An Avanade Blogging Community

An interesting blog alert popped up in my inbox over the weekend about a posting from Ed Brill, a respected Lotus Notes blogger and currently IBM's worldwide sales lead for Lotus Notes. The post mentioned Avanade and Accenture and referenced the Lotus migration which took place a number of years ago when Accenture made the decision to discontinue Notes development and move to the Microsoft platform. 

You can find his post here: http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/he-had-no-idea-but-then-again...microsoft-wants-to-steal-five-million-notes-customers

To be clear, Avanade never ran Lotus Notes, we helped one of our parent companies, Accenture,  move away from the IBM platform over a period of years, this is well documented in the case study linked to from the Microsoft and the Avanade site as evidenced in the link below: 

 http://www.avanade.com/_uploaded/pdf/casestudy/accenturecasestudyln2ms460335.pdf

So apart from that (albeit minor) clarification to Ed's post I'm a little curious as to what all the fuss is about exactly? 

Accenture is, and remains in my opinion, one of the best examples of a well executed, enterprise scale Lotus Notes migration which is publically referenced. Does the intimation that they are still running some applications offshore detract from the quality of the credential which highlights the complexities of undertaking a platform switch and discusses how Avanade/Accenture dealt with these complexities to successfully execute the migration?

It's actually quite clearly spelt out in the case study why Accenture chose to migrate:

"As a high performance business, Accenture foresaw a shift in the global business environment -  increased collaboration, a need for a robust messaging and collaboration platform, and increased reliance on converged mobile technology such personal data assistants and cell phones. Accenture needed an IT infrastructure that would allow it to collaborate internally as well as with third parties including clients, alliance partners and suppliers. The proprietary nature of the Notes software, however, made it difficult to support this level of teamwork. " 

Or more succinctly:

"Accenture wanted a better solution—one that would be less costly and allow for increased collaboration."

So there we have it, they made a decision to migrate as they had a clear business imperative to move.

As for why Lotus Notes may still exist in their environment today:

"Under the market economic model that Accenture introduced, the company is charging sponsors to host databases and applications." 

So they are charging an application owner to host any legacy applications or databases that were left at the end of the migration should they not want it to be re-platformed (for instance for compliance reasons), the cost of re-platforming it turns out to be prohibitive, or they were willing to incur the cost of maintaining the application directly. So where is the problem with this exactly? - it's a business decision that has been made and clearly called out in the case study.  I agree, this is a clear case of truism’s and FUD if you ask me.

Calling out a job advertisement from the Accenture Careers site looking for Lotus Notes developers in India as evidence that Microsoft is promoting FUD is stretching things a little too. Accenture as a consulting company has requirement for developers who are skilled on many different platforms to service their customer’s needs. If their customer is running Lotus Notes and has a requirement for development work to be continued because they have made the decision to stay with the Lotus platform I fail to see how this becomes anything other than a business decision by Accenture to hire consultants to service this requirement.

A simple if/else statement might help to clear things up

if ((Lotus Notes= true) + (Development Requirement = true)+ (Customer= true )+ (Skilled resource= Available)) {

Echo "Happy Consulting company";

} else {

Echo "Happy Competitor";

}

My syntax is probably wrong - and I'm not a developer, but the point is clear here, consulting companies stay in business by performing tasks requested by their customers. If they don't then their customers will go to another consulting company that will.

Incidentally IBM Services has a number of open positions for Exchange Server & SharePoint professionals for those that are interested in heading over to work for Big Blue: https://jobs3.netmedia1.com/cp/search.jsp?tc=1217273951548

Does IBM Services refuse to work with a customer because said customer is using a competing platform? No - they provide the service the customer is asking for and go on their merry way.

As for the comments around Microsoft's stated strategy to target Notes accounts to make the switch to the Microsoft platform - that is nothing but fantastic news for me. Not that I have anything against Lotus Notes or IBM in general, it's just that with a growing practice around helping customers move from Lotus Domino to Exchange this is music to my ears. I have been our Solution owner for Lotus to Microsoft migrations for close to 2 years now, in that time I have seen our practice double in size and it continues to grow steadily today towards doubling again.

 A quick tally up of our top 50 customers who are migrating away from Domino gave me a rough figure of just over 1million seats migrated ( yes, those are actually deployed Exchange seats and yes it may be off by a couple of % points) in the past 24months. Some of these were "new" switchers, others had owned the licenses for a while and chose to deploy for their various reasons. Not quite the same numbers that Microsoft has mentioned have been moved, though we are but 1 of 40,000+ Microsoft partners worldwide – I’m sure some of the others are doing Domino to Exchange work as well.

So in closing off I guess I agree with Ed here on his last comment of his blog post more than anything else:

"I hesitate to make more noise out of any of these episodes of the past, because our story is solid and there's no need to be constantly and loudly defensive.  On the other hand, when the truth is out there, doesn't it deserve to be heard? "

You're right Ed, the truth does deserve to be heard, both sides of the truth of course....

An article I wrote was published on the CIOupdate.com website recently on the topic of planning for Unified Communications in your organization, I've included a link and the text of the original (longer) version of the article for those who are interested in reading it.

http://www.cioupdate.com/trends/article.php/3758556

Ironically, the explosion of new communication tools over the past decade has made collaboration in large enterprises more difficult than it needs to be. Whilst the number of options for communication has increased, so has the need for interaction among geographically distributed teams, partners and suppliers. These groups typically use a variety of communication channels to exchange information, placing greater demands on the IT organization and making it difficult to know the best way to reach someone at a given time.

Managing diverse systems for communication such as telephony, instant messaging, e-mail has strained many IT departments, whom are often forced to make a range of equipment in different countries work together. Additionally, more and more people, especially younger recruits, have come to expect the same capabilities at work that they now use at home. This places extra burden on IT staff to keep up with user demands as well as security concerns posed by these emerging technologies. The challenge is both technological and strategic. Clearly, users need access to the right tools, however to truly transform organizational performance these tools and systems must be integrated within the context of the company’s strategic business objectives.

Unified communications allows people to collaborate seamlessly, regardless of location or device. It accomplishes this by combining the functionalities organizations use today—e-mail messaging, collaborative Web sites and conference calling— with presence, instant messaging and software-powered voice over IP (VoIP).  With the overall result providing a foundation for enhanced competitiveness in the global marketplace, improved user productivity, significant cost reduction and new business value opportunities.

Situation

To stay ahead of global competitors, organizations have to respond ever faster to new business challenges and shifting priorities. Most global companies struggle with growth in part because the technology they use for communications is fragmented and doesn’t work together to span language barriers and time zones.

Avanade has collaborated with more than 50 global customers to unify their communication systems, helping them communicate with colleagues in multiple locations. One such company, a Business Consulting firm with operations worldwide, was expanding rapidly and adding new services, however its ability to communicate and share information internally was impeding its continued growth.

With a distributed global workforce our customer was challenged by a series of fragmented communications systems which were not adequately meeting the changing business needs of their highly mobile workforce and engaged Avanade to assist in defining and executing against their stated business goals.

Solution

The strategic Unified Communications solution Avanade implemented with this Global Business consulting company included the Office Communications Server 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 technologies, which were then integrated with their existing information portals and line of business systems.

Initial results have shown a dramatic increase in productivity, an ability to find critical information faster and a reduction in roadblocks to decision-making. In addition to the productivity benefits, our customer has seen a shift in the way their employees communicate and collaborate – resulting in reduced telephony and external conferencing costs as a result of utilizing their internally provided Unified Communications infrastructure.

Improved Flexibility Equals Enhanced Competitiveness

Using technology that’s available today, businesses can evolve their business strategy and processes to take advantage of their existing technology investments and gain competitive advantage. Better communication and collaboration leads to process efficiencies, faster innovation and faster decisions based on better information.

Additionally, with unified communications, employees don’t have to commute on a daily basis. It gives organizations the flexibility to have a distributed work force, get drivers off the road, and make employees at home just as productive as those in the office.

Reduce Costs

In addition to providing process efficiencies and competitive advantage, unified communications can also deliver bottom-line savings. With many employees traveling or working onsite at customer locations, conference calling for internal meetings is critical for organizations. A straightforward cost saving can be achieved by moving your internal conference calls through Office Communications Server 2007, resulting in savings of thousands of dollars a month in some instances.

Companies implementing unified communications also see savings from simplifying multi-vendor solutions, reducing software licensing fees, eliminating video conferencing hardware and simplifying IT management. For example, the integration of Office Communications Server 2007 with other Windows-based software means that any issues with voice communications can be handled centrally.

Open the door to new business value opportunities

In increasingly competitive global markets, customer service and experience plays a greater role in the success of an organization than in the past. Organizations recognize this and are adapting their strategies to incorporate new mechanisms for interacting with their customers and business partners.

Integrating unified communications technologies into your customer facing systems or processes opens the door to developing business value opportunities and the ability to drive growth through contextual interactions, empowering your customers to make an informed decision about which communications channel they use to engage with your organization when interacting with your customer facing staff.

Taking the Plunge

Although broad collaboration across teams and regions in large enterprises is a complicated goal, several fundamental steps will prepare your organization for a new unified communications platform.

People, planning and piloting should represent the majority of early-stage work in implementing your unified communications project. Thorough plans, clear sponsorship at the executive level, and extensive pilots will have the biggest impact on the success of your project. First impressions can make or break adoption of new tools and technologies, and unified communications technology is particularly viral in the way it takes hold in an organization. A well-planned, positive first experience for a set of key pilot users will send the right message to the rest of the organization.

Unified communications is not just about deploying instant messaging or telephony, it’s about connecting people to the information and the expertise that they require in order to do their jobs more productively. By taking these practical steps now and ensuring a positive experience at the onset, your organization will be able to take full advantage of unified communications in the future.

An interesting sponsored whitepaper dropped into my inbox a few days back regarding a Linux-based Corporate email server as an alternative mail system for certain types of user within an enterprise. In fact it can simply "drop-in" to a heavy Microsoft environment with ease and co-exist seamlessly, no disruptions or reconfiguration of any kind required.

The whitepaper screams a few interesting points as to why it is the alternative to Microsoft Exchange, for a giggle I thought I'd spend a couple of hours playing with it to familiarize myself in-case one of our customers was interested in it one day and wanted the other side of the sales story.

According to the whitepaper it would seem that Exchange is plagued with problems, inherent architecture flaws in some instances it would seem:

• Performance and backup issues with larger mailboxes
• Closed database architecture driving complexity around backup and high availability
• Inefficient storage I/O, driving archiving costs and challenges
• Limitations of the Web access client, with its pre-Web 2.0 UI and flimsy support for browsers other than Internet Explorer
• Inefficiencies for mobile device clients, especially BlackBerry users (via BES)

So, let's just take a peek through these issues and discuss a little these flaws in the world's most prevalent corporate messaging platform and see if we can't debunk a few myths.

Performance and backup issues with larger mailboxes, Closed Database Architecture and inefficient storage I/O driving costs and challenges.

These three are all pretty much the same and seemingly the foundation upon which PostPath makes it's case for using their solution rather than undertaking an expensive Exchange upgrade and migration.

As with all Exchange naysayers the bogeyman is yet again the JET database architecture. A deprecated technology screams the whitepaper which in effect requires an organization to go out and purchase expensive storage which in turn add's complexity to the backup and archiving solution and contributes to the performance of large mailboxes given the stress placed on the disk subsystem.

Interestingly enough the folks at PostPath seem to have missed that Microsoft themselves have given quite comprehensive guidance around amongst other things the performance of mailboxes in an Exchange 2007 environment. Seems that the cost of RAM is cheaper than the cost of storage up until about 32gb and was therefore a primary driver behind the switch to 64-bit computing in Exchange 2007.

Referring to the cost comparison on the PostPath website (I'll come to this later) a correctly sized mailbox environment for 2000 users, who are all relatively heavy mailbox users we would require 10gb+2gb RAM for the overhead. But in doing so we shift the majority of the I/O from the disk, to the RAM subsystem - which in most tests shows a reduction in disk I/O of around 70% from Exchange 2003 and therefore eliminate the need for all of that expensive storage we needed to account for.

Wow - did I read that right? A 70% reduction in disk I/O from the previous version of Exchange off the bat - not sure about everyone else, but I kind of like that kind of "shortcoming" in the product.

Limitations of the Web access client, with its pre-Web 2.0 UI and flimsy support for browsers other than Internet Explorer

Not sure I entirely agree on this one either, I kind of like the improvements in the OWA experience with Exchange 2007 afterall the purpose of the client is meant to be for those users who infrequently use mail or happen to be away from their primary client machine (in which case they would be using outlook right?)

Of course Web 2.0 interfaces are much prettier and AJAX is great right.  However given one of the key features promoted by PostPath is the fact that their alternative works with Outlook just as well as Exchange (Yes, I'll ignore that guys)  that would mean that all of our corporate users would not only need to be familiar with the featureset of Outlook when in the office, but then the rich Web 2.0 UI when out of the office or away from their primary PC.

Given OWA Premium is one of the most advanced AJAX applications on the planet some of their comments around AJAX later in the whitepaper confused me, along with the lack of "non-IE" browser support which if you look at OWA Light (which incidentally has quite a nice Web 2.0 feel about it) sort of disappears as well. In fact at last check OWA Light supported all of the major browser players - Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape, mulitple versions of IE including IE on Mac. Obviously I haven't tested all of these but my experience on IE and Firefox was the same - if someone wants to mail me one of those super light Mac laptops I am happy to try Safari as well.

Inefficiencies for mobile device clients, especially BlackBerry users (via BES)

Interestingly the primary reason stated for inefficiencies with mobile devices was also the I/O overhead - given I've covered that fairly well earlier on I'll just ignore this one for brevities sake.  Even if a BlackBerry is a little more resource intensive device, will be interesting to see what kind of performance hit the iPhone 2 has on our Exchange servers, I'm predicting a global meltdown myself.

I'll cover off the cost comparison from their website in my next post as it makes for some interesting reading as well.

It was great to see Quest go public yesterday with their plans to include an application assessment capability in the next release of Notes Migrator for SharePoint.

We've seen some early previews of this capability through the Avanade/Accenture/Quest alliance that has existed for many years in the Lotus Notes migration space and are currently waiting to get our hands on the bits so we can "test it in anger" with some early customers.

An excerpt from Steve Walch's blog:

The first thing to clarify is that there is really not a separate analysis tool.  Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.0 will contain extensive features for conducting pre-migration assessments (i.e., it will be an “analysis tool” as well as a “migration project management tool” and, of course, a “content migration tool”). 

In the analysis area specifically, Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.0 will be able to…

• Discover Notes Databases across all servers in all locations
• Classify Applications according to Technical or Business attributes
• Analyze Application Usage to identify unused applications
• Analyze Design Complexity and deviations from standard templates
• Analyze Data Complexity and identify content migration needs
• Extract QuickPlace room hierarchies and Domino.Doc cabinet organization

We will be demonstrating this new version at our Tech·Ed IT Pro Booth # 1446 [link] and are planning on making an alpha or beta version available to key partners and customers by the end of June.  We do not have a final release schedule at this time.

Original post can be found here: http://notes2sharepoint.org/archive/2008/05/29/when-is-quest-going-to-deliver-an-analysis-tool.aspx

One question I see asked a lot on our internal forums and by customers is what do I miss if I stay with Exchange Server 2003 when implementing Office Communications Server 2007.

You don't actually "lose" any functionality from either of the products by staying on one version or another, however you do "miss" the opportunity to provide a much tighter integration between Exchange and OCS and a much better experience for your user base by opting to stay with Exchange 2003.

Exchange Server 2007 introduced the Unified Messaging role as a component of it's architecture. Designed to be complementary to the telephony capabilities of LCS2005 SP1 and later OCS2007 the UM role in Exchange provided amongst other things the capability for a users to receive voicemail in their inbox direct from the Exchange Server rather than within a PBX infrastructure.

This concept of anywhere, anytime access allows companies to direct unanswered calls to the Exchange infrastructure and then delivers the voicemail to the users inbox allowing them to see their missed calls when they login next or from their Windows Mobile device - and then play the message direct from their client and/or on a phone if that is the preferred option.

Outlook Voice Access was also introducted with Exchange Server 2007 and is beneficial for those users whom are out of the office or on the road a lot - allowing them to connect to and manage their inbox, calendar and personal contacts from any telephone either via natural speech (english only today)  or a touch tone interface.

More information on UM and OVA can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/unifiedmessaging/umcommunications.mspx

We recently relased a perspective paper on getting started with a Collaborative workspace solution which is suited to your business and some tips with things to consider.

The paper can be found published on the Avanade website here:

http://www.avanade.com/_uploaded/pdf/pub/avaformattingsupportperspectivesharepoint070628180242.pdf

I’ve been asked this one a couple of times in the last few weeks as we continue to work on some GroupWise and other migrations.

To identify the Exchange schema level which is set for your forest you can navigate to:

CN=ms-Exch-Schema-Version-Pt,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=DN-of-forest-root-domaincontroller

In the Attribute Editor tab, scroll down to the “rangeUpper” attribute. If Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 Beta 2 has extended the schema, the value should be 11116.

If you are using the RTM version of Exchange 2007 the value should be10637.

For Exchange 2003, the value should be 6870 and Exchange 2000 should return a value of 4397.