ZDNet.com.au: Microsoft ditched as Anglicans go open source

July 10 2008

A potential user base of "thousands" moving to Lotus Symphony...

In an interview yesterday, George Lymbers, CIO of the organisation, said he has uncovered substantial savings potential by getting rid of licence fees.

"Some people say, well you only need Windows. Wait a second: you need Office, you need Windows, you need this, you need that. Before you know it you have 10 to 12 licences on one PC covered across thousands of installations. The cost of that is just spectacular," he said.

Office will be the first to go. Lymbers had two alternatives for replacing Microsoft Office: OpenOffice and IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OpenOffice source code.

He decided to go with the IBM solution, on security and support grounds. Big Blue will provide the back office support for the suite, while Lymbers' department distributes it via thin client over the church's wide area network to the various church organisations. ...

He also said he was looking at Lotus Quikr to replace Sharepoint. The organisation currently runs Lotus Notes email.
Link: ZDNet.com.au: Microsoft ditched as Anglicans go open source >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus Symphony  Add/View Comments [12]

Post a Comment

  1. 1  Dave T  | 7/10/2008 3:45:22 PM

    Thanks Ed, It always brightens my day when I hear a story like this...

  1. 2  Julian Woodward http://blog.woowar.com | 7/10/2008 3:49:44 PM

    Good news - thanks for sharing that with us. The first of many I hope!

  1. 3  luis benitez http://socializeme.blogspot.com | 7/10/2008 3:52:54 PM

    Great reference Ed..! Thanks for sharing!!

  1. 4  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 7/10/2008 4:01:03 PM

    And an interesting variation on Quickr... Quikr. I recently saw a document referring to 'QwickR' but I'm not revealing the source. No, thankfully it wasn't someone from the Lotus brand ;o)

    Great news on the Symphony win. John Head's Symphony session at ILUG was the most attended of the three tracks at that time, so clearly this is gaining interest and I'm really seeing people take it seriously.

  1. 5  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 7/10/2008 4:30:33 PM

    They're going to take 24 months to setup a test? They say the Church works in mysterious ways, but two years to setup a test?

  1. 6  Adam Brown http://www.isw.com.au | 7/10/2008 8:25:58 PM

    ISW has been working with the Anglican Church and Sydney Diocese Secretariat since November last year. The church is actually very quick to move but in an informed and well managed manner.

    We went thru a consultative stage where we looked at their whole business and how they are communicating and collaborating together both within the Sydney Secretariat Diocese as well as how they communicate with their other organisations and the community/parishes. Once they evaluated the options and made an informed decision the actual process of rolling out Notes & Domino 8 and Sametime was very professional and quick. They actually have a very mature process for managing their projects and I was personally very impressed with how they executed with ISW once the decision was made. We upgraded a portion of their user base from previous versions of Notes and we migrated a significant number off outlook in the process. They have implemented a Lotus Notes based Portal/Intranet and rolled out a series of Lotus Notes based applications.

    Their adoption of Lotus Notes has been fantastic and they are truly leveraging it for far more than email and calendaring. Notes & Domino has become a a strategic platform for the organisation and ISW has worked with them to develop and implement a variety of business process applications that are are having a very positive effect on their organisation. We are planning on extending these applications to their wider community to integrate there extended user base directly into their business processes.

    George's comments about the scope to provide services to their greater communities is a reality and I am confident that they will achieve what they are aiming for.

  1. 7  Jyotiprakash  | 7/11/2008 12:52:44 AM

    The Company where I am working also moving to towards OpenOffice. In near future a lots of company in india may move to OpenOffice. IBM should work on the memory issue of Lotus Symphony. It takes a lot of time while opening a file as compared to openoffice and MSoffice. You will still find a large number of organisation having low configuration computer. So Lotus Symphony's success depends on how quick IBM resolve the memory issue.

  1. 8  Neil Gower http://www.ngower.me.uk | 7/11/2008 3:13:35 AM

    John Head's Symphony session at ILUG was the great, and I really like Symphony...

    Now can IBM please give me a LotusScript API for it (pretty please) so I can really exploit it in my Notes applications.

    Story's like this are great, is so nice to see another organisation really exploit the Domino platform.

  1. 9  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 7/11/2008 6:05:37 AM

    @7 - memory usage and speed are big areas of focus for Notes 8.0.2 and 8.5, and the benefits from that work will also find it's way into Symphony. Betas are showing improvements in these areas.

  1. 10  Bill Brown  | 7/11/2008 8:29:48 AM

    @4: Are you sure they weren't talking about { Link }

  1. 11  Bilal Jaffery http://www.LotusFoundations.com/ | 7/11/2008 2:58:21 PM

    Great news for us Lotus Foundations folks as well. Great leverage piece. By July 31st, we will be packaging Symphony with Foundations as well.

    Bilal

  1. 12  Wayne Boxall  | 7/13/2008 7:45:31 AM

    I think I may have helped here in early Dec 2007.....mmmmmm....