BoysTown achieves the Lotus position — without Exchange
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From ITWire: BoysTown achieves the Lotus position — without Exchange
This is one of the best articles I've seen of late talking about a company faced with a Notes vs Exchange comparison, and how they logically worked out their decision:
When Australian youth charity BoysTown was looking at the future of its Lotus Notes/Domino collaboration platform late in 2009, ICT manager Julius Bergh knew that the group had to make a decision.
“We have seen in the press, that a number of organisations have changed over to Exchange,” he says in an interview this week. “We thought to ourselves that we had better investigate this thing thoroughly.”
There have been quite a few revelations of Australian migrations off the Lotus Notes/Domino over the past few months — with one high-profile move being that of Qantas, whose shift was revealed in February. Centrelink is also likely to end its long-running relationship with Notes as part of the welfare agency’s integration with the new, broader Department of Human Services.
And analyst firms such as Longhaus have questioned Notes’ future in the face of Exchange’s dominance and competing cloud-based services such as Google’s Gmail, which are speedily encroaching on Notes’ traditional turf.
So Bergh sent a few members from his team over to a conference in Brisbane on how to move to Exchange 2010 to scope out the Microsoft platform — check out the lay of the land and see what would be involved in a migration of Boystown’s 480 staff. What they found disappointed him.
He honestly admits that there were (and *are*) good reasons for them to move to Microsoft. But...
There were some clear advantages if Boystown did choose the Exchange platform, Bergh admits.
For example, the organisation is a charity — which Bergh says translates to some “nice discounts” from Microsoft. In addition, users are generally more familiar with Exchange’s user interface because they often use the software on their personal PCs, or have used it at other workplaces. “We did take it quite seriously,” he says.
However, ultimately what swung Bergh to upgrade the software was one aspect of Notes that its userbase in Australia often cites as one of it’s main strengths — the extensibility of the platform compared with its rivals. Bergh points out that Notes is much more than just an email server.
And I *still* can't believe the distortion reality field that causes so many companies to overlook this central issue:
If Boystown was to use a rival collaboration offering, Bergh says, he would need to buy quite a few more corporate applications just to match the functionality that Notes already offers.
These are the types of things that all of us should focus on when touting the value of Notes. And I love the way it wraps up:
But ultimately when speaking about Notes, for Bergh it all comes back to the inherent flexibility of the platform — arguing that it’s so much more than an email platform.
“If you buy Lotus Domino because you like the email system, it’s like buying a porche because you like the ashtray,” he chuckles.
From ITWire: BoysTown achieves the Lotus position — without Exchange
This is one of the best articles I've seen of late talking about a company faced with a Notes vs Exchange comparison, and how they logically worked out their decision:
When Australian youth charity BoysTown was looking at the future of its Lotus Notes/Domino collaboration platform late in 2009, ICT manager Julius Bergh knew that the group had to make a decision.
“We have seen in the press, that a number of organisations have changed over to Exchange,” he says in an interview this week. “We thought to ourselves that we had better investigate this thing thoroughly.”
There have been quite a few revelations of Australian migrations off the Lotus Notes/Domino over the past few months — with one high-profile move being that of Qantas, whose shift was revealed in February. Centrelink is also likely to end its long-running relationship with Notes as part of the welfare agency’s integration with the new, broader Department of Human Services.
And analyst firms such as Longhaus have questioned Notes’ future in the face of Exchange’s dominance and competing cloud-based services such as Google’s Gmail, which are speedily encroaching on Notes’ traditional turf.
So Bergh sent a few members from his team over to a conference in Brisbane on how to move to Exchange 2010 to scope out the Microsoft platform — check out the lay of the land and see what would be involved in a migration of Boystown’s 480 staff. What they found disappointed him.
He honestly admits that there were (and *are*) good reasons for them to move to Microsoft. But...
There were some clear advantages if Boystown did choose the Exchange platform, Bergh admits.
For example, the organisation is a charity — which Bergh says translates to some “nice discounts” from Microsoft. In addition, users are generally more familiar with Exchange’s user interface because they often use the software on their personal PCs, or have used it at other workplaces. “We did take it quite seriously,” he says.
However, ultimately what swung Bergh to upgrade the software was one aspect of Notes that its userbase in Australia often cites as one of it’s main strengths — the extensibility of the platform compared with its rivals. Bergh points out that Notes is much more than just an email server.
And I *still* can't believe the distortion reality field that causes so many companies to overlook this central issue:
If Boystown was to use a rival collaboration offering, Bergh says, he would need to buy quite a few more corporate applications just to match the functionality that Notes already offers.
These are the types of things that all of us should focus on when touting the value of Notes. And I love the way it wraps up:
But ultimately when speaking about Notes, for Bergh it all comes back to the inherent flexibility of the platform — arguing that it’s so much more than an email platform.
“If you buy Lotus Domino because you like the email system, it’s like buying a porche because you like the ashtray,” he chuckles.
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