Lotus Notes dumped in AMP cloud email move
by Volker Weber
Financial services giant AMP this afternoon revealed that it would ditch its Lotus Notes/Domino installation as part of a shift to Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform hosted by CSC Australia.
The article contines to list other customers who recently recently dumped Notes (Quantas, Monash University, Department of Human Services) and who stayed with the platform (BoysTown).
[via Duffbert]
Comments
Very sad, but typical of the trend in Australia.
The Department of Human Services has not dumped Notes yet, and more than Boy's Town have stayed.
Centrelink (DHS) 'refreshed' to 8.02 about a year ago, and have stated publicly that they now want to modernise on to Outlook.
I'm not sure how Outlook is more modern than Version 8 of Notes - there's the challenge for Lotus Knows.
As for the 1000's of teamrooms, discussion databases and apps they run, my guess is the Notes Client is going to be there for a little while yet.
We all know you can't 'dump' Notes for Outlook when there is more than email at play, you always need more products. Lotus Knows it. But the press here don't or just want to ignore that. Those sort of topics aren't trendy...
I think the need for these 'extra products' is the real story someone should case study and write about. That's the real news.
@Adam -- and a disgraceful amount of money is spent migrating and then maintaining two systems. The public service in NZ is particularly good at this trick and we the tax payers just bend over and take it.
As you mentioned teamrooms I just setup one and ran it in the browser. And indeed what a fine application that is. And some of this uber design is even generated by a nice Java applet.
In the past you often had to be twice as good as the competition to be successful especially when competing with Microsoft. Now the market has changed and perhaps twice as good or half the price is not needed any more but running at half speed does not cut it either.
It is probably cheaper for IBM to not invest in those who want to leave but comfort those that are happy with less for the same price. And the marketing IBM does to sell less effort as more value has been tremendous (my opinion, your mileage may vary).
Those who leave are not all stupid and those who stay not all clever.
@Adam. The press is very anti-IBM here in Australia. It seems hard for IBM to demonstrate to the media vultures the value proposition. An old saying comes to mind. "It's as useful as throwing pearls to swine."
So if users are still giving you grief about the looks of the application as a reason for migrating, (YAWN!), YUI is a great option with plenty of doco and examples. I have had alot of raised eyebrows and "Wow! It doesn't look like Notes" comments when demoing simple web conversions of applications using YUI 2.
Yeah, there is XPages, but if you haven't got the budget/time to work up into XPages yet, YUI gives me a very simple and quick means of retrofitting the formatting of Notes forms without any "rectal remodelling" of the database design . And you shouldn't have any worries about cross browser compatibility,(IE6+, FF2+, Safari 3+, and Chrome). The online grid builder is a little gem for this sort of thing.
Seems like exchange ghost is following me everywhere, first my US major diesel engine manufacturing client (heard they are moving to exchange as well), then my Swiss major pharama company (their internal target is 2012 for exchange migration), then AMP and now i am hearing my current US based client is moving as well.
