Leadership By Numbers :: Microsoft Spin on Collaboration Platforms

Category Management
Exchange Geek, Steve Byrant, has an entry which espouses the migration of Domino into the Microsoft Collaboration platform. He suggests that 83% of all Domino applications "in most businesses are based on standard templates." If so, then Microsoft has Sharepoint migration tools.

Unfortunately for Steve, the numbers he's guess-timating don't appear to match anyone's real live experience (certainly not mine, or my customers). It's just weird to be throwing around numbers without any understanding of the architecture, or actual user data.

A more interesting question, though, is what is all this Microsoft interest about migrating Domino 7? I think it is disingenuous to talk about migrating away from the highest ranked collaboration platform. And into what is Domino being migrated? Into Sharepoint, which itself is having difficulties migrating its own upgrades.

From a management perspective, the substantive concern should be about providing value. Does it make financial sense to pay for a rip-and-replace from the best collaborative platform into one that is still going through re-designs?

UPDATE: I have to preserve the confidentiality of my source, but I can share with you a comment that was sent to me, in response to this post:

The MS collaboration team (yes the team that made the tool) believe that 4-5% of applications are based on default Lotus templates. That was said to me by Microsoft by people that wrote the tool a few weeks ago. . .

I know the person who sent this insight, and I consider this person highly reliable (and a good speaker).

Comments

8 - Thanks all for the comments. I was at a client's all day yesterday.

At the end of the day, as a manager, I just want to put my finger on the bottom line that says, these numbers work.

From the work of Paul Mooney testing "Red Bull," and the comments of many, many bloggers it's quite transparent that migrating off of Domino 7 is either going to be horrendously expensive or massively uneconomical.

If the Sharepoint conversion tools did work with 85% of Domino applications, and that's what it took to motivate someone to migrate away from Domino, then they'd be migrating from an award-winning collaboration platform into a sub-set of capabilities, splintered into a wide portfolio of products.

I just don't get the spin. I don't expect the Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino to do anything good for Microsoft except expose (1) how expensive it is to migrate Domino applications, (2) how expensive it is to build Sharepoint applications which do everything that can be done with Domino 7.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 12:32:50 AM On 03/18/2006 | - Website - |

7 - So did anyone reply on his blog? I don't see any comments on that thread.

Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 06:00:58 PM On 03/17/2006 | - Website - |

6 - Rocky, I thought of the whole "mail is an 'application'" thing as well. I was going to give him a little benefit of the doubt on that!

Posted by Chris Whisonant At 09:15:55 AM On 03/17/2006 | - Website - |

5 - My guess? He mangled and misquoted to suit his needs. I would guess that 83% of DATABASES deployed are based on the mail template; and I would further surmise that the majority of those are unmodified mail templates (I mean over 50% are unmodified). So, instead of using the right word - databases - he substituted "applications", which implies templates to us. And, going on that, you could probably migrate mail from one system to another relatively easy.

But that is a HUGE stretch when you leave that narrow scenario.

Either way, this is WAY up on the FUD-o-meter.

Rock

Posted by Rock At 02:36:57 AM On 03/17/2006 | - Website - |

4 - Interestingly, his own wire diagram of the Application Analyzer logic shows the inherent difficulty of a migration. I have NEVER built an application based solely on a a prepackaged Domino template. I may have cut and pasted code or other elements from them, but never relied solely on them.

Posted by Christopher Byrne At 10:38:41 PM On 03/16/2006 | - Website - |

3 - Check that thought! It's four uncertain phrases in a single sentence. I didn't notice "fairly easily".

Posted by Richard Schwartz At 10:35:19 PM On 03/16/2006 | - Website - |

2 - He wrote: "In most cases, roughly 83% of the current applications in use are probably based on standard templates..."

In most cases, roughly 100% of the words in that post are probably wrong.

Seriously, could he have been more evasive? Three separate uncertain phrases in one sentence ("in most cases", "roughly", "probably"), and yet the number 83% is indicative of anything but uncertainty! You don't add that extra digit of precision unless you're deliberately implying that there's a real measurement behind it. Of course no reference is given, but his hope is that the gullible reader takes away that 83% and ignores the "in most cases roughly probably" part.

Posted by Richard Schwartz At 09:57:40 PM On 03/16/2006 | - Website - |

1 - This red bull stuff is giving me a headache! Standard templates for applications? Give me a break...what application templates ship with Domino? Teamroom, document & smart suite libraries, discussion, RnR?

I have used some teamrooms and discussion databases in the past, but not heavily. I would use some OpenNTF DBs if I needed to now... I think that right now out of all the applications on my server that I have only one teamroom!

Posted by Chris Whisonant At 09:07:40 PM On 03/16/2006 | - Website - |