to convert this application using the MS Transporter suite but failed miserably. Not much of the information is transported and is not up to the team's expectation. After trying several rounds, they came to Lotus team for assistance.
So the point here is the government will have plenty of such applications and custom workflow applications, tracking applications, content management applications etc. MS team has to basically rewrite all the existing apps in MOSS platform ( not all the apps can be built in MOSS there are quite a no. of apps that need to built in .NET) and even to move all the data from current Lotus Notes to MOSS they need to work closely work Lotus consultants.
Just wondering if all the applications has to be rewritten from the scratch what is the ROI we are talking about or the cost savings we are talking about.
I would welcome any thoughts or debate in this...
Part of this initiative is also the migration of Lotus Notes to MS Exchange platform. I am very keen in exploring this area to see what would such initiatives finally bring to the table.
If this portion of the project is successful that will mean the government agency users will start using Outlook as their email client instead of Lotus Notes. As such it's only messaging nothing beyond that and this part is not difficult.
But Lotus Notes client is much more than a email client unlike MS-Outlook through which all the business applications can be built and accessed. Now the issue starts there, to convert all the Lotus Notes applications / Domino web based applications to MS platform.
There is no easy way to convert these applications to rival platform as much as MS touts (even it does at the end of it you are going the same functional application in the MS platform). Recently, i have encountered a customer scenario where they want to convert a Lotus Notes document repository application to MOSS and expect to work in the same fashion. The LN application contains lots of rich text data and MS architect team tried to convert this application using the MS Transporter suite but failed miserably. Not much of the information is transported and is not up to the team's expectation. After trying several rounds, they came to Lotus team for assistance.
So the point here is the government will have plenty of such applications and custom workflow applications, tracking applications, content management applications etc. MS team has to basically rewrite all the existing apps in MOSS platform ( not all the apps can be built in MOSS there are quite a no. of apps that need to built in .NET) and even to move all the data from current Lotus Notes to MOSS they need to work closely work Lotus consultants.
Just wondering if all the applications has to be rewritten from the scratch what is the ROI we are talking about or the cost savings we are talking about.
I would welcome any thoughts or debate in this...
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