Soliciting Feedback
March 20, 2008
I’m looking for some answers from the community…
As I mentioned previously, the status of Lotus Notes/Domino is again under discussion. To make an educated, unbiased business decision, we are looking for data on the following questions:
1) Development Effort – In General, how does development time in SharePoint compare to development time in Domino. Assuming skilled talent in both technologies, and non-trivial apps… does anyone have any real numbers and data comparing the level of effort to write applications on both platforms? Or even any anecdotal data?
2) Maintenance Effort – How does the level of effort compare to maintain SharePoint Applications vs. Notes Applications. (Again, in general). I’m not talking about the infrastructural support for the platform – just the application support. How many developers does it take to support a 500-app Notes platform vs. a 500-app SharePoint platform?
If anyone has any real world experience, and in particular measurable data dressing these issues, please either comment here or contact me directly at migratenotes@gmail.com.
Thanks!
March 20, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I hope you’ll take into consideration the fact that a net-new Notes application developed in 2008 likely needs a different kind (and probably less) support than any Notes applications your organization built when you originally deployed Notes. In the e-mail world, it would be like comparing Outlook 2007 to Notes R5 — they’re obviously not the same vintage, so the metrics are going to be different (to O2007’s favor, I would think).
March 21, 2008 at 4:33 am
Yes, Ed, good point — as a matter of fact, we discussed exactly that point yesterday.
That is also part of our challenge, though – we have no real data to use, as we are looking at future maintenance levels, and have reasons to believe that our past experiences won’t match the future. So far, it is just everyone’s best guess.
March 28, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Why you do not consider the effort that will take to build a brand new application in Notes and SP, the expertise required, the support required in production, etc?
vlad
PS: On the other hand my company goes on SP path too but the management has chosen to keep Lotus Notes as well. I am planning to go on the route proposed by you: get rid of Notes client (we do not use Notes as email), use IIS with Domino (already built a clustered environment) with no persons docs in address book. I already have one big application in production, other two will come soon, and plan to migrate other as well.
March 31, 2008 at 10:45 am
We are at the same stage in our Notes migration project. Last year the developers got trained in SharePoint and we identified some “simple” Notes apps that should be migrated to SharePoint. We succeeded with these but it has taken us about 3 to 4 times as much as effort as anticipated. So right now we are evaluating converting the remaining more complex apps to .Net, Domino or using 3rd party apps – we should also consider the SP+.Net option you mentioned previously. As far as metrics, all of these options are costly and time consuming and maintenance effort will most likely be increased. So there is no good option but we will continue to evaluate and push forward.
June 2, 2008 at 12:27 am
I’d like to contribute a bit,
we have 6 Notes developers looking after over 1000 Notes applications.
I’m also interested in any figures from SharePoint world.