Fairchild Semiconductor dumps Notes for Google Apps
by Volker Weber
Google ... said Fairchild Semiconductor has moved its 5,500 employees to Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) from IBM Lotus Notes, the latest coup for the company's growing effort in cloud computing.
5500 seats are not going to make a big dent in IBM's revenue. But there are more clients working on this switch.
Comments
They were probably only using Domino/Notes for email.
David,
once you used both, Google's and Lotus' calendaring functionality, you will never want to switch back to Notes. I would love to sync my Notes calendar into one layer of my Google Calendar, but IBM's hunk of crap is just a big pile of poor code and data structures that was designed to keep you locked in. They talk about supporting open standards (i.e. icalendar) but they don't support any open standard transport for syncing the data with another service, just manual im- and export.
FWIW, I read, answer and file emails about 4+ times as fast in GMail, as compared to Notes 8.5. Ah, yes, and I find Mails and stuff I am looking for (as opposed to Notes, that lets me search in a totally ridiculous query language while turning up results in a way, errhm, strangely sorted fashion).
Google Talk (or some of the numerous Jabber clients out there) just works. Through most firewalls. Just out of the box. If you compare this with the effort of getting a Sametime server and a few clients up and running...
Ah, yeah, and there's "awareness" in GMail; did you ever try getting this to run on a Domino Server with DWA? IBM's way of packaging and deploying Sametime stlinks is giving me the creeps.
For GDocs, there's a nice plugin for Open Office which effectively uses Google's service as storage for your documents and tables.
So, I can perfectly understand people switching to G Apps.
I switched parts of my personal mail, calendaring and some tables to Google when their service became available.
If there would be
1) a simple solution for backup and
2) extending calendar by views and simple applications and
3) some way of on-client signage and encryption for stored documents and other data
Google Apps would be very very interesting for the organization I'm working for, to say the least.
Cheers,
/k
Yes sure. And the deal was closed on the golf course and the CIO is an idiot and there is no support for real business equipment such as Blackberries and they have no SLA and Gmail will never be Sarbanes Oxley compliant and it is missing important features such as mail delegation and there is no way to work offline with GAPE for now and good.
Ah, and most important: Never mind to check the facts.
Ups, Karsten has been faster than me. Obviously I am also referring to David's comment.
For everyone who want's to check the facts: Read page two of the eWeek article.
Lucius, nobody understands irony. Say what you want to say.
Karsten, I believe Notes 8.5 can display remote iCalendar files. It cannot publish them, and it has no provisions for CalDAV so far. And I would not agree with you on the designed for lock-in claim. It's just legacy.
"the company wanted a more modern collaboration platform." hmmmm sounds like BS to me. But IBM Should be looking at this very closely and monitor Gmail/Apps
I'm curious, Karsten - in what ways don't the Google data APIs and RSS/Atom meet your needs for 1) Backup and 2) extended functionality?
Never mind all the blah: the killer feature is that you open a web browser, and it’s all there…
… As opposed to firing up a bloated Eclipse client installed on a specific machine.
Sssssh. I can imagine people trying to install Expeditor on Chrome OS, completely missing the point.
Ben has it right, that, and the cloud is the draw. All the other limitations are seen as fringes on the cloud.
As a occasional GMail user, I haven't spent much time with the Calendar yet...looks ok...but...we'll see.
I don't understand @1 talk about not being able to find stuff in Lotus Notes/Domino? Maybe full text index isn't turned on?
As Bill just recently posted, the indexer on Lotus Domino is very powerful and so is the search. (Here a link to Bills interesting post: Post)
