Evolving Business Processes or, Reinventing the (Expensive) Wheel
Last week, Google announced its tool to aid migration from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, and they dropped a few respectable names of people/organizations used as case studies to prove how smoothly this all went.
Upon further investigation, it’s apparent that the migration from Lotus Notes currently includes only mail, contacts and calendar. While these are undoubtedly the most used applications in any Notes/Domino -based organization, they are far from the only applications used. If they were, the organization in all likelihood would have moved away from Notes years ago. So what about all the other mission-critical applications and data stored within them?
Well, a whitepaper from Google states:
“Based on where the targets are for various applications, different tools can be used for importing data into Google Apps . Import APIs for Google Spreadsheets and Google Sites are the two primary mechanisms for moving data into Google Apps.”
I searched on Google’s site, and
on the web using Google, for more information on these API’s and found
nothing. Even a similar question, submitted on Google’s Help Forum
on July 16th, hasn’t been answered, at the time of this post,
by Google or anyone else.
IBM and others have been attempting to successfully automate the migration of design elements and data from Lotus Notes to other platforms for years, and have not been able to do so consistently. Even using DXL does not work in all cases and can corrupt some elements. IF (and this is a big IF) Google has managed to find a consistent way to do this, then—and only then—migration of Notes applications would seem feasible at a cost-benefit level.
Hamilton Beach is another Google case study for migration. This migration and the reasons behind it have been debated on Ed Brill’s blog and I’m not going to second-guess or argue the other internal reason Hamilton Beach decided to migrate their mail services off Notes.
However, this is reminiscent of many projects that are undertaken, at no small cost, to replace a system that will ‘evolve and improve processes’. But the results show the new system only replaces the same functionality of the old one. Users are then perplexed and frustrated that they have to spend time training on a new system to perform duties they were efficient at performing prior to this new investment (some large CRM systems spring to mind),
If migrating your mail services to Google Apps can evolve your organization and provide a demonstrable benefit—for the cost of the consultation, hosting, training and other services—then great! Go for it!
Just don’t forget the time required to migrate (as you can see in comments on their blog, this has not gone smoothly for everyone) and the fact that you will still require resources to host and maintain all your mission-critical applications. Oh, and remember that you’ll still require the hardware for storing backups, unless you really want to let Google have the only copies of all emails in your organization… Some CEO’s and CIO’s may want to ponder this for a minute.
Finally, I would like to state that there is some good advice for Domino administrators in the Google whitepaper (see link above). Running an assessment of your applications to find usage levels and complexity issues is a recommended action that we advocate. Regardless of whether or not you’re preparing for a migration project, this assessment can give you visibility into cleaning up your environment, saving space (consolidate those servers!) and moving you into a better position for your next upgrade.
Category Lotus Notes Migration
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