Looks like they’re making yet another go at "red bull"...

October 14 2007

A few days ago, a partner forwarded along a non-confidential e-mail from Microsoft announcing their new "Notes Transition Partner Program (NTPP)", which is also found on their website.  Could it be, that after three failed attempts to run a Notes platform migration effort, they'd really try again?  Apparently so.  That neutered "red bull" program from 2005-6-7 seems to have clearly died out, but it also seems like they've decided it is time to try again.

Without reprinting the full e-mail here, I have to make some observations about it.  All the pundits who feel like Microsoft is turning into the IBM of the 80s really would have fun with this.  Every element of their new program has its own convoluted name (would you like to use the "business value analyzer suite", or is the "customer engagement solutions (CES) model" more your style?).  Everything is "new", which I guess it would have to be after the previous tools have all fallen flat.

The other thing I especially like is that Microsoft has a presentation in this project updating partners on the IBM sales strategy and technologies, which will be presented by "knowledgeable people who have both IBM/Lotus and Microsoft sales experience".  I guess that, once again, the supposed high-road approach that one Microsoft employee has represented in comments on this weblog has flown out the window.  (Reference: "my answer is ALWAYS 'You should get your information about IBM's product plans from IBM...you shouldn't ask me,' and that's the answer that I think most ex-Lotus folks here will give when asked.")

As you all know, I'm not throwing stones here at MS for running this play.  We at IBM have similar efforts, and have had some great successes recently at Exchange to Domino moves, licensing optimization discussions, and clearing some of the defensive hurdles from the road ahead.  But I also believe we say what we do, we do what we say, we represent Microsoft accurately and make corrections when we're wrong.  Blogging has been a great tool to help with information transparency -- and consistency -- in the market.

Ed Brill Written aboard AC873, FRA-YYZ, Seat 1G Category:  Microsoft  Add/View Comments [35]

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  1. 1  LongliveLotus  | 10/14/2007 7:08:05 PM

    They're like deranged robots with duracell in them, they just keep comin at ya...

    Paul Mooney, come on down...!

  1. 2  David Bell  | 10/14/2007 10:01:36 PM

    "Transporter Suite" - very apt; from Wikipedia, "The term transporter may also be used to refer to a device in science fiction".

  1. 3  Paul Mooney http://www.pmooney.net | 10/15/2007 4:18:44 AM

    hmm... perfect timing again I may add.

    January (Lotusphere) is on the way - about time to start the MSFUD machine, especially with recent decline of Exchange usage reports being published. From a technical perspective, I never ever had a problem with what the product could do (although it didnt do much). I DID have a problem with what MS Sales said it could do. So.. happy to do the analyser again. The last build was not much different from the 06 one.

    For a history lesson on MS Application Analyser, just read this { Link }

  1. 4  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 10/15/2007 4:27:55 AM

    It is interesting how Microsoft refers to Lotus Notes as "Legacy E-Mail" as if it's PROFS or OfficeVision running in a 3270 emulator.

    If the mere longevity of a platform makes it a "legacy" system, does that make Microsoft Word a legacy word processor?

  1. 5  Bernard Devlin  | 10/15/2007 5:49:15 AM

    @4 Maybe it is just taking Microsoft a bit longer to catch up on how IBM has been re-positioning Notes in the last few years:

    "Most of the Domino customers I talk to are also WebSphere customers, running two separate infrastructures. They use WebSphere for all of their next generation e-business applications, and they run Domino almost as a legacy environment within their infrastructures. When I talk to them about how we're bringing these technologies together and bringing the best capabilities of Notes and Domino forward into this new infrastructure, customers know that they have the ability to consolidate on a single infrastructure.

    From an operations viewpoint, customers have two separate operating environments and two sets of administrators. Lotus Workplace allows it all to come together."

    from "A view from the top: Michael Rhodin on Lotus Software", November 2003 { Link }

    Personally I think it's kinda weird how the word "legacy" in IT has almost the opposite meaning to its normal usage where it generally has positive connotations.

  1. 6  Jim Casale  | 10/15/2007 6:59:35 AM

    I guess I will have to hear about these new tools from the Exchange zealots here. Oh joy :-(

  1. 7  Karen Demerly  | 10/15/2007 7:11:14 AM

    I'm with Jim (@6). Isn't it too bad you can work the numbers to make anything look like a good idea?

  1. 8  Jim Casale  | 10/15/2007 8:23:49 AM

    @7 I can disprove some of the bull they throw out there, but sometimes it's very hard to defend against the politics. Add the fact that they will not listen to reason when I try and point out the misinformation and...well you know how it goes

  1. 9  Steven  | 10/15/2007 8:28:59 AM

    Earlier this summer, we used the pre-beta version of the most current Transportet suite when MS did a private training session for a number of bureaus under a certain govt' department. Apart from the fact that it was hard to set up, required a lot of Power Shell, and the documentation was lacking (pre-beta remember), it did everything very well and as advertized with the exception of migrating Domino Apps (which we did not attempt to test). It was quite funny though when the folks in the training who were MS aficionados couldn't get their Domino server to send SMTP mail, or sync with Exchange, but the Domino folks in the class could get Exchange up and running, do bidirectional SMTP, bidirectional account sync, free-busy time look-ups and migrate all the email, calendar and local entries in the Notes personal address book. This pre-beta was also used in a initial migration of about 700 users over the Labor day weekend and it worked very will with less than 2% failure rate. Sorry to say, it seems to work very well.

  1. 10  Jim Casale  | 10/15/2007 8:34:42 AM

    @9 2% in my environment would mean 8 people or roughly 12 GB of data lost or not migrated? That does sound very successful to me (but that is just my opinion)

  1. 11  David Bell  | 10/15/2007 9:58:33 AM

    @9 - mail migration has never been the main problem. The coexistence connectivity for mail and calendar routing has been around for a long time.

    What is still an issue, is that MS convinces customers that they can migrate mail, C&S *and applications*, then said customer migrates mail, C&S and cannot do a thing with the applications. Now they have to manage two less well integrated environments.

    Hard to believe that anyone puts themselves in this situation, especially when TCO / costs are purported to be the reason for doing so. As we all know, all this exercise does is cause disruption and higher costs.

  1. 12  Jim Casale  | 10/15/2007 10:18:51 AM

    @11 Agreed. Speaking of TCO, I found out recently that the last time my company looked at Exchange for 250 people they had already spent 500K+, and it still wasn't finished (and nothing was migrated yet). I still don't know the full reason why it was killed shortly before I started working here.

  1. 13  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 10/15/2007 10:27:28 AM

    @9 & @11 - I must agree with David, mail migration is a highly overrated project.

    I did it years ago with an Exchange 5.5 to Domino 6.0 migration and hats off to Binary Tree and their Common Migration Tools. Once you have it setup, it's pretty mindless, and if you follow some best practices with regard to hardware and network architecture it's actually pretty quick.

    The rub is migrating the reverse from Domino to Exchange. The mail part is easy. The direction of a mail migration is irrelevant (especially with Binary Tree's tools). However, when it comes to applications, there is no quick fix. And that's why it's easier to go from Exchange to Domino. Exchange is essentially a one trick pony. The migration of Domino applications is where the consulting bucks start to rack up quite nicely.

    As far as SMTP is concerned, we never touched it. We actually used the Microsoft connector. We kept it on a separate pizza box to keep it isolated. Which was a definite good idea because it did like to crap out (technical term, but I know this crowd has a very advanced vocabulary) once in a while and needed a restart. Mail connector essentially worked fine. Calendar connector did not. The reason SMTP was irrelevant was because each system was configured to talk "natively" to the other. No SMTP involved.

    This was October 2002, I'm sure the tools from all parties have been vastly improved over the past five years.

  1. 14  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/15/2007 10:38:08 AM

    @9 - "It was quite funny though when the folks in the training who were MS aficionados couldn't get their Domino server to send SMTP mail, or sync with Exchange, but the Domino folks in the class could get Exchange up and running, do bidirectional SMTP, bidirectional account sync, free-busy time look-ups and migrate all the email, calendar and local entries in the Notes personal address book."

    I hate to say this, but that's because it's MUCH easier to get Exchange up and running doing all these things than to get Domino to do it.

    It's not a surprise, really. The UX team at Lotus is only just now developing personae for support people instead of end-users, and therefore is only recently taking the needs of admins & devs into account. The priorities are in the right order, of course. Now that IBM has gotten the hang of taking user experience seriously, it's good to see them remembering that support people are users too.

    But don't have any illusions about the Domino people in the room being smarter. They simply had the easier unfamiliar task.

  1. 15  Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 10/15/2007 11:42:00 AM

    @14...kinda surprise to hear that. Your saying, setting up AD,DNS,Exchange,IIS, smtp connectors and the like is *easier*? I will admit if someone has never seen domino and had to get it going, it's intimidating (there's no big button that says "start here...like in most MS apps")...But I'm not sure they had the easier task....Just find it all that's all...

  1. 16  Steven  | 10/15/2007 12:03:20 PM

    @14: I'm gonna have to disagree.... Within a lab environment on a clean Win2kx server, I can get a D6/D7 server up and running with user accounts that can send/receive SMTP in 14 mins flat. I've had to do it at least 5 times in one day for a single PMR with Lotus. Twice while actively on the phone with support. It is not hard in the least unless one has done nothing more that passed a bunch of MS exams. It can take longer than that just to get the forest prep done for Exchange.

    The point of my post is that the tools which had been VERY BAD are getting much better. Lord knows that could not have gotten any worse. The coexistence stuff and calendaring migration has been quite bad in particular, and they are still a bit messy if you're not going to 2007. I agree that apps migration is a pipe dream on MS's part which is the part of the story that is not getting told "truthfully". Even for the folks who KNOW they're not taking their Domino apps over, they need to know that there are tools available that won't add even more cost to their downgrade budget and will allow them to get their Notes email, C&S, and contacts over to the dark side.

  1. 17  Bill Dorge  | 10/15/2007 12:22:45 PM

    Ah, how appropriate. Here is sit in front of my green screen on the system i running Domino, about to start a migration of Exchange to my legacy Domino/Notes. At the end of the day, one will be running, one will not!

    The MS folks can spin it as they like, the bottom line is as a IBM Domino/Notes professional, I have a very good product to talk about when it comes to value, openness, and backward compatibility.

    Besides, having a legacy is only bad if your the person/product not leaving one.

  1. 18  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/15/2007 12:34:27 PM

    @16 - You make my point exactly. YOU can get a Domino server up and running in 14 minutes. Guess what... you know Domino really well.

    "It is not hard in the least unless one has done nothing more that passed a bunch of MS exams." Translation: I am smarter than the Exchange admins, which is why I can install their systems and they can't install mine.

    @15 - "(there's no big button that says "start here...like in most MS apps")"

    Exactly. Installing the MS apps is discoverable. Installing Domino is not. And God help you if you want to install Sametime, or Quickr, or *shudder* Connections. Actually, scratch that... you don't install Connections, you BUILD it.

    The list of things that Microsoft is incompetent at is as long as my arm. (And migrating Domino applications is probably on there multiple times.) But there's one thing they're very good at: getting you started from zero knowledge.

    Bragging about getting an Exchange server running faster than the other guys getting a Domino server running is EXACTLY like a Debian expert bragging that he could install XP faster than the Windows admin could install Linux. It's not an endorsement for the non-Microsoft platform.

    It's hard for us to imagine not knowing that to configure SMTP routing, you go to NAMES.NSF. But really, if you imagine a starting point of ignorance, does that make sense to you?

  1. 19  Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 10/15/2007 12:37:27 PM

    @17...sounds like a quote from Transformers :)

  1. 20  Vedant Kulshreshtha http://vedantk.blogspot.com/ | 10/15/2007 1:25:41 PM

    @18: I agree with you. a Exchange/SharePoint expert can install and configure their servers really well and in less than 30 minutes.... Just like a Domino expert can install Domino.

    Migrating customers is a game which both IBM and Microsoft play. There is a big bag of tricks - TCO, Technology, Roadmap, Migration Tools, "Certified" Partners thrown in with discounted licensing deals which are used.

    Many customers migrate (IBM -> MS or MS-> IBM) because of technical challenges they face. It a tragedy that they do not get "experts" (or spend enough time) to fix what they have. Rather they blame the current vendor and take the easy way out of migrating to rival. A customer willing to migrate gets a very high level of time/money commitment from IBM/Microsoft rather than one trying to fix the current setup.

  1. 21  Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 10/15/2007 1:54:00 PM

    @18, unfortunately I agree with you (not that agreeing with you is bad, just what you've said is very sobering). I don't want to derail this into "why is Domino and the related products so difficult to configure" but in large part it is true. Sametime has been that way from 1.0. I've just always marveled at how stupid-easy MS small-business server is to *get going*. Now there's a bunch of razor blades and nuclear bombs in there in terms of backup and recovery, but it's *easy*.

    At a LS a couple years back there was someone walking around talking about a super-easy front-end for domino as a mail appliance...all web based, point click and go...

  1. 22  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 10/15/2007 2:56:26 PM

    @21 - They could have been talking about Nitix { Link } . I saw a demo a while back and it was pretty simple to get going.

  1. 23  Stuart McIntyre http://www.collaborationmatters.com | 10/15/2007 2:57:30 PM

    @18 & @20: Tell you what you need, Sirs, a really good book that tells you how others have got these products up and running in similar circumstances. Perhaps a Lotus Redbook might help. Ahhh I forgot... { Link }

    @Ed: I'm not sure why you bother blogging about MS's "migration" tools anymore? As someone who's worked for two MS Gold partners in recent years, I can promise you that the most press these "tools" get are from your blog and others in the Lotus community. Bizarre really...

  1. 24  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 10/15/2007 3:15:42 PM

    If I were a CIO, my question to Microsoft would be "so you want me to ditch this application which works perfectly well and I know will be supported by tomorrow's versions of Notes / Domino and re-write it / convert it / migrate it / whatever... why? What do I get out of doing that?".

    Analogy: Mr Customer, your toaster works perfectly well, but I'd like you to replace it with this toaster. The end result - you can make toast. Great value proposition, eh?

    Oh, by the way, your new toaster won't work with the next versions of electricity and bread, so we'll come back with a toaster migration plan. Sign here please.

  1. 25  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/15/2007 3:21:59 PM

    @21 & 23 - I want to be extra-special clear about this... I think IBM is starting to do the right thing in terms of recognizing that admins & devs are users too, and have user experiences that need to be improved. While I'm being critical of these experiences as they exist today, I do think that IBM is serious about improving them.

    What I most emphatically do NOT want is more documentation as a solution -- whether it comes in the form of Redbooks or online services or presentations at Lotusphere.

    IBM doesn't need to figure out how to make ME smarter. They need to figure out how to make the SOFTWARE smarter. And they are.

    For those people grousing about Redbooks -- if you took every Redbook that had been created for a Domino product, and instead put that time, energy, expertise and budget into simply making the problems that the Redbooks addressed EASY, wouldn't that be a better use of resources? I think it would.

    For the record, Notes/Domino is also nicer to admins/devs than any other product in the IBM portfolio. It might not be terribly intuitive to go to NAMES.NSF to configure SMTP mail routing, but that's sure better than hand-editing a case-sensitive XML file! { Link }

  1. 26  Mark Hughes  | 10/15/2007 4:28:02 PM

    @25 I just go to the configuration tab, choose messaging, and choose settings.

    Sounds like you are doing it old shool.

  1. 27  Flemming Riis  | 10/15/2007 4:32:50 PM

    -Analogy: Mr Customer, your toaster works perfectly well, but I'd like you to replace it with this toaster. The end result - you can make toast. Great value proposition, eh?

    Well i just replaced my perfectly working toaster with a prettier one , great value does always come with better functionality.

    new toaster is pretty though :)

  1. 28  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/15/2007 4:59:14 PM

    @23 you have an interesting point. I briefly considered ignoring this latest MS salvo, but the opportunity to point out hypocrisy was too interesting. What is more interesting to me, though, is that these kinds of postings barely attract attention anymore -- because the story from Lotus has been so positive of late, the defensive "siege" mindset is disappearing from the Lotus customer base. This is a good thing.

  1. 29  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 10/15/2007 6:32:15 PM

    @27 - I knew I should have stuck with my original idea for an analogy involving a washing machine. But I thought as it's mainly guys here they might not understand the concept ;o)

    But seriously, the point is Microsoft should have to prove there's some gain to offset the risk, cost and effort... which sounds like a description of a Vista rollout.

  1. 30  Bll McCuistion  | 10/15/2007 8:16:49 PM

    My toaster doesn't require much infrastructure or administrative costs. If the toaster made bread, that would be interesting.

  1. 31  Bram van Scharen http://www.axel-vervoordt.com | 10/16/2007 2:41:47 AM

    Strange, thought Domino was so easy to install.

    Think I can consider myself as a user, not an admin or developer; I know HTML and CSS ... a power user maybe.

    A few years ago we bought an xSeries 225 on which I installed domino 6.5 (my first time) it took me half a day to get it up and running + installing the clients = operatonial, sounds reasonable to me for a newbie.

    Later upgraded to 7, 7.5 in 30 minutes and easily installed SameTime 7.5

    Google and the help function solved every problem I ran into ... if any I can remember

    Concerning the migration of Exchange to Domino.

    I thought exchange was a mail server and domino an application platform that also provides mail.

    I don't see how any migration to Exchange can be done as it does not do the tasks Domino does.

    Installing Domino & Notes 8 on my XP laptop took 20 minutes , curious to see if I could do this with Exchange ... or do I need to install something else first?

    I currently work in a company that runs exchange (i'm not involved with IT anymore, but try to keep track of Notes & Domino).

    We recently asked our admin to send mails from a different domain ... apparently that is not possible?!?!

  1. 32  Randy Smith http://www.certprimer.com | 10/16/2007 8:55:30 AM

    @24 - And don't forget, during the toaster replacement period (typically many months or in some cases years) you will need staff to operate both the old toasters and new toasters (these things just don't operate themselves, no matter what the new toaster vendor tries to tell you). So, you have two options during the toaster replacement period: [1] Hire additional staff/consutants with the skills necessary to operate the new toasters, while retaining your current toaster operation staff; or [2] Retrain your existing staff to operate both the old and new toasters, working them to death while they are seeking another employer who has a CIO with a bit more common sense.

  1. 33  Kevin Mort  | 10/16/2007 9:07:25 AM

    @29 - Darren, that's precisely the thing. What seems to happen so often in these deals is that MS never has to really justify why their solution is better.

    The assumption is that you should just be running Exchange and there really isn't any discussion on it.

    All goes back to politics & emotions as the basis of many decisions today in IT. Truth has little to do with it anymore.

    My experience with Domino/ST/Quickr is that it takes me orders of magnitude more time to set up the OS environment for whatever I plan to install than the application code itself.

  1. 34  Ports http://www.mrports.com/ | 10/16/2007 11:53:06 AM

    I love the fact that people make a big deal about mail migration. After all, what is the job of email? To move a message from one system/user/account to another! So a migration is hardly rocket science!

    Applications, on the other had, distil business and process logic and flows to the line of business. Rather more difficult to "automate" that migration.

    And while our friends in Redmond are saying move the mail, forget about the apps, let us not forget that it was about 10 years ago that we stopped using separate mail and calendaring clients (cc:Mail/Organiser, MS Mail/Schedule+) so is it really progress to be ripping apart messaging and collaboration now? Vive le integration I say :-)

  1. 35  Pablo Barlow http://techformula.wordpress.com | 10/23/2007 1:41:24 PM

    @Ed - I've been working with Lotus Notes for almost 6 years and I can say that here, in Argentina, most people I know hate Lotus Notes.

    Some people use a Notes-Outlook synchronizer to avoid using the Notes UI.

    What I'm most concerned about is that nobody knows what Lotus Notes can do. People think it's only an email client.

    I assume that's the problem...poor product publicity and information, while Microsoft is always doing cool user product ads.