Synthesis of Discussions on Notes v. SharePoint

In the past week, I’ve received numerous emails, comments, and reactions to the general concept of migrating Notes to SharePoint.
I wanted to post a brief synthesis of some of the main points, and add some commentary of my own:

1) Notes vs. SharePoint is not comparing apples to apples. Quickr is the better comparison tool.
This is true. However, Quickr does not have the market penetration that Notes in general does. Much as I’d like to say it is a fair discussion for organizations in my situation, unless you already have Quickr going in your environment, it just isn’t realistic. We’re talking about determining the best platform for our current functions, not evaluating a new platform for future collaboration. Quickr just is not a consideration in our current environment, for political, if not technical reasons.

2) Web enabling an entire Notes environment is a difficult, expensive task.
Maybe it is because I’ve been web-enabling Notes apps since the first IBM-internal beta of R5, but I just don’t think it is as difficult as people are making it out to be. There is certainly a large learning curve, but I got over that curve almost 10 years ago. Am I the exception? From all the wonderful tips and techniques offered in the blog-o-sphere, I thought more Notes developers were comfortable in this arena. Is my perception inaccurate?

That being said, I agree that a 100% web enablement would be a chore. We’re more likely to pick the easy apps, and pick the apps with a large user base. If we can web enable enough apps to decrease the number of Notes Clients in the environment, we decrease support and maintenance costs. The more we decrease those costs, the more management will support keeping Notes/Domino as a technology platform.

3) Why would you migrate anyway?
It all comes down to cost. I think everyone will agree that today, Notes is cheaper to run. We already have a talented staff, the environment is stable, we have processes in place, etc. In addition, truly talented SharePoint experts are rare and expensive. A lot of people have it on their resume, but they crash and burn in a real project situation.

So with all that in mind, how can SharePoint save money? People I have spoken with believe that in 3-5 years, the costs will reverse. 3-5 years from now, SharePoint folks will be as common as C# folks are today. Microsoft will have released one or two more major releases, and will respond to the major weaknesses being identified in the platform. (With Ray Ozzie at its helm, no less…)

On the other hand, Lotus folks are a dwindling population, at least in my area. I’ve talked to a number of organizations who will accept a greater cost today to get to the platform that they believe will become cheaper as Microsoft responds to the weaknesses of SharePoint, and the talent pool increases their skillsets.

After all the talks, my general strategy hasn’t changed much from one of my previous posts, and it is very close to becoming the official strategy at my workplace:

1.  Increase the internal skillset on SharePoint, BizTalk, .NET, etc. to reduce the amount of consulting required on the platform.
2.  Web enable Notes apps, and integrate them with a SharePoint portal, striving for a reduction in Notes client deployments.
3.  Create new apps in .NET/SharePoint, unless Notes has a clear cost and speed advantage for the specific functions requested.

Let me just add one or two caveats:

• If you are already on Quickr, your strategy may be different.
• If you are so large that the enterprise-level weaknesses of SharePoint are unacceptable to you, Notes makes more sense.

And I would like to close with an open-ended question — given the following root causes of the desire of “management” to migrate to Notes…

1) Decreasing Lotus talent pool, and increasing cost of that talent.
2) Confidence that MS will resolve their SharePoint issues, and decrease long-term costs and pains in a SharePoint world.

….What can IBM/Lotus do to turn around migrations like mine?

(From a truly unbiased point of view, I shouldn’t care. But with 15 years of Notes experience, but only 2 years of .NET, and 6 months of SharePoint experience, I just plain got more skillz on the Lotus side, and I’d like to use them.)