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IBM Lotus to Google Apps Migration Remorse: The story from a [reported] Google Apps customer
03/15/2010 04:00:00 PM by Chris Toohey
A while back (July 23, 2009), I posted a public response to David Hoff of Cloud Sherpas, who spoke of all of the joys and happiness afforded someone who migrates from IBM Lotus products to Google Apps. Of course, this was a competitive marketing piece in editorial's clothing... I mean, I'd rather hear from all of the amazing benefits resulting from a migration from Lotus Notes Domino to Google Apps from an actual customer...
Lucky me, this weekend I received the following email:
We are a recent convert from Notes/Domino to Google Apps. When I say recent, I mean we are in the process of converting over right now.
During the evaluation process, I could never get over the feeling we, as a company were making a huge mistake. I've been in the I.T. field since 1978 as a college freshman as a systems administrator/programmer to a network support tech/engineer and now the effective director for the department for [...].
During the evaluation process I only found one argument in favor of the move to Google apps. The high reliability of cloud computing. We are still a small and low margin company in several ways so we cannot afford the bandwidth and system requirements to have multiple AS/400s mirroring data for both the retail system and e-mail applications.
We put out RFPs to several companies. Cloud Sherpas was the only respondent. Meir Sasson and his team offered to help us, but were very insistent they know our budget for making the change up front. Meir told us he would need to fly in a team to get copies of our data and then develop custom apps to convert e-mail and other databases over to Google Apps. When we balked, he then suggested we take a go-it-alone approach and Sherpas would be there if we needed them. At the time, Google apps had a conversion utility on their we site for uploading Lotus Notes to Google apps. I had managed to make it work and uploaded my e-mail history to my personal account. That app has since been taken down. Two months later, David Hoff's blog was posted on Cloud Sherpas' web site.
I've been designing and managing e-mail systems for almost 20 years. I have never gone from an in house system to an outsourced one. Always the other way.
I have trust issues with Sherpas. First of all, blatant marketing material by employees being touted as factual revelations seems to be the ultimate conflict of interest. I don't know his history with Lotus Notes, I only know he's touting his own product as if he's a recent convert. He may have helped develop the front end or other utilities, but his credibility with me as a consumer is lost.
Secondly, any consulting company that wants to know budgeting for a project before the project is completely defined has suspect motives. I've worked for, and quickly left consulting companies that looked to the profit side of endeavors over really trying to help the customer. The final straw was a meeting I attended when the project manager stated we'll get them moving on the front end, then come back and fix things later for additional consulting fees. As an engineer, I thought the idea was to design and build things right the first time. Improvements were done to make things better for the next customer.
Third, I've read stories of e-mail administrators who abuse their position to snoop into e-mail accounts, then pass the information they find over to others. In many cases to the competition. Sherpas has access to the e-mail files as co-administrators. Based upon my conversations with their staff, I get the feeling some of their employees might just violate our trust.
Fourth, There are too many toys that will encourage our employees to do other things besides work. Chat is a great feature, but being able to regulate it to internals only is a must. The other "Labs" fall into the category of distractions than rather than usefulness. User customizations open the system to all sorts of abuse that admins cannot control. It requires good faith and trust that employees will actually abide by the company's acceptable use policy.
Fifth, There is no administrative structure. All admins are created equal in Google Apps. They can then download the security key and browse all user's e-mails. Their role as an admin may only be to create and delete users.
Sixth, Blackberrys are not directly supported by Google Apps.
Finally I have problems with the front end. Webmail programs are great when you are on the road and don't have your own computer. I don't like it for business environments. It doesn't look professional. Browser crashes close all instances of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome. More than 99% of e-mail users like a mail client. Notes, Outlook, Sea Monkey and Eudora give the user an easy interface to their e-mail. Users like a separate program for their e-mail. They all have two problems with webmail, timeouts and inadvertantly closing an e-mail to do a web search for supporting information. Offline e-mail clients don't have these problems.
I cannot help but feel we've made a big mistake. I don't put my name on something unless I'm 100% sure it will work and work well. Then my boss told me the driving factors are costs and reliability. He implies vendor Integrity doesn't seem to matter.
Hopefully we will be able to move back to something we like without damaging the perception we always act with the company's best interest in mind.
I feel really bad for J, and really bad for his customers. They've moved from an amazing platform and product family to something that was not -- as many people have said in the past -- enterprise-ready, and I think they'll find themselves suffering in the long run.
After an email exchange, J told me the following:
I tried to post my counter to the Top 10 Reasons on Sherpas' own web site but was blocked. I guess Sherpas doesn't like dissenting opinions.
I'm glad I could give J a voice here, which I hope can serve as a warning to anyone considering a migration: make sure you are 100% certain of what you're getting before you put Migrate to new enterprise messaging and application platform on your To Do List!
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@edbrill != surprised
I sympathize entirely with J, and suspect that a strategic effort with the CIO/CTO to evaluate the options at the front end was lacking. There are times when this move would make sense - very few indeed - but most of the time it would not.
It was fun to read the comment about consulting companies wanting to know budgets before a project is defined. I see that a lot (not me, I don't even like clients to be pre-budgeted for our work) but just as often or even moreso, clients want to know prices before they share (or know) all the requirements. This often happens when consultants and clients fail to engage at the right level.
Thanks for the voice, Chris.
There were other reasons we went to Notes/Domino all those years ago.
Our business system runs on an I-Series. My goal was to integrate the business system with e-mail as well as make us platform independent. Exchange Servers require very high bandwidth and are constantly hacked, or violated by attacks, Outlook Clients have too many security holes, and web-mail products are great for home use, never a business environment. Groupwise was never a consideration
When I was selling Notes/Domino to the management team here, I told my bosses we could capture real time customer data, write some apps to run in background and get some e-mail enabled reports. That data could also feed our own e-mail marketing campaigns based upon what ever criteria we wanted. New customers could receive coupons and newsletters with very little maintenence of customer databases, just a little creative work from the marketing department. Financial reports that take one of the controllers half a day to generate, could be scripted out and run and delivered to appropriate managers as part of the end-of-day/end-of-week/end-of-month processing. The idea of making departmental document databases and discussion areas was another great selling point. It makes it easy to help standardize proceedures in a geographically disbursed company like ours. I was working on a trainer's scheduling program when I got the word we were considering leaving Domino. When done, our trainer only had to pick the class he was teaching, the location and number of seats and the start date of the class. Training materials would be e-mailed to the printer with binding and delivery instructions. E-mail notifications went out to department heads, and the trainer was to get reminders of where he was supposed to be on Monday or Tuesday morning. New classes would only take a few minutes to setup.
Basically, with Notes/Domino, the possibilities were endless.
Support by IBM and Lotus personnel has always been first rate. Even though they still can't solve my calendar issue, (Document has been modified or corrupted since signed! (data)). If you ave a problem with other company's e-mail programs, you might get a call back during a critical scene of an episode of Lost. (Which is what ususally happens to your trouble ticket)
Notes/Domino hasn't been the perect platform. But based upon the several different e-mail systems (5) I've managed in the past, it was, for us, a great environment. Blackberry and other connector services require me to have an integrated Windows server. So much for being totally platform independant.
I've managed to support more than 300 computer users by myself. (That's right, a staff of one. I do have a systems programmer that knows how to turn on a PC.... Does that change the support count to two people?) We've always had disaster recovery issues. We have one I-series. My boss's opionion was similar to Mark Twain who once wrote, "Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch the basket". Obviously, Mr. Clements never did computer support. We've grown to the point where we should have at least two. Replicating our e-mail system would never have been an issue. Especially in our bandwidth challenged environment. (That's why you have a cablemodem backup)
On the bright side, I did get a consession from my boss. If Google Apps falls flat on it's face, we kill it immediately and go back to Notes. I'll let Chris know in a month so he can give you all an update. (Maybe I'll write my own column somewhere about using the equivalent of Facebook and Twitter to keep a business data system running like a well oiled machine)
Rob, I am the CIO/CTO.
I have this Domino Developer friend who used to a work at a company that made this same jump. They did it an wave of self-generated publicity too; telling the press how wonderful things would be with Google as opposed to IBM/Lotus.
Then Google suffered the first of what turned out to be a series of embarrassing outages. And the business, who'd been all in favour of the move up to that point, wanted to know why nobody had warned them that they could lose access to their email like this. (Something which had never happened under Domino, by the way.)
Of course, IT had warned the business that this kind of thing could happen, but they simply hadn't listened. So it goes...
Oh, and two years later, my friend is still being contacted by that company to work on updating some of their Notes apps with new features.
Jay - no disrespect intended of course! And I really didn't mean to imply that due diligence hadn't been performed "by" the CIO but rather I inferred (perhaps wrongly) that an external engagement with a collaboration strategy expert or group outside the company, not employed by either vendor, may not have occurred ("with"). If I'm wrong, my apologies.
Given the gravity and long-term implications of migration decisions, a cottage industry of collaboration strategists has sprouted in the past 3 years or so, and that external view from people who spend their time studying the entire market can be valuable. They understand and can frame the intersection of functionality, security, portability, reliability, and usability with corporate needs and culture. They just tend to be well-hidden collaborations of individuals or niche firms, and during the recession, were frankly not often used.
Again no offense was intended. I do agree with your points - especially the ones I can evaluate without knowing anything about the vendor - and your experience with this organization and Google Apps itself sounds subpar at best.
Just to tack onto my last reply, the word "really" is the only word intended to be in bold. At least that's what I had highlighted when I clicked the B...!
Well, thanks J for having sharing the experience. I wonder how many stories like that one exist and are untold.
A friend of mine once told me, "Mystery = Margin".
Google has an aura of new and exciting, so it easily attracts executives with a "Baby Huey" mentality.
Sometimes I wonder what the competitive landscape would be like if We had the Eclipse client and widgets 4-5 years ago. I know, that sort of thinking gets me nowhere, but it seems like Notes/Domino lost so much traction while waiting for Workplace to come and then eventually dissipate like smoke.
It's very disappointing to see the misinformation circulating here, and I would like to present the facts so people can make informed decisions.
1. My post was entitled "The Top Ten Reasons I left Lotus Notes for Google Apps". It was not "You should leave Lotus Notes". It included an invite to come learn if the switch might make sense for you. It's not the right solution for everyone, but there are reasons why more than 3,000 companies are making the move every single day. Again, for those that are interested, I invite you to learn more.
2. Cloud Sherpas is dedicated to helping customers successfully move to Google Apps. This is one of the reasons that I helped found the company. As part of our business model, we offer professional services to organizations that would like to engage our team; we explain this in detail on our website. There is a big difference between what we can provide for $100 and $10,000, and yes, we want to set proper expectations of what can be done in a given price range/budget. When someone says they have no money, we provide the information needed for them to self-migrate. In this case, it sounds like they were able to successfully install and configure the Lotus Notes migration tool.
3. Google provides a free migration tool for Lotus Notes to Google Apps. It is a very full featured and robust application. The tool is a native Notes application, that runs on a Domino server, and it will migrate mail, calendar, and contacts with a very high degree of fidelity. I would encourage all the readers of this post to see if they can find the link for this tool. It looked like Bing had it buried all the way down as the second result when I looked for "lotus notes migration to Google Apps", but if you are interested in the tool, I don't think you'll have any trouble finding it. http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=154630
4. For organizations that feel that they must dictate and control every aspect of their employees email and collaboration tools, Google Apps is not for you. I'm not trying to sell you on anything here. I'll say this a second time for emphasis, if your company has a draconian approach to IT, where it could not be imagined why anyone would need 25 GB of email in their inbox; where users shouldn't be able to create collaborative sites without asking IT for approval; where calendars can be published outside the VPN; please run from Google Apps as fast as you can. And make sure that you add some new filters to your firewall to ensure your users can't search for "Google Apps".
5. Google does not provide a way for Administrators to read a user's mail, period. This is in stark contrast to Lotus Notes, where a new feature was added in R7 to allow "Full Access Administration", which allows Administrators to bypass security Access Control Lists as needed. Google Apps does provide the ability for users (not administrators) to delegate access to their mail. Unlike Lotus Notes, Google Apps provides that only the end user can enable this delegation.
If your company is subject to email compliance and retention requirements, you can purchase an optional product, called Google Message Discovery, that journals all mail to a separately managed data store. This product is not unique to Google Apps, and can be run with your Notes/Domino server.
6. Blackberries are fully supported by Google Apps. Again, I'll invite you as readers to see if you verify can this independently. Google has released a GBES, which provides the same native support for having a Blackberry Enterprise Server as you've come to expect with Notes. Of course, Google has gone the extra mile to provide a full J2ME Gmail mobile client that can be used when you don't want to support a BES server, but again that's up to you.
7. If you don't like the browser interface, Google is fully IMAP/POP compliant. If you want to use Eudora, as the poster mentioned, it works great with Google. If your concern is offline access, Google provides offline support right in the browser.
I know that the facts seem to be changing at a shocking rate; Google is releasing new enhancements, additions and improvements to Apps every week. Since there isn't any installed software, the features are being deployed to over 200+ million users on a daily basis. This is yet another reason why I choose Google Apps for my company. We take can advantage of these features without the need for costly upgrades or desktop software installs.
For the people that are interested in facts, I hope that I have provided insights on what you can and can't do with Google Apps. I would also suggest that you take a look at the Google Enterprise blog to keep up to date on the new features that are being released http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/.
- David
"if your company has a draconian approach to IT, where it could not be imagined why anyone would need 25 GB of email in their inbox ... please run from Google Apps as fast as you can."
I can't see why anyone needs 25gb in their Inbox - all of that stuff should get filed into folders to assist in locating documents more easily further down the track. If a 25gb Inbox is the best method Google can find to sort and store data then Google Apps is worse than I thought.
The 25GB mailbox exists because backup can be more expensive if people delete. If users do not delete you just have to replicate, if they delete you have to backup because they could have deleted a message in error.
So the advantage of a 25 GB mailbox is that in a huge replicated environment deleting messages sometimes can be expensive.
I don't need a 25GB mailbox either but I know of people that never want to delete. Deleting messages can be a hard task because you have to decide what is important and what is not. Even CEO s don't want to delete. Maybe they think everything they do is important (but there are some legal issues too).
I don't like Google mail but their concept of tagging messages is a good one. It works much better than folders for me.
@David If you encrypt Full Administrative Mode is less dangerous than you describe it. If you cannot trust your Administrators you have a problem on every platform that I am aware of (not saying that I know all).
Our company is currently in the process of looking at the possibility of migrating from Lotus Notes 8.5 to Sharepoint. We are having different companies come in and evaluate our custom applications to see if and what it would take to redesign them in Sharepoint. Our VP driving this research wants to have a decision made by the end of March on the feasibility/cost of migrating to Sharepoint so that he can make the recommendation to spend the money to migrate to Sharepoint or spend the money on some of the new Lotus products (i.e. Live, Connections, etc).
Does anyone have a story from a customer, or have a link to one, that did a migration from Lotus to Sharepoint (good or bad)?
"more than 3,000 companies are making the move every single day".
(Notes > Google) - For real? Or does it fall under
"It's very disappointing to see the misinformation circulating here, and I would like to present the facts so people can make informed decisions."
?
@Dwain...Based on my personal experience, you'll be disappointed in a move to Sharepoint.
Functionally, you will not be able to replicate everything that you do today in Notes and you will be left with a system that is really nothing more than glorified file shares.
Much information ends up in silos, which is the exact opposite direction that the collaboration industry is moving as a whole.
While Sharepoint might be very good for specific team collaboration, it wholly falls down in ad hoc or advanced collab.
For an interesting look at a developer who documented his success and frustration in going from a Notes to Sharepoint environment, check out the following blog.
We have moved our student population to Google Apps for Education. Why did we do it? Because students wanted Google and because of the cost. However there are limitations.
(1) maximum email size is 25 mb.
(2) the migration tool provided by Google will not migrate documents that are larger than 25 Mb.
(3) the migration tool, while it is a native Domino app, has been through at least 4 iterations in the short time we have used it, and it is still buggy.
(4) there is no central directory for users. if your users have extensive private contact lists, this may not be an issue...but gee...do you want the users maintaining those themselves?
(5) users do have a different sweet spot for Google outages versus inhouse server outages. When Google is unavailable they are perfectly content to wait. Where as with the inhouse system they had expectations of 1 sec recovery time. If you are considering Google you need to go in with your eyes open. There is an additional fee for the Message Discovery option...and retention is based on how much you want to pay and there are limitations within the option.
(6) most specialized administrative functions are still based on APIs. For example you have to use an API to rename a user. Also there is no mechanism to cleanly migrate data from one Google domain to another (moving active students to an alumni domain is not possible at this time).
(7) the CPanel for administration is limited in function re: if you are trying to determine if a user is actively logged in and from where to troubleshoot a problem.
In summary, you are getting what you pay for.
"migrate mail, calendar, and contacts"
Hate to tell ya, but Lotus Notes is not just email and calendaring.
And "more than 3,000 companies are making the move every single day"?
So you're going to run out of companies to migrate within few months?
Sounds like you need to find a new job soon ;-)
One major point: Google is trying to move everything INTO the inbox. The trend is to move stuff OUT of the inbox. Hoarding files in a personal store does no one any good. The value is in collaboratively sharing files and information. If all of your companies intellectual assets and the tacit knowledge of its people are tied up in personal inboxes (i.e. silos), collaboration grinds to a standstill.
Mr. Hoff,
Let's address your points individually
I've been doing this job in some form for almost 30 years. I've been implementing E-mail solutions since 1991, 92 or 93. (I don't really remember which) I take a certain personal pride in the fact I disconnect my personal feelings in the evaluation process. I report my findings as fact until proven otherwise, then I publically state, in bold and enhanced type when I was wrong. Not everyone I know in this job does that.
It's marketing material disguised as testimonial. During the evaluation process, several persons asked me why we weren't changing based upon this obious sucess story. As for the claim of 3,000 companies making the move every day, I'll factor in the fact you passed yourself off as a former Google Apps convert instead of the owner of Cloud Sherpas.
I've done consulting work too. One of my last questions is budget, not one of my first ones. If a customer out of the box tells me they have budgetted $50,000 for a migration, I know consultants that will find a way to spend $45,000 so they come in under budget and look like a hero. Same thing if the client budgets $100,000, $200,000 or even $50.
Your team offered to build us a custom tool to migrate from Lotus Notes. The real questions would be, when was this tool developed? Did you develop it for another customer? Did they pay for the tool's development, and if they did, why are you now giving it away for free? In my book, the company that pays for the tool, owns it, unless you have an agreement up front.
I always thought of Company E-mail as well, e-mail I use to help my employer. He/She/It paid for the license. He owns it. I just manage it according to the boss's wishes. If the boss doesn't want employees e-mailing someone's latest vacation video or the entire family tree to their co-workers, that's his right. After all, I'm there to work and earn a paycheck, not conduct personal business. And by the way, the folder tree, isn't one. Do you know how long it takes Outlook Express to sync filters on an IMAP connection? The only time anyone asks our IT department about colaborative sites is to show them how to set one up. We run a pretty open policy on that reguard.
From Google Apps:
I'd like to be able to say "Wrong Answer, Minus Five Point" By the description and expanded help file it looks like anyone can access anyone else's e-mail data files...... Can someone tell me I'm wrong? If I am, then the description needs to be changed. Any rational person could be led to believe I'm right, you are wrong. The people at Lotus told me the Full Access Admin feature was not accessible to some members of the administrative tree.
Once again, from your support web site:
Since there is a Blackberry Connctor for Google Apps, Let me just say: I Wasn't telling the whole truth with this one. I was Wrong! Google Apps, mostly supports Blackberries!
I'll give you this one. Tell me though, Just how to you connect your Google Apps Calendar to Outlook or Outlook Express?
I'm a loyal employee. My boss tells me what he wants, and I make it happen. I give him the facts so he can make the final decision. He gets a complete evaluation, Pros, Cons, Doesn't Matter, Limitations and all the Work Arounds. My boss has never made a final decision based upon partial or biased information. If he asks my opinion, he gets it straight, no punches pulled.
Our company has more than 500 employees in multiple locations, I support every one of their workstations and laptops almost entirely by myself. (I even handle the telecommuters when they are out and about.) I not only believe in the KISS principle, I live it. My employer's I.T. department makes it work, then gets out of the way so the employees can do their job. I don't agree with their decision on this matter, but inspite of your efforts, I'll make it work for them, and work well.
+1 to what has been quoted. the move to google apps from lotus notes has been nothing less than disaster even for our 1500+ user base. And once you move to google, there is nothing such as support. Till today in the past 6 months, we have never managed to get anything useful from them.
I'm lost, I don't get it. If Google Apps doesn't meet your needs, what are you doing? Are you the CIO/CTO or not? Please understand, I don't mean any disrespect and I know everybody has a boss to answer to. BUT, But but.... c'mon...
I've been installing, training and supporting Google Apps for the past year, mostly for small businesses (10-100 users). Is it the right solution for everyone? NO! Is it Enterprise ready? No! And I've walked away from customers that wanted it to be more.
Jay, I'm sorry you are having such a tough time. Clearly Google Apps is not the right solution for you and you should stay away.
Cheers