Ed Brill

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1. 1  Paul  | 6/20/2008 5:33:28 AM

   Ed,

   The decision to move was based on some odd things, but one was that users liked Outlook more :)

   But the world is changing to a IT Service off the shelve, but I think they are now bleeding edge and suffering.

   Notes or Exchange is irelevant, its just mail ...when it works!

   Paul

1. 2  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/20/2008 5:43:21 AM

   "it's just mail" is ignorant of the thousands of important notes and/or domino applications various divisions continue to run today, as well as switching costs. If the decision was made today, would an Outlook preference still hold? If it was "just mail", was it worth it?

1. 3  Ferdy Christant http://www.ferdychristant.com | 6/20/2008 8:12:25 AM

   guys,

   As an insider I can say that the statements above are not fully correct. Philips has not migrated, it is in the process of migration and the downtime and performance problems are related to the migration, not the platform that was chosen.

   Also, there was definitely a whole lot more to this decision than just users liking Outlook more, but I cannot go into that too much.

   Whether I agree with the way things are going is not relevant, I'm just saying that public statements about Philips should be accurate, not assumed.

1. 4  Keith Brooks http://lotustech.blogspot.com | 6/20/2008 8:29:28 AM

   Doesn't matter which system it is, if companies keep paying peanuts for IT admins they will get a horrible network experience.

   But no one ever blames the CFO or head of HR.

1. 5  Dan Lynch  | 6/20/2008 8:34:39 AM

   It will be interesting to see what Philips will do about this for it's US operating units: The 9th District in SF made the following ruling which will make outsourced mail difficult for US companies involved in litigation and e-discovery: "The Wednesday ruling also lets employers access employee e-mails only if they are kept on an internal server."

   { Link }

   Court Clamps Down On Employers' E-Snooping

   E-Mail, Texting Affected

   POSTED: 2:42 pm EDT June 19, 2008

   UPDATED: 3:08 pm EDT June 19, 2008

   SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court in San Francisco has made it more difficult for employers to legally access e-mails and text messages sent by their workers on company accounts.

   Under the ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, employers that contract with an outside business to transmit text messages can't read them unless the worker agrees.

   The Wednesday ruling also lets employers access employee e-mails only if they are kept on an internal server.

   The case originated from a lawsuit by Ontario, Calif., police sergeant Jeff Quon and three other officers. They sued after wireless provider, Arch Wireless, turned over to the police department transcripts of Quon's text messages in 2002. Police officials read them to determine whether department-issued pagers were being used solely for work purposes.

   A lawyer for the city of Ontario and its police department says his clients probably will appeal Wednesday's ruling.

1. 6  Scott Marchione http://scottmarchione.blogspot.com | 6/20/2008 10:50:19 AM

   @5 - I doubt that the ruling will stand, as a person who lives close enough to Detroit to have the cities scandals effect his daily life, I can tell you that a precedent will be set with the prosecution of the current Mayor, mostly due to the evidence of text messages sent on city owned two way pagers. If the device is owned and paid for by the company or entity, all data that is transmitted from said device is property of that entity, it's not private. Now if they turned over the info from the officers personal device, and they were reimbursing him for expenses occured during work time, that would be different, and they would have no right to the data.

1. 7  Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 6/20/2008 11:08:42 AM

   One thing that amuses me about deals where folks 'migrate to exchange' is always the optimism that dictates they'll be finished "in months". *Snort*.

   This is usually a CIO 'first 90-days' style decision, easily made, and easily justified. 'Lets make a big, popular, easy to implement change in the first 90 days' says 'The Dummies Guide for CIOs'.

   Of course, as part of the cost saving the company lets the support contract for Notes to lapse, effectively freezing the enterprise at some arbitrary point in time.

   The migration project then hits 'technical snags'. For instance:

   - persuding the customer that in fact the Exchange server infrastructure requires up to THREE times the disk space of the domino servers. Exchange uses less disk space?

   - Oh. You wanted 'Failover'. That'll cost a lot more. Much much more.

   - that an exchange server requires a new operating system - windows 2003 64-bit.

   - the transporter sucks so badly that directories dont get updated, calendar entries dont work. Forget about freetime lookup. Oh. Didnt test it first ?

   - document links of course are not translated (so get CoExLinks from Geniisoft). Mail archives have to all be converted. A hundred gig of dead mail through a tool that at best does a gig every couple of hours. Especially when it crashes every 50mb or so.

   - Many many more servers. So much for a 'green initiative'. And you have to fight to get the servers into the computer room, given the energy and power requirements.

   - Pick a migration tool. Few deal with coexistence and user provisioning well, so you have to build an entire, manual process around this mess. This means synchronizing changes between two or more directories, and getting buy-in from competing teams running those directories. Good luck on that. And remember - the bigger the directory, the more risk, the bigger chance of complete screwup. And so the longer it takes to do anything.

   - In the meantime, the experienced notes guys flee, leaving you with a bunch of muppets trying to run both systems. And I dont mean someone useful like Kermit.

   - Just to add a little more spice to these proceedings, one or more team is outsourced/insourced to India/China/Easter Island/RTC/Detroit. You know - it'll cut costs even more. Ha.

   - Realising that Exchange doesnt do apps, and you dont have the stomach for $50k per application to convert it to Sharepoint. So domino must stay.

   As the project lurches from failure to failure, morale plummets, and critical people from the project leave. So much for getting to the end. Like rats leaving a sinking ship, a good disaster indicator is when the technical lead or the project manager jumps..

   ( This is the 'When your up to your arse in alligators, its difficult to remember that you were supposed to drain the swamp' stage )

   Meanwhile, the IT board are screaming, the costs have blown out of all proportion, and of course your running out of time. Threats are made - if the project team/consultancy company/outsource company dont actually show return for the millions of dollars/euros/semoleans spent, then they're to be thrown out!

   After all that, Imagine how embarrassing it would be to be left, after a number of years of trying to actually migrate, with both Lotus Notes and Exchange eMail users in your enterprise. And the Lotus Domino users are out of support.

   oops.

   (Meanwhile, thanks to CIO roulette, the CIO has long since departed after the £35m SAP HR disaster)

   Its never a good thing, a migration. Like overtaking on a country road, its best to minimize the time spent running two cars abreast. However, given the size and glacial-like speed that modern enterprises operate, the best thing is to assume that you shall be running both messaging systems for a considerable time indeed.

   This is of course complicated, expensive, difficult. Exactly the sort of thing that CIO's dont want to hear, and dont want to spend money on.

   ---* Bill

   ( I hasten to add I know nothing of the environment at Philips nor of the migration team or efforts. This list is compiled by listing all of the common excuses/failure points I've heard over the years during Notes to Exchange migrations and bears no Do you have ones to add? )

1. 8  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/20/2008 11:48:47 AM

   @3 whether due to the migration itself or not, I suspect user perception is, the new system has a problem. As has been part of some of my presentations for years, the email system gets blamed for everything, so there is a bit of irony regardless.

   I appreciate you sharing your perspective.

1. 9  Purposely Annonymous  | 6/20/2008 12:50:39 PM

   @4 Our new CIO has been here less than 2 months, and (big shock) he's already pushing for Outlook. No research, no real cost analysis. No CLUE as to how enormously expensive and painful it will be to try and migrate 15TB of email data to Exchange. Guess he read "Dummies Guide for CIOs" as well. It's a shame, because I really like everything else he's doing! Sigh...

1. 10  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/20/2008 12:58:32 PM

   This "CIO for dummies" thought is no accident...I have seen several cases where Microsoft was able to influence the selection of a company's new CIO, or where they suggest in the first meeting tbat switching to Outlook would be a "quick win". Silly us at IBM, we like to understand customer business problems before proposing solutions.

1. 11  Bill Brown  | 6/20/2008 1:29:25 PM

   @10 When you're a one trick pony, why waste time understanding when you are going to make the same recommendation, regardless? The only difference between clients is how many seats they'll buy.

1. 12  Dvir Reznik http://dvirreznik.blogspot.com | 6/20/2008 4:38:12 PM

   I'm not familiar with Philips, but I could put 'customer x' and it would hit pretty close to home as well.

   Although I might agree that 'it's just an email system' (from the users' perspective), one cannot make a migration decision lightly when there's so much at stake. I have seen cases where a new CIO/CEO has an agenda to push for Outlook, just because he loves it more. It's not your father's company when you can do and say what you want, and even if it was, there's a process to everything. Even migrating messaging systems.

   Maybe we need to re-think something? strategy, routes to market, development? IBM's path so far has been one of understanding problems and offering solutions - maybe we should adopt another path? A path of emotion and feeling - there's at least one customer I can think of that would relate to that path.

1. 13  Peter Wilson  | 6/20/2008 5:51:47 PM

   Bring back cc:mail I say :-) When Lotus had a really nice, simple easy to use email client and owned the market. Was probably a mistake to force those customers over to Notes IMHO. Pete

1. 14  J.Franchetti  | 6/21/2008 8:09:51 AM

   I have witnessed several migrations in my industry, and though the "people like Outlook better" comments are sometimes heard, the main "vocal" reasons tend to be:

   (1) ISV application integration: Everyone (except RIM) codes their apps to work with Outlook first, and often only, as a standard. This isn't about iPhones, it is business applications where email client integration is key.

   (2) Small "Outlook to Notes" issues: I saw one firm switch because they were tired of receiving emails as winmail.dat files. Another because meeting invites with clients had trouble when the other side was using Outlook.

   The "its not Lotus' fault" argument on those doesn't hold up long - as in the end if it is just email, then "lets have the email that doesnt have the above issues" wins out.

   HOWEVER, it doesn't take much effort on the CIO front to work with IBM\Lotus to find resolutions to the majority of the above - as most get solved in version updates. Additionally, the list of complaints from Outlook shops is starting to be worse (cached mode doesnt work; mail storage space has doubled; setting up failover isnt as easy).

1. 15  Patrick Kwinten http://quintessens.wordpress.com | 6/22/2008 9:25:18 AM

   It's not who's wrong but how we (read: systems) get along =)

1. 16  Sean Jennings  | 6/23/2008 5:18:36 AM

   @10 hmm.... yes I know of an instance where CIO frequently quoted in press/adverts by Microsoft would whenever joining a new company would immediately look at axing any IBM Lotus applications and migrating to Microsoft

1. 17  Dovid  | 6/23/2008 10:10:09 AM

   As a former Lotus evangelist and architecht of migrations, I'd say everyone here is wrong. And right.

   The world isn't so black and white. CIOs don't necessarily make these decisions as flippantly as you say. MS often gives them a good deal. Or, there are multiple mail systems now, so it actually makes sense to migrate to one (because coexistence really does suck)... and there are ZERO CASE STUDIES of a large org migrating Ex2ND. Ed tried finding one for me last year, and he just couldn't.

   Then there's the "migrations fail" argument. Yes they do. usually because of poor planning. Planned right, they usually do fairly well. There are always some bumps, but that's true of any large IT project. (Failing to account for Domino applications and long-term strategies is a big part of poor planning that shows up LATER. We haven't even gotten there yet!)

   So, if coexistence worked better and migration tools worked better and IT planned better... we wouldn't have much to talk about. As said above, e-mail-is-e-mail-is-a-commodity. HOWEVER, since the above often are not true, I probably wouldn't want to be the CIO backing one of these. I shouldn't complain though, successful migrations are the reason I can almost afford to pay the kids' tuition bills. Call me when you nee dto recover mid-stream :0 whichever direction you ar emigrating :0

1. 18  Paul  | 6/24/2008 2:41:21 AM

   Now lets talk about OCS and Sametime and the smooth sametime service that had gone through pain to be the most stable service in PHILIPS, and then they try OCS and its down for weeks!

   All migrations and changes on this scale go through pain, but why change when you have 100% uptime...MAD

   paul

1. 19  Andy  | 6/24/2008 3:40:17 AM

   A Philips employees thoughts after being moved onto exchange :-)

   "Gotta love a disaster. Actullay its been behaving this week - been terrible though since I was moved to it. Usually 50% of the time you could not connect to server and lately that went up to 95%. Still hopefully they have fixed it"

1. 20  Marcus Howell http://www.marsh.com | 6/24/2008 4:41:23 AM

   Ed While I appreciate your blog. Your comments such as this are SO OFF BASE. Many people are moving to exchange for stability and my company and myself are one of them.

   I know, the first thing you'll say is you don't know how to configure a domino server. Wrong as a admin with over 12 years experience on domino, I was one of its earliest "scream it from the rooftops" I love domino.

   As IBM began to let domino go down the tubes, and the lack of support for the product, its easy to see why people are jumping ship. 8.0 just sucks, and I wouldn't touch it with if you paid me. 7.0x UNSTABLE, and you can't even get the code to work. My user's are down consistently, and calls to support, and sending NSD's are a daily occurrence. Now one thing to note, it is on a platform which you give very little support to obviously.

   Anyway, exchange just works. Thoose who have problems with exchange just don't know how to configure it (Sounds Familiar :)) But really, it is the case.

   We ran a pilot. I love it. I've converted. We've setup production servers. Love It. I'm counting my days to moving to exchange.

   Traitor? No. Tired of domino's BAD performance? YES. Tired of Domino? Yes. Tired of getting a call in the middle of the night that a domino server crashed? Yes.

   Is exchange a diaster? No.

   The funniest part is lotussphere when IBM tells you how many people are converting to domino, and they pad the stats by oh say 50%, WHEN MOST MAJOR COMPANIES ARE MOVING AWAY FROM DOMINO. Oh well, keep dreaming. Maybe in 10 years after domino is dead, we can have a revival like AMIPRO or some of the MANY failed IBM Products.

1. 21  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 6/24/2008 5:24:09 AM

   @20 12 years Domino admin experience and you can't keep an ND7 box running? Good grief.

1. 22  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/24/2008 6:04:50 AM

   At least Marcus had the courage to sign a name and company. But marsh's migration was driven by politics, and has already taken longer than anticipated. What I don't care for in his comments are that he is somehow calling me a liar and saying that notes is unreliable, that stats are padded, and comparing notes with 40% of the market to ami pro, never exactly a market leader.

   As for crashes and NSD's, sure they happen, but I work with customers who report 100% uptime for months or years. Like Ben says, there seems to be a lot more to the story.

1. 23  Dan Lynch  | 6/24/2008 6:11:14 AM

   We've been engaged in a long term comparison of moving 1/2 of our environment to domino from sendmail, or replacing the entire global environment with exchange 2007.

   After peeling off the layers of pre-sales propoganda, and drilling down to the technical and architectural details of exch2007 with a senior MS exch architect, we've learned that those who prefer exchange 2007 must accept the following costs and scalability challenges.

   1) With exchange, no virtualization possible whatsoever, no VM, no partitioned servers as is possible with domino. That equals much more hardware, complexity, moving pieces, admin time, etc.

   2) If you want to use Blackberry and BES with exchange you'll need to size your environment accordingly. Based on a live sizing excercise we did with this high-end ms exchange architect resource, one BES user against exch 2007 presents a load profile of 4 MAPI/Outlook users, and if that user also uses Outlook (with some degree of concurrency calculated into that during the day) each Outlook + BB user adds a sizing factor of 5x that of one Outlook user. That is not trivial, and adds to the cost profile of exchange. You could opt to use winmobile of course.

   3) If you are a global company who needs to do business in the asia/pacific region, in order to get the double-byte character sets for Japanese, Mandarin etc, you have to pay software assurance (@ 33% of the purchase price annually for the rights to do business with exchange in these regions). Yes, the genius marketing and salesmen at the heart of MS have deemed that they would restrict functionality and international support, and require you pay them alot of cash every year to do business in asia/pacific regions.

   4) The exchange 2007 stack includes layers of server roles (mailbox server, client access server, hub server, and if you are so inclined, an edge server) that in anything above a small business, will mean separate hardware for each of those layers. That adds, cost, complexity, moving parts and more hardware and software support, administration and deployment costs. Domino can provide those functions (exclusive of the edge architecture requirements) in one box. If you run on unix and use partitioned servers, many of those can be on one box. That's easy math to do to see the IBM advantage.

   5) People to run your mail environment: As compared to what we have today to run an environment with partitioned dominos, the senior ms consultant stated we'd need 2-3 more email administrators and 3-5 more help desk people versus what we have today, in order to support exchange and outlook. (To augment domino we'd need one more person perhaps). More people to manage the hardware as well. More permanent recurring costs etc.

   6) To state the obvious for good reason, according to the MS experts, exchange will never be ported to more scalable and stable Linux/Unix platforms, so you'll need to accept the costs, and pros/cons of running your mail on a product that requires frequent patching, security issues and will need proportionally more care and feeding from a platform/os perspective. That translates into always drinking all of the cool aid, not just a gulp or two.

   7) To run our global enterprise on domino (17,500 seats 15 countries, 12 languages) we can and will run that on 6 physical unix hosts in our HQ, and 6-7 distributed wintel hosts (for HW support reasons outside of the US)in remote sites. The same math for an apples to apples comparison, again generated by the senior MS consultant we worked with for 2 days, would require 43 pieces of ms hardware, presuming we use existing domain controllers for catalog servers. The BES sizing issues described above, and the fact that we cannot virtualize anything with exchange, would in part dictate this kind of sizing, as would the tiered 3-box architecture that would still be necessary at a smaller sites around the world.

   These are not domino-centric unfair comparisons, these are the real-world issues, numbers and sizing from microsoft themselves, vs our real world experience running partitioned dominos running on solaris/sun. The cost comparisons, which we've done in great detail, of all of this are dramatically different for MS vs IBM, ie MS will cost you much, much more, on the order of at least 200% vs IBM in an apples to apples comparison over 5 years. (For us it was more like 300% difference over 5 years because we already have domino for 1/2 of our environment).

   For companies that are willing to accept less scalability, more hardware and software costs, no virtualization, more people costs, more complexity, frequent patching and security concerns, and are prepared to pay software assurance to do business in asia/pac, and are comfortable running their email infrastructure on windows with no os/platform alternatives, exchange 2007 is clearly the best choice.

1. 24  Marcus Howell http://www.marsh.com | 6/24/2008 6:29:14 AM

   @21 Yes 12 years, and the problem isn't keeping a domino server running, its the poor code. I know domino administration.

   @22 wasn't calling you a liar just stating FACTS.

   @23 1) WRONG! VIRTULIZATION IS POSSIBLE with Hyper-V. It shows how much you know about Microsoft.

   2) I don't believe this to be so and I am setting up a production EXCHANGE BES NOW

   3) Maybe, don't know

   4) Unix partioned servers are a joke. IBM has like two people working in the department, and they send those who they want to punish to the unix team. TRUST ME I KNOW EVERYONE BY HEART THERE. NEXT!

   5) WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Any idiot can run a exchange server, it just runs unlike domino which crashes1! NEXT

   6) WHY WOULD THEY WANT TO DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE? while solaris is good, or aix (laughing!), maybe HP/UX...Linux is horrible! Still not ready for the mainstream, and IBM Can't even support LINUX. NEXT!

   7) The only ISSUE I AGREE ON IS THE COST OF EXCHANGE! It's overpriced, and domino is cheaper! But It's like buying a car. Do you want the Old Clunker (domino) or the Ferrari (exchange)? If you want the ferrari you gonna have to pay. If you want the old clunker (domino) you can get it for practically free.

   8) IBM SUPPORT SHOULD BE PAYING ME FOR BETA-TESTING HOTFIX AFTER HOTFIX...I have a PMR that's open for almost a year now! Their clueless, enough said!

1. 25  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/24/2008 9:36:58 AM

   @24, I don't know you, but I know Dan. I know the work his company has done for the last several months. You have barely refuted anything he or I or others have said, just a bunch of hyperbole. I'm sure you can find another place for it.

1. 26  Andy  | 6/24/2008 9:56:09 AM

   Agree with Ed ... this thread was interesting for a while but has now degenerated into "Microsoft vs the world" ... besides MS bigots can never be swayed ... they only know how to press the "Next" button in a Windows gui.

1. 27  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 6/24/2008 9:58:34 AM

   @24 define "poor code". What are you actually saying? Are you saying the server doesn't run properly? Or that the apps you host are bug-ridden? As you know, these are two entirely different propositions, and you need to clarify.

   If the latter situation, you know the cure: get some decent developers! . If the former, sorry, but you've just proved your credentials as a joker: Domino hasbugs, no question, but the level of hyperbole in your posts is crazy.

   I know some amazing administrators, both in terms of Domino and Exchange (and often both). None of them would come out with the stuff you've just guffed: they know their job better than that. So if you're seriously standing by the assertions you make, I'd say it's time for a new career.

1. 28  NeilT  | 6/24/2008 12:39:42 PM

   @17 interesting not being able to get a case study. I know of a very large pharma that migrated 50% of its clients Ex2ND. I can guess why it's not offered as a case study. I had 2 guys programming code for 4 months to work around the limitations of a product we quaintly call "Doesn't".

   OK, bad decisions make for bad solutions and we make a living of working around them.

   @ generally

   Domino doesn't crash? I guess It has become more stable with the later releases, but if you get into the middle of a migration and find a bug which is blowing your server up to 3 times a day and IBM takes 1 month to provide a fix, you're always going to feel bent out of shape and not forget it. It happens on the other side too.

   I remember a figure of 135 unexpected outages in a month for a cluster of Domino servers running on a group of iSeries. OK it depends on how you count it, but the long and the short of it is that 135 distinct instances of users not being able to access their cluster were reported. Very, very painful. Extremely hilarious for me for personal reasons, but painful to manage.

   Equally I’ve heard of Domino servers with over a year of uptime (although not on Unix, Linux or Windows). It is interesting that when I discussed uptime with the AIX specialists back when I was working with it they were aghast at anyone who would not maintain their AIX boxes every 60 or 90 days (necessitating a reboot). I guess it’s changed radically since then???? :-) But even back then I heard about the invincible uptime of AIX. Rumour mill, wonderful isn’t it.

   Talking about bad decisions, I made a change to the structure of the DIAMOND1 servers. I had to fight to get the change and it cost $3million to implement it. Had I lived with the Bad decision I was handed we would have wound up with an unsupported solution which didn't perform, leaving us with the same kind of outages being seen today. It's easy to make bad decisions, very difficult (especially in a cost conscious time), to make the right decision and see it though.

   Oh and for pity’s sake don't mention the public key checking (I can hear the groans from here :-) )

   I guess the whole point of this is that change comes with pain. IF the new Philips Exchange service sorts itself out in 6 months and works flawlessly we’ll never hear of it again. Even if it finally works out cheaper, is rehomed on the new Microsoft web services or whatever, it’ll never make the light of day because it conflicts with the “Domino Story”.

   Which is worth a thought!

   Ed can comfort himself that another client which looked like going exchange now looks like being another corporate Ex2ND story. Perhaps Ed can convince them to become a case study I guess they could be talked into it…. :-)

1. 29  Brett H  | 6/24/2008 2:43:29 PM

   Wow Marcus... who p*ssed in your Corn Flakes this morning?

   I gotta tell you, I have been working with N/D for over 15 years now and I have never heard such a bunch of cry-baby "it's all Notes fault and not my ownshortcomings as an adminstrator" drivel in all my life. As mentioned previously here, if you are "all that" yet have such an unstable environment, with so many issues, then perhaps it's time to start looking at your own skillset and see what may lacking there. With so many unresolved issues, it sounds like "Dr. Phill" would be better at running your Domino environment than yourself?

   Notes has been by far the most stable, flexible, extensible, environment I have ever worked on... but that is just my experience YMMV.

1. 30  Marcus Howell http://www.marsh.com | 6/24/2008 9:23:19 PM

   @29 My own shortcomings, hardly.....I don't know why people can't face that the domino code is subpar period. I mean they can't even get it stablized, so blaming it on my poor sys admin skills is ludicrous when I have more experience than 90% of the "so called domino admins on this site".

   Yea I agree domino runs stable on a few platforms, and I said a few (<2) and that's about it. IBM has always made mistake after mistake, with OS/2, AMIPRO...GOD they even revived SYMPHONY like anyone would use that s***. IBM was stumped by bill gates in the early eighties, and he's still kicking a** with 80% market share on Exchange up from the 50% a few years back.

   IBM's number are EXTREMLY overinflated. Lotussphere is a joke. So I'm supposed to believe domino has 60% marketshare...let's keep it real.

   Even oracle has a better shot at a mail system than IBM does.

1. 31  Brett H   | 6/24/2008 11:02:52 PM

   Ohhh oh I'm sorry I did not realize it was Troll season.

   My apologies.

1. 32  NeilT  | 6/25/2008 3:12:59 AM

   @29 Brett, that depends on what you do. My experience of Domino is rarely positive because I have spent much of my Domino life delivering very high performance systems running at the front end of delivery. Experiences of receivieving two 4.5 gold CD's, hot off the press, one of which simply doesn't work is an interesting memory.

   However that does not mean the environments I worked on did not become extremely stable and well managed. It's just that this all happened after the code stabilised and the environment settled.

   Perspective is a valuable thing. It seems that Marcus has had a very poor experience and has lost some perspective.

   A statement such as:

   "Even oracle has a better shot at a mail system than IBM does"

   Is derisible. IBM is the ONLY real competitor to Microsoft today.

   But I do mean Today, that does not mean in 5 years the same will be true. The key to this is that rivals are no longer specifically targetting IBM, which means IBM is not seen as the threat to deal with.

   Which is, in itself, interesting and potentially a driver for the kind of migration Philips is doing today.

1. 33  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 6/25/2008 3:53:17 AM

   RE "when I have more experience than 90% of the 'so called domino admins on this site'."

   I think you'll find that "90%" is actually the per-centage of statistics that are made up on the spot, you poor poor chap.

1. 34  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/25/2008 6:43:12 AM

   @32 "The key to this is that rivals are no longer specifically targetting IBM, which means IBM is not seen as the threat to deal with."

   I'm not sure what rock you live under, but even Salesforce.com got into the action yesterday by targeting Notes customers. Microsoft has whole sections of their website, and those of several business partners, on the topic, and have run conferences on it. Google is after Notes customers.

1. 35  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 6/25/2008 10:45:00 AM

   @24 - Marcus you managed to perfectly demonstrate what I've said before, that those on both sides of the fence here are exactly the same.

   Your statements demonstrate what I posted in my blog as many beliefs in the MS community, that is that anything that doesn't work in Domino means it sucks and anything that doesn't work in Exchange means the admin doesn't know how to configure it. { Link }

   And yes this can apply the other way too.

   Do you honestly think that no competent Exchange admin out there is having an issue? Please.

1. 36  Dovid  | 6/25/2008 10:47:33 AM

   Marcus and Neil,

   I've worked both systems. They are equally stable. There are some environments where each has shown very bothersome instability, but those are somewhat unusal. For example, I've seen a particular bug or two that for IBM or MS was pretty rare, but if your environment happened to have the right ingredients, you had a nightmare of constant downtime until resolved.

   IBM has a few more of them (a FEW is NOT a logarithmic function, chaps), but that is easily attributable to the greater utility it provides. A bug in the HTTP stack somewhere is more likely to be found in an org that has more than just webmail in use. To have that kind of situation for years and years indicates that you either don't have a support contract, or that you are unskilled, or that you carry the West Vile Migration Virus ... only question is whether you are just a carrier, or present with symptoms.

1. 37  Marcus Howell http://www.marsh.com | 6/25/2008 5:36:57 PM

   @35 & @36 Well gentlemen, I can certainly sympathize with the Domino lovers out there...I used to be one of them. I guess a majority of my time as a domino environment I worked with Domino on rev's 5&6 which for the most part were pretty stable. I never ran across serious issues. This we can agree on. Some minor bugs here and there.

   Domino R7 was a nightmare, and I got several gray hairs because of it. Unstable, and otherwise. Certainly, again, you could say oh he doesn't have proper domino skills, which is BS, and you and I both know it.

   If the CODE IS BROKEN, there ain't no sys admin skills in the world gonna patch it. IBM has been on an extended PMR with us, and HAVE NO CLUE. The Incompetence of IBM support is unfathomable, and ludicrous. That's what would make people move to exchange. They've admitted to the bugs and ISSUED SPR's and HOTFIXES. Well friends if it wasn't broken, why would they have to do that.

   They're so much ignorance on this forum, and IBM kiss ass***ng that no see's the truth.

   That's why Microsoft is gaining market share every day in exchange 2003/2007 environments, and IBM has to make up fictitious numbers, to appease the 10% or so customers still hanging out.

   Not surprising...people clinged to OS/2 till it was dead. Domino is already dead, and you think it's still alive. Now that is SAD!

1. 38  Rob McDonagh http://www.CaptainOblivious.com | 6/25/2008 6:01:02 PM

   @37 I doubt many of the people reading this site would argue with a statement like, "Domino has some bugs, and some of the catastrophic ones thoroughly hosed my environment, and Exchange doesn't have those specific bugs." Especially if the bugs were identified in detail. Everyone here is either laughing at you or ticked off at you because you insist on making outrageously hyperbolic statements that can't possibly be defended. Then you try to defend them by making more outrageously hyperbolic statements that can't be defended. Lather, rinse, repeat.

   I've seen Exchange shops crash regularly, and I've seen Domino shops do the same. But I haven't seen EVERY Exchange shop or EVERY Domino shop be trashed because of lousy code. You mentioned way above that the particular platform you run on isn't well supported by IBM, but you haven't told us what that platform is. You haven't given any details at all, actually, all you've done is jump up and down and yell, "Domino stole my lunch money!" And yes, the grade school imagery was deliberate. If you want to have a serious discussion, there are plenty of people here who would be happy to join you. Otherwise? Grow up.

1. 39  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/25/2008 6:46:28 PM

   I deleted a commment here and am closing the thread. "Marcus" is clearly an alias, since I can't find him or his e-mail address anywhere online. And he trots out a classic troll line of somehow connecting OS/2 (which was never even close to a market leader, let's be honest) to Notes/Domino, which have 40% of the market and has been #1 or #2 its entire 18 year life cycle. I won't allow this to degrade further.

   Dear Mr. Troll -- don't bother using anonymouse.org to visit here again. Kthx.