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...
30 notes apps = 3 or 4 .net apps
ReplyDeletemany apps in notes are built coz its easy to do.. u will see many of them to be just some small forms, saved and then email workflow etc.. basically all trivial stuff..
and they cannot keep much data due to performance so more databases, but not like this in .net. ms sql can store many more, and that means more data less application.
cost saving can la..
that is application consolidation, you can do that in LND world too..
ReplyDeleteyou can consolidate and build the apps in Domino if you want web based.
why don't you reveal your identity so that i know who am i debating with :)
lotus notes applications all people used to develop, and now due to IBM changed policy, they are moving away.
ReplyDelete.net is a nice platform, share point not so good. notes developers need learn new technologies and .net easy for them.
so i think migration is good because new people are not learning lotus notes, but old people in lotus notes will know .net, and get more salary jobs. notes job market very poor.. my friend lost his job :(