IdoNotes (and sleep)

Microsoft Office 365 has launched a new tool called Secure Score that analyzes risk to your data in Office 365 and how to help secure it.

Secure Score figures out what Office 365 services you are using, then looks at your configuration and behaviors and compares it to a baseline asserted by Microsoft. If your configuration and behaviors are in line with best practices, you will get points, which you can track over time.

Read more on this over at IdoOffice365 blog (yes that one launched quietly a while ago)

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On Tuesday, October 25th, 2016   by Chris Miller        

IBM is announcing Mail Next shortly and Microsoft launched De-Clutter for Office 365 today. Both promise to hide your email bring the important mail to the front for you to work better. The goal of each is to learn your email behavior and start working for you via analytics and consistent actions you perform in your email.

For example, if  in your organization tree your direct manager sends email, then the system would recognize you need to see that email from them constantly.  While emails you always delete or send to folders can be removed or filed away for viewing later.  Basically clearing your inbox view (or whatever it becomes) into something manageable. You can train both systems as you go along and they both keep learning. That really is not the core issue users face today.

The product goals are a band-aid and is where both fail. They do not solve the actual problem of receiving too much email.  We oversubscribe to content and teach ourselves to ignore instead of unsubscribing from the emails. This tool only hides content from you that you ignore even easier since it is automated.  Many of us have email rules that do that now.  We send emails to folders and then go delete everything in the folder.  Why not stop receiving them in the first place? Is there in inherent fear we will miss something? Yet we never view those messages.

You can see the announcement for De-Clutter right here and all my blog postings on IBM Mail Next right here on the IdoNotes blog.

I am curious of your feedback and conversation on both products as well as the idea we oversubscribe

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On Wednesday, November 12th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

IBM announced and demonstrated the Domino Migration Utility back at IBM Connect 2013. This tool was designed to move Microsoft Exchange users into IBM Domino. Apparently it was rebranded and not made available free to the public. It is a paid service only.

Today someone asked about the Domino Migration Utility in a Skype chat looking for updated information on it or how to download/install it.  After some digging online I found that back in June 2013 IBM stated in the Notes and Domino Forum the following:

The development work is taking longer than planned.  We are beta testing in conjunction with paid consulting engagements, and iterating on some code, but it will be later in the year before we can consider a release.  Thanks for checking in.

Someone asks the same question again on the same thread in July 2014 to no response. I found a few other random threads with the same result.  That is where it things changed.

Apparently the Domino Migration Utility was rebranded to the IBM Domino Onboarding Manager and used to move users to the cloud service. It runs as a Java Application on Windows only (expected) and can move users/groups from Active Directory to Domino. It will grab email, calendars and contacts from Exchange and move those over as well.

This Domino Migration Utility was to replace the older tools that were built in when installing the client as optional components. It was to provide greater function and ease of migration including date ranges and multiple thread capability for moving more than a single user at once..

There are some limitations around mail rules, shared calendars, Tasks and Exchange Public Folders which I expect.  O tools really move everything from one mail system to another.  Fidelity is hard enough without adding in specific features.

Unfortunately, this does not help those companies trying to migrate internally. Here is where the tool sits right now for those looking for it. Does anyone need an want this utility for your organization? Maybe enough responses can get IBM to look at opening this tool up to everyone.

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On Monday, October 27th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

IBM has released Top 10 reasons to choose IBM SmartCloud for Social Business over Microsoft Office 365 whitepaper. Here are some highlights.

Documents from either IBM Connections or SmartCloud for Social Business which are synced to your laptop or mobile device are encrypted. Microsoft’s offline files are not encrypted which may result in the loss of confidential information if your device is lost or stolen.

This is generally a large requirement by organizations. I would not be surprised to see them address this though.

An internal IBM study showed that people located information 32% more quickly using tags because tags allow us to express relationships that are not readily apparent in the content. An Office 365 search would only return items that match the searched text, tagged items are not returned in the results. Tagged items can only be located by browsing a tag cloud

That can be a great selling point as long as users are actually tagging items.

From there I am not too sure about some of the others as organizations just don't seem to care. I am being honest in saying that when we talk to companies that are looking at Office 365 for just mail, the rest of this are things that just come along with mail. They will still use Domino for apps for a long time to come, but it is the mail experience driving the change.  Hopefully IBM Mail Next will help in that area.

Get you hands on the Top 10 reasons to choose IBM SmartCloud for Social Business over Microsoft Office 365 whitepaper (seems you have to be a partner to get it after some digging, I am looking for a public link)

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On Tuesday, September 16th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

A quick offer for FREE Windows 8 Guide - Getting Started with Windows 8 Volume 1 until August 8th, This 41 page book is from Windows Secrets with tips, shortcuts and more..

The first section in Volume 1 – An introduction to Windows 8 – covers the confusing differences between Windows 8 and Window RT – since they look and work very similar but have some extraordinarily important differences.

We then take you through the basics of navigating Windows 8’s dual (some say, dueling) interfaces and some important initial setup steps. In the second section – Customizing your new Win8 installation – we delve into the Windows 8 tiles, how to get the most out of File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer), and how to use standard keyboard controls to navigate Win8’s touch-centric interface. We think you’ll find this concise reference useful as you start to learn your way around Windows 8. Don’t forget to check out the full series at WindowsSecrets.com.

Request your copy of this guide (retail value of $9.95 USD) by Friday right here.

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On Wednesday, August 6th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

This ebook presents the fundamental concepts of Office 365 for consumers. You’ll get an overview of Office 365 and learn to understand the program on a higher level in 15 small chapters.

This eBook will shed light on some of the following topics:

• Office 365 System requirements
• How to install and configure Office 365
• How Office 365 is different from Microsoft Office?
• An overview of the features in Office 365
• A quick look at the different plans
• Consumer plans in detail
• Office 365 free trial
• How does Office 365 boost your productivity?
• Is an Internet connection a requirement?
• Mobile apps for Office 365
• Office Online

This book is usually available for purchase at a price of $12.95. But they are letting me offer it for FREE until 8/5/2014. Don’t wait! Grab it right now

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On Thursday, July 31st, 2014   by Chris Miller        

As promised, Microsoft released Office for the iPad today. Finding it can be tough so here are the links. It is freemuim so viewing is free, while editing requires a purchase or Office 365 subscription.

• Microsoft Word for the iPad
• Microsoft Excel for the iPad
• Microsoft Powerpoint for the iPad
• Microsoft OneNote for iPad

That should help you find Micrsoft Office for the iPad a bit easier since there was numerous knockoffs for a couple years now.

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On Thursday, March 27th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

The Lync Conference 2014 was held in February 2014 and they had some case studies on stage. Tampa General Hospital sounds like they had bad admins

The second Lync deployment story session I attended was delivered by representatives of Tampa General Hospital. They opened by saying as recently as three years ago, the hospital was in the "IT Stone Age." This was defined as being dependent on a mainframe and using Lotus Notes, Sametime, WebEx and BlackBerrys. Three years ago, the hospital replaced Sametime with Microsoft OCS for IM and presence and moved to iPhones and iPads. Two years ago, they moved to Lync for not just IM and presence, but audio and video conferencing as well, decommissioning WebEx.

I mean they did have 3000 pagers still in use. I am not sure what Notes, Sametime and BlackBerry had to do with that Stone Age portion of their infrastructure.

Read more on the story here

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On Monday, March 17th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

IBM has released an IBM Sametime 9 compared with Microsoft Lync 2013 report from the IBM Competitive Project Office
Here is an overview of the report IBM Sametime 9 compared with Micrsoft Lync 2013:
Continue Reading here" IBM Sametime 9 Compared with Microsoft Lync 2013" »

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On Monday, November 25th, 2013   by Chris Miller        

Project Hawthorn was a huge announcement from IBM about using Microsoft Outlook 2013 and IBM Domino servers. I took some additional notes at MWLUG 2013 and wanted to share them as I promised in the previous posting.


This is based on what I could quickly write down based on what Scott Souder, Program Director, Messaging and Collaboration Solutions, IBM,  was saying.  Then I had to read my own writing which made it worse while writing slides at the same time.  So here you go:

• This is not IMAP or POP3
• You will use Domino 9.x.x and Traveler 9.x.x or higher.  No Domino 8.x support for the server or Traveler
• It is 64-bit Domino and 64-Bit Traveler on Windows 64-bit.  No other OS announced yet for the server side
• The Microsoft add-in for Outlook leverages Domino REST services
• There will be tons of capabilities for message fidelity, calendaring, out of office and more
• Windows only (I presume Windows 7 on since it is Outlook 2013)
• It uses ost files and not pst files locally on the client machine

As you can see the list of features for Microsoft Outlook 2013 against IBM Domino is impressive. I think he mentioned encryption but that might have been a question to myself in my notes.

Make sure to read the previous posting Project Hawthorn - Microsoft Outlook 2013 support for IBM Domino

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On Tuesday, August 27th, 2013   by Chris Miller        

At the MWLUG keynote, Scott Souder announced the Project Hawthorn initiative which will be a deployable add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2013 to hook to the IBM Domino server via ActiveSync.

This add-in will utilize Microsoft deployment into Microsoft Outlook 2013 (only 2013 and on Windows only) connected via ActiveSync to hit Lotus Traveler.  This allows you to access IBM Domino via the Microsoft Outlook 2013 client.  The local .ost file in the Exchange based format will store the data. ActiveSync stores the synchronization against the back end nsf. This provides data fidelity and no MAPI interaction.

This will also bring better calendar capabilities together between Microsoft Outlook 2013 and the Domino server. This has been a huge pain in the ass for some time with integration.

This is not DAMO, keep that in mind.  This is using the native ActiveSync built into the Microsoft Outlook 2013 client providing better expectations right away.

I will have more information shortly. I have to run to go present, sorry!

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On Thursday, August 22nd, 2013   by Chris Miller        

An IBM Notes and Domino 9 Social Edition versus Microsoft SharePoint 2013 competitive sales kit has been released by The Edison Group commissioned by IBM. It contains:

• an executive presentation slidedeck
• a sales guide document
• a battle card document
• a quick reference guide
• a link to a public YouTube video

I note the final bullet as public since the rest are isolated to IBM Business Partners only. Yes, you as the customer should go get a business partner or IBM rep to get you these as you fight this battle internally like many of you do.

IBM commissioned Edison Group, an external research firm, to conduct a study where they compared these two products in depth and interviewed Notes and Domino sellers on the front line to understand their point of view on competitive-related discussions with customers. Based on their research, Edison produced the set of materials in this sales kit.

Here is the link for those of you with access

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On Monday, June 17th, 2013   by Chris Miller        

Qantas is in another article about migrating off of Lotus Notes. Now into their fourth year it appears to me they didn't understand how deeply integrated Notes was in their environment for daily operations according to a Delimiter article.  While they finished moving email users in 2012, the applications are taking their toll.

The nation’s largest airline Qantas has revealed that it’s still in the process of migrating its corporate email platform off IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino platform and onto Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange system, with the rollout now into its fourth year.

What confused me is how they are splitting all of their users up into different on premises and cloud based offerings.  Not one but now three.

..some of its staff would instead be moved onto Microsoft’s Office 365 package. In the airline’s statement today, it described the Office 365 migration as “a separate but parallel project”.

Qantas’ migration mirrors moves at its low-cost brand Jetstar, which announced in July 2011 that it would keep most of its head office staff on Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform, but shift about 2,200 staff onto Google’s Apps alternative

But back to the applications themselves.  Qantas is now trying to consolidate applications down into fewer and possibly make them web enabled from what I took away.

What I want is everyone to go visit and take away from the Delimiter article is the comments section as people start to dispute complexity to move applications from Lotus Notes into other platforms.  One comment even states 85% of the work can be done with a utility, CIMtrek (I wrote about back in Oct 2010), and a couple clicks.  Sure, yes 85%. If you only use a document library.

Join in here or over there, just join in.

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On Monday, May 20th, 2013   by Chris Miller        

IBM has released a white paper titled Choosing between Notes 9.0 Social Edition and Microsoft Outlook 2013 from the IBM Software Group Competitive Project Office.

For the most part, both IBM Notes and Microsoft Outlook perform well when handling typical email, calendaring, and contact management tasks. But when we step beyond those standard Personal Information Management (PIM) tasks, IBM Notes really starts to shine. It all starts with Notes’ renowned security, customizability, and distributed architecture. Combine that with the Eclipse framework and the result is a flexible, extensible, multi-platform application that offers significant functionality beyond what Outlook provides.

In the 31 page whitepaper they look at  the supposed evolution of email into a social realm then dig into some example scenarios comparing Notes 9.0 Social Edition and Microsoft Outlook. There are quite a few footers with links to some good articles in there as well.

You can only seem to get your hands on this report if you can log into IBM Partnerworld as part of their sales kit package.  I think this would be more helpful to everyone in todays corporate environments.  Thoughts?

UPDATE: IBM replied to my inquiry saying that the document is still under review for public consumption and is to be used for face to face meetings and in preparation for customer meetings.  It is not to be left behind at this time with the customers until it is cleared for public.

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On Monday, May 13th, 2013   by Chris Miller        

The Market Quadrant 2012 for Hosted Business Email and Collaboration by The Radicati Group, Inc was released.  While IBM was listed as a Specialist in the report, they also appeared in the lower left corner which shows a loyal subscriber base but behind on capabilities and innovation.

The Radicati Group evaluated 15 cloud-based Hosted Business Email and Collaboration vendors based on various technology platforms, including POP3/IMAP, Microsoft Exchange, and other proprietary technologies

The quadrant choices were mature, top, trail blazers and specialists.  Google showed itself as a Top Player. Functionality was rated 1-10 with 10 being the highest and Market Share assigned to installed base in reverse numbering.  Meaning the largest installed base was 1. (that is silly tome to not be consistent in numbering direction).

Their definition matches hundreds of current providers:

Hosted Business Email and Collaboration Providers offer cloud-based email services that provide robust, enterprise-grade functionality aimed at business users. These providers typically offer email services on a multi-tenant server located in their data centers.

Their statistic says that 21% of business email is hosted.  I find this number quite high and I am unsure of the sample rate. Reading through the requirements and other options, you can make your own conclusions on how they come up with such numbers.

The report is a long 48 pages but much of it is a listing of those companies in the quadrant. Using your own math you could plug in other companies or even dispute why a specific one got placed in a certain corner.  Definitely worth the read and the discussion about it.

You can download your free copy of the Hosted Business Email and Collaboration - Market Quadrant 2012 from The Radicati Group, Inc. right here.

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On Thursday, January 3rd, 2013   by Chris Miller        

I spent a while going through the install of Windows Pro 8 on VMWare Fusion 5 for my Mac Pro.  Everything on the basic Windows side worked fine but the tiles interface would not.  After some digging I found the simple little checkbox that solved that issue of making it all work.  I also continue on with some setup information for the beginners..

Keep in mind this is for new installations of Windows 8 and not the upgrades.  

Get Windows 8 Pro here
Get VMWare Fusion 5 here

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On Thursday, December 6th, 2012   by Chris Miller        

I keep an eye on what goes on with Microsoft Office 365 as many of you should and Binary Tree was just selected as the migration tool to take users away from Lotus IBM Notes and Domino.

Binary Tree, a provider of software solutions for migrating to Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office 365, announced that Microsoft has selected Binary Tree migration and coexistence technology to streamline the migration process for customers moving from Lotus Notes/Domino environments to Microsoft Office 365.

This agreement allows Microsoft to offer Binary Tree technology to streamline the customer's migration coexistence experience.

As Binary Tree was a large vendor at Lotupshere for many years showing coexistence and migration into IBM Notes and Domino, it is interesting to see the flipside take place and have Microsoft themselves choosing the tool.  Congrats to them as a long time business partner to both.

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On Wednesday, November 14th, 2012   by Chris Miller        

An article from Delimiter in Australia highlights findings from analyst firm Telsyte that Google Apps has moved to number two behind Outlook/Exchange over Lotus Notes/Domino and Groupwise.

Google’s popular Apps collaboration suite has knocked IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino and Novell’s GroupWise platforms off their perch to become the second most popular office suite in Australian enterprises behind Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, analyst firm Telsyte revealed this week.

According to a statement released by the company, it conducted a survey of more than 330 local chief information officers and senior IT decision-markers on their enterprise software use and intentions.

There are some flaws in what is written as usual.  It compares Lotus as email lumping it in with Outlook, not the full Microsoft suite.  It highlights a ton of the cloud stuff as a key factor, with no mention of IBM SmartCloud for Social Business (or the name is too long to type unlike LotusLive).  They did mention Google Apps and Office365.

They talk greatly about SaaS and how the offerings are better but no real details of what is better for each.

Continue reading more from Delimiter.

Related posts:

• MigrationWiz now includes cloud based Lotus Notes migration
• Lotus Notes got dumped because employees didn't have smartphones?
• BlackBerry launches Business Cloud for Office 365

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On Monday, September 17th, 2012   by Chris Miller        

With all the cloud work I am doing this week, I am consistently running into new cloud solutions. MigrationWiz is a cloud only migration tool that moves users in and out of multiple different mail systems through a web interface.  Lotus Notes is now included with fidelity for messages, folders, contacts and even contact pictures.

MigrationWiz is a complete cloud-based migration solution that helps companies move from existing to new messaging systems seamlessly and affordably. With no hardware or software to install, the patent pending technology is a solution designed to meet the needs of individuals, IT administrators, consultants, system integrators and service providers interested in migrating mailboxes.

They offer a free trial (limited mail is moved but shows fidelity and movement) which can then be converted.  I was also impressed to see an individual package all the way to enterprise.  This means that someone leaving a company could migrate mail on their own. Transfer limits for the two paid programs are 10GB and 50GB mail stores.

I bring this up because MigrationWiz is a two way street allowing movement into Lotus Notes as well as out of.

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On Thursday, September 13th, 2012   by Chris Miller        

In the wake of yesterday's blog posting on Microsoft licensing BinaryTree for Office 365 migrations I was sent a link from a few weeks ago.  Bang & Olufsen were not quiet about their move from Lotus Notes to Office 365.  This ComputerWekly article did bring out a bizarre reason though: The company had issues with accessibility with its previous system. About 75% of employees work remotely but, Lotus Notes was only accessible to the 150 employees who had company-provided smartphones. The other 1,350 had no access when working remotely.

So the lack of knowledge about:

• Lotus Traveler
• BYOD support
• managed replicas

stop you and somehow force you into migrating to a whole new platform?

Straight from Ole Damsgaard, senior director of IT & shared service centre at Bang & Olufsen he states:

“It was easy to integrate Office 365 into our existing work environment and for our employees to start using it right away because they already know tools like Outlook and other Microsoft products,” he said.

How can it be easy to integrate something that was not in use at your organization? How are employees using Outlook when they use Lotus Notes daily (since you are migrating them)?

It sounds more like IBM lost in trying to sell them on hosted offerings compared to Microsoft. Thoughts?

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On Wednesday, September 12th, 2012   by Chris Miller        

While this is not large amounts of news that Microsoft licensed BinaryTree for migrations from Lotus Notes to Office 365, the quote used in the article from CMS Wire is what caught my eye:

t’s not clear how many users have already made use of BT’s technologies to do this, but Microsoft claims that it is in the millions:
Binary Tree’s software has been used to migrate millions of users from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Office 365 and has proven instrumental in the onboarding process,” Kevin Allison, general manager of Office 365 for Microsoft said.

Millions? Of users? Migrated? Millions?

Microsoft can offer four parts of the BinaryTree software under the license agreement but where the heck did these millions come from?

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On Tuesday, September 11th, 2012   by Chris Miller        

A long time user of Lotus Notes, the University of Nebraska, made big waves last year when they announced the move away from Lotus Notes for their entire faculty and staff at campuses (students moved long ago).  The article from Daily Nebraskan states they spend $1M USD annually to use the software and will reduce costs by half when they switch to the web based Microsoft Office 365.

NOTE: The University of Nebraska Medical Center is not migrating to the new system because of concerns about security.

Interestingly they said their Lotus Notes environment only had 1G of storage per person and the new Microsoft system offers 25.  This is alrgely due to their limitations the university set and had nothing to do with the software as we know.
Continue Reading here" Microsoft offers superior web based interface per newspaper" »

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On Thursday, February 16th, 2012   by Chris Miller        

I went on a search of different Lotus Notes Address Book convertors with the recent migration to Google Apps for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) we are going through.  They asked about moving straight to Outlook by converting the address book in the Lotus Notes client and leaving mail off as an archive.  Here are some tools I ran across in my searches (not comprehensive I imagine) since there was no one page encompassing them:

• SysTools software for Lotus Notes - this site has a slew of tools for obtaining converted Address Books.  They had tools for Outlook (and in reverse I might add), Excel and Outlook Express.  Pricing was $250 for a personal license and $500 for a business
• Notes Address Book - You could but this one (which was SysTools again as far as I could tell) for $99 from this site.  They also had a Lotus Notes to Google Mail Address Book conversion tool for $49.
• Lotus Notes Address Book to Outlook - besides having a long URL, the Kernel tool supported converting to Outlook and Excel.  It was $79 for a personal license and $99 for a corporate.
• Quick Recovery - moves all the contacts over when both Lotus Notes and Outlook with an active profile are installed on the machine.  The cost for this one was $99 and $199 for a corporate license.  The listed support for Address Book conversion all the way through Lotus Notes 8.
• BinaryTree CMT - they are the leader in the migration space of data, including address book data, from in/out of Lotus Notes for many years.
• Address Majic (via Scott) - this had a huge list of supported address books.  You can get the personal issue for $29.95 and the Plus version for $49.95
• (I will keep adding tools)

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On Sunday, May 30th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

Lotus introduced the LinkedIn widget, that I gave my opinion on back in July 2009.  It was not any type of connector, but a simple web interface that sat in the Notes 8 sidebar.  They soon did the same with TripIt for the same result.  I, admittedly, was disappointed in the integration I had hoped would appear.  I am actually able to use the TripIt app on my Blackberry to sync to my calendar which then goes into Notes.  It should not have taken that much work.  Tungle is exposing this now in their integration.  This week some more news hit the web.  Here comes Microsoft. A screenshot for your viewing pleasure first:



Before you jump on the Lotus Connections bandwagon commenting, we are talking about bringing in social contacts seamlessly to provide an integrated experience.  Shortly, there will be hooks from the announced partnerships with Facebook, and (ugh) MySpace with the connector.  LinkedIn did a great welcome blog posting for getting set up.  

Lotus Connections bridges integration inside the firewall with profiles from the Connections system.  The benefit given from the OSC is when we start exposing the social data that people are sharing and placing on the web into our history of email, CRM and local contact data.  Tungle (listen to podcast Episode 71) now opens your calendar information from Lotus and Gist (Iisten to podcast Episode 72) is attempting to work with contacts.  

The question we need to ask: Is Lotus moving fast enough to keep up with the social changes needed for the sites not deploying Connections at this time?  Is the majority of Notes users a large enough demand to have them create this type of integration or are the social vendors not working hard enough to write against the Lotus infrastructure?

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On Wednesday, February 17th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

A great article with a bunch of embedded videos covering the years of Microsoft advertising.  Interesting how the first ones focus on Lotus 1-2-3 on Windows.  Ahh the good old days of Ballmer craziness.

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On Tuesday, December 29th, 2009   by Chris Miller        

Haven't seen this announcement?  Of course you have.  Lotus says it everyday in an attempt to get customers to migrate over to Domino.  The same tools that are in place to migrate you in are the same to migrate you out.  Why would Microsoft make the same statement that started getting talked about last week?  Well to stir the pot and prep more announcements on future releases, mainly in the collaboration software space.

Does Lotus always know who uses Notes for mail/messaging or just applications?  Possibly by the license type.  Many people just buy the package that includes both, but they may use something else for email.  We run into if often.

So the fight becomes what does my friend/neighbor/competition run.  If everyone moves to some new piece of software, look at BleedYellow and PlanetLotus for perfect examples, then many more follow.  While this is Lotus specific for an example, the point is proven that we listen to those we think know the most or give the best argument.  Microsoft sales employees are trained to tell you the best story possible.  Do you know how often we have to deal with this scenario based on the number of customers we host and often represent in meetings?  Far too many from both directions.  90% of the time the company has already made their mind up on what tey want to use for collaboration and email in the SMB space.  The fight is over how much from there.  Give me the best deal, not who can archive better and has chat.

If we drill down to basics, the training of the Microsoft employees is generally how to battle against the competition.  That is always hot for them.  The training of the Lotus sales is the software of the moment.  If we bring them in to talk email to keep an account, the pitch Portal and Connections.  If we bring them in for licensing talks, they pitch Portal and Connections.  What is hot for the moment to them.

So what do we do?  Sit and watch the 2 go back and forth over how many seats were sold, how many are installed and who is the case study.  Then we go back to our dark holes of an office and play with it ourselves.  Call our grandpa, flip a coin, spin a dial or get out the darts.  Either way it is the cost factor once we decide both are just close enough to make either software work.

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On Monday, July 28th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I ran across a tool called Twist which gives a graph of how many times words or phrases are used in Twitter.  For fun, I did Lotus Notes versus Microsoft Exchange (using just Exchange gave every instance and was to much).



The downside was that many of the Lotus Notes postings were negative.  How about some more positive tweets?

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On Thursday, April 24th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I just got the recent DominoPower newsletter in my inbox.  The top article is why the author still recommends  Lotus Notes  over Exchange.  The ND8 Upgrade Seminar has an ad at the bottom that appeared on one of the pages even.  But this ad really caught my eye:

GSS Notes to Outlook migration
Global System Services announced its latest email migration tool, NSF2PST. The NSF2PST tool enables large-scale conversion of Lotus Notes email files ("NSF" files) to the popular Microsoft Outlook Personal Store ("PST") format. NSF2PST can be used for email migrations as well as for data recovery and computer forensics

The author of the article and the company pushing this migration tool away from Lotus Notes is exactly the same!!   In the same issue.  Maybe it is just me today..

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On Monday, October 15th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So I was playing around with Trends for a customer and thought this image said some nice things. People are looking for more info on the term "Lotus Notes" than "Microsoft Exchange". Does this mean the Notes 8 market is heating up?

News volumes are fairly consistent on both sides though.
Ignore the 'F' flag as that is when McAfee got all the email stuck n Lotus Notes apparently.

Just looking at the United States for the year 2007 shows the same result

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On Monday, July 30th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

This should be interesting:

Brief Description
Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino is used for interoperability and migration from Lotus Domino to Active Directory, Exchange Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Anyone tested the gold release yet?  You need the following installed also:

• MMC 3.0
• Windows Powershell 1.0
• Microsoft Exhange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1

I will load them on the test machine and see what we get.

The Release Notes
The actual product page

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On Saturday, April 7th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

While this was announced on the web a couple weeks ago I tried to do some digging to see just how Microsoft plans on implementing a gateway that will take PBX traffic into VOIP to enable Office Communications Server 2007 and Communicator make a stand against the IBM/3rd party integrators.

So far it leaves much to be desired in actual technical information.  While the IBM and 3rd parties have not only marketing content but technical content in how this all works.  Microsoft did align with Nortel to get some known name in the market behind them, but I know we lack the confidence to have a Microsoft piece of hardware sitting between us making calls or not.

To top it off, Microsoft has it's own version of SIP that they are basing this on.  Even Trillian is writing a new plug-in labeled LCS and everyone else is SIP to make note of the differences.  So if they are writing custom code around their own custom SIP, you will be knee deep in MS land with your phone if you take this route.

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On Friday, March 30th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

While there is a glaring line that states that the number of seats accounted for just applications in Notes/Domino are not being counted in here, it is interesting they way they break the sizing down for who has Domino and who has Exchange. Looking at their statements and figures, Domino leads in larger enterprises and the two go head to head in swapping customers in migrations.

Take a read of the article here:

The survey's release comes amid the shipment of Microsoft's Exchange 2007 late last year and IBM's annual Lotusphere conference, which was held last week and focused on Notes/Domino 8, slated to ship mid-year, and new social networking collaboration tools.

The report Gartner put out costs a lovely $995 to read some collection of data I never understand where they actually derive it from.  But if you have a log in, it is over here.

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On Wednesday, February 7th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Ok, this has me laughing and I had to share.   I still use some of the mood stamps in mail messages, they actually draw attention since so many users are 'new'.  But Microsoft has now taken them on in patent under the name emotiflags

An emotiflag is made up of a graphical icon and a text tag, and may also include a textual representation of the graphical icon. A collection of emotiflags is maintained by an email application and made available to users. Users can modify existing emotiflags and create custom emotiflags. Users can also add an emotiflag to an email message they are composing so that when the email message is sent, the emotiflag is sent with the email message

So this old product piece once again becomes a patent for someone else.  There is supposed to be images attached but they would not load for some reason.

In the patent I liked this little section from the 'background" assumptions:

Many existing email applications enable users to apply color-coded flags to received email messages. These flags are frequently used to represent a status of the email messages (e.g., red for follow up; orange for reply; yellow for to do; and so on). Some email applications also enable users to mark a message as important (e.g., with a "!") or unimportant (e.g., with a ".dwnarw.") before the message is sent, so that when a user receives the message, the importance of the message is clearly indicated

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On Monday, December 18th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

First, from ZDNet Asia comes this little quip:

According to Peter O'Kelly, research director at analyst company Burton Group, the cocktail of Microsoft's Exchange 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 will present "unprecedented competition" to IBM in messaging and collaboration software. He was speaking to ZDNet Asia on the sidelines of a press briefing, held Wednesday--a day before Microsoft launches Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 for business customers on Nov. 30.

O'Kelly said: "Microsoft has never had the combination of very strong enterprise messaging and collaboration software before. So, I think Microsoft is going to be a new competitive threat to IBM."

He noted that Microsoft has historically been strong in enterprise messaging, but not in collaboration. "[Exchange] hasn't really approached what you could do with Lotus Notes, which is a combination of enterprise messaging and document-oriented workflow."

I am not sure how he derives this from announcements only and no testing, but I am curious to see how it falls into place.  Now the licensing for Unified Communications, which covers antispam, antivirus and other items makes sense when Microsoft has been out buying such companies.  So rolling it into one package does make a nice offering.  However, most companies are already embedded into appliances and other installed applications for filtering and service.  But, when those comes up for maintenance or renewal, some will jump ship to a reduced, single cost point that offers all if it works right.

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On Tuesday, December 5th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

I found an article about a product set that assist in migrating Notes mailboxes to Exchange.  The lines that stuck out were as follows:

"We seeing larger customers moving to Exchange," says Ron Robbins, product manager for Exchange migration solutions at Quest. "we are seeing 20,000 to 50,000 user accounts moving over..."

Quest, which says it has migrated more than a million Notes mailboxes to date, ...

Where the heck are all these users?

There is a podcast you must listen to, for at least the first minute, that they put on the right side.  The podcast's first question that asks why people are moving.  Ron, quoted above,  actually states that there is confusion around whether Notes will be around and the move to Workplace Messaging replacing Notes.  Of course, the interviewer and Ron are both Quest employees.  The statement that there is more mobile options on Exchange and greater reliability had us laughing in the office.  Oh please go listen and laugh along.  Then taunt them with me.

Continue Reading here" Interesting quote in a company's claim of migrating Notes to Exchange" »

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On Wednesday, August 30th, 2006   by Chris Miller