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...

MS - Sharpoint Server 2007

I attended a 5 days training session on MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007) in Avantus.
Originally it was intended only for MS tech guys in my company but i managed to get inside. The prime intention is to learn and some obviously draw some comparisons between my favorite LND and SP. I know i cannot compare LND with just SP cos SP requires many other things to get it work.

I will try to write this in detail later but the conclusion i had to draw is - if your infrastructure is Lotus already, i don't think its a good idea to use Sharepoint. If you are a MS shop yes you didn't had anything of this kind before and oh yes, you could move with additional M$.

In my opinion, if you are already LND shop and also use Quickplace, you are in the game already :)

The Famous Deal - IBM and MS

A bit of history this time. When i was Googling about IBM and MS i found some interesting articles/deals. One of the article is about the famous deal between IBM and MS and how MS became a multi billion dollar company from nothing. Its definitely worth reading.

After completion, you will contemplate whether Bill Gates really a Genius or anyone can become so!!!

So the moral of the story is :
Sometimes, its not what you know that matters, its who you know really matters? Taken from one of the Singapore taxi drivers business card, who also happened to be a Letter writer for accidents etc.

Updated the last 2 lines on 19th Nov 2006.