Leadership By Numbers

Category Administration IBM/Lotus
If you are deciding to migrate your messaging platform to a hosted or SaaS solution, then you might as well think of it as choosing a tattoo. At least one company I know wished it had picked a different one. When the purchase details start to fade, you won't be cherishing it for the negotiated price. Choose for the long term. To help out, I have some insights from one company that went from Domino to Google Apps for Business.

Reality Orientation

Are there lessons to be learned from a Domino to Gmail migration ? I asked a project manager for some off-the-record comments of his company's recent experience:

• Gmail is first a consumer product, and second an enterprise solution: For many new employees, starting a new job with Gmail was a welcome familiarity. Google Sites and Apps have been seen as useful and are appreciated. However, for senior and executive staff, the loss of their work-flow habits was frustrating. Users who had used the Notes 8x client were not as impressed by Gmail features, as those with an older release (e.g., calendar overlays are supported in both Gmail and Notes 8x).

• Pilot-testing should include executives and their support staff: One of the biggest surprises that still continues to frustrate users of the new Gmail system is the rough process for joint delegation of contacts and mail (calendaring is a little better). If you are choosing between multiple vendors for their hosted solution, then try to run parallel pilots to allow easier cross-comparisons.

• Be prepared for unannounced feature changes: You no longer control the release-cycle for upgrades and feature adjustments. While Google maintains a blog for documenting significant enhancements, there are many little changes that frequently appear without any notice.

• BCC is not identifiable to the recipient: If you send out an email to several groups, and include a BCC reference to someone else--they won't know that the mail was addressed to them as a BCC. This ambiguity leads to awkward situations when a Reply To All is selected from the BCC recipient.

• The mechanics of the migration were most difficult with calendars: Even with the most recent import tools, the calendaring transfer was very challenging, especially for repeating meetings (of which many had to be manually recreated).

• Moving Blackberries was much more troublesome than expected: Accounts had to be first converted into PSTs before their inclusion with GMail. The process is slow, and CPU intensive. It proved so difficult to complete that an extra BES was provisioned to assist in moving over the accounts.

• Read and unread marks do not work with shared email: Read marks are set anytime any one reads a mail entry. If two people spot read through a mail account, then all the read messages are marked as read--with no distinction as to who read what.

• No Return Receipt: Some people love it, others hate it. In Lotus Notes you can mark email for a Return Receipt as soon as the recipient opens the email. It's a confirmation function that assures the sender the mail has been received.

• Mail-in Databases are confusing: In Lotus Notes, mail-in databases don't add to the licensing cost, but they do with Gmail. In addition, there is a maximum of 10 delegated readers to a mail file.

• Help Desk support from Google is painfully weak: Corporate Help Desk Mail support was still required. All contact with Google support is through the creation of trouble-tickets. There is no phone contact. The process for problem resolution is slowed by the requirement of very thorough question and answers to every incident. In some instances, Google was not able to replicate or verify the problem and required customer log-in credentials to analyze a problem.

• The browser-only interface is not always sufficient: Threading is problematic, so many clients have gone back to a stand-alone client (through IMAP) like Apple Mail, Outlook or Lotus Notes.

• Labs are erratic: The Labs extensions add tremendous customization but they have a buyer-beware orientation (to be fair, that's why they are called "Labs").

This particular organization was hoping that their migration would lower operational costs, and they expect to show the benefits within three years. On the other hand, in hindsight they would have chosen IBM's LotusLive as a better "enterprise" messaging platform. There were just so many more adjustments and work-arounds than they had expected.

The Platform is the Message

The review of the Gmail move brings to the forefront whether a hosted solution is a fix for yesterday's issues of cost and complexity or a messaging platform with vision. The evaluation metrics are different, because nearly everything (the customer's content, processing logic, authentication, etc.) is lifted into The Cloud. It's what makes a multi-tenant offering so cost-competitive: many users sharing the same infrastructure, benefiting from increased efficiencies. But, behind the browser interface is a vendor-specific platform. Yes, it's lock-in, but it can also be further leveraged.

So, don't believe the sudden love that vendors have for your current problems and their sympathetic willingness to lower every barrier to your purchase. Once they have a customer's account, a vendors' cost model changes, too. Now, the customer is a subscriber with annual renewals. It's guaranteed income to the vendor, who couldn't be happier as they look to create even more value by extending the infrastructure.

Google is looking to "appify" their email. Microsoft is quickly solidifying their Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and IBM has LotusLive and Project Vulcan. Cost reduction is only the introduction to the advantages of hosted and SaaS collaboration technologies. The next push will be to integrate and broaden messaging into unique capabilities. It won't just be the obvious linkage of Microsoft Dynamics with Microsoft on-line or Salesforce.com integration with IBM/Lotus. As Steve Ballmer says, "for the cloud, we are all in."

Google's Gmail has been the most successful at building out a large scale, on-line messaging platform. Joe Brockmeier has drawn out some of the significance in Google's latest adoption of the Oauth authentication standard for building off of enterprise Gmail.

Enabling OAuth means that an application can connect without your credentials. It still has access to some or all of your data, but it doesn't have your password. Meaning that the application can't take full control of your account. OAuth is being used pretty widely by social networking sites like Twitter to give access to third-party apps without giving them full run of account. This is a Good Thing, and people should not be giving access to their social network sites to other Web-based services in any other way.

For their part, Microsoft is looking to extend Active Directory so that networked single-sign-on will work against cloud services. Their Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS) is just coming on-line. "In addition, ADFS 2.0 is part of a larger identity platform that includes the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and Windows Cardspace."

Interesting, isn't it ? The security and authentication systems adopted by the vendors are changing and evolving to take advantage of hosted and SaaS collaboration offerings. Turning to Google again, they are beginning to draw on "contextual gadgets" for development in Gmail with Google Apps.

In addition to the many integration points currently available for Google Apps, like the Google Data APIs, we announced that we will soon open Gmail contextual gadgets as a new extension point for developers. These gadgets can smartly draw information from the web and let users perform relevant actions based on the content of an email message, all without leaving the Gmail inbox.

Contextual gadgets are very promising and opens up an entire new field of development. Liz Gannes has a solid overview of the "appifying" trend with Gmail and warns that "Email will be a bit tricky to innovate around, given how dependent and immersed we are in it. For instance, messing with linear, chronologically ordered messages in order to bring relevant ones to the fore might do more harm than good."

Redesigning the inbox and integrating with new functions will be be tricky, but it will be done. What is happening, is that third-party vendors and enterprise developers are beginning to build on the email platform in The Cloud, just as they did when it was on-premise. The difference ? Once the platform is Microsoft, or Google or IBM, then the developers will become even more constricted for their tool set and architectural choices. I doubt many Exchange/Sametime customers will hesitate to absorb their IM choice into Microsoft when they go to Microsoft BPOS. Moving into LotusLive or Google is going to slowly kill off Microsoft Office, and promote the Open Document Format (ODF). The re-birth of the enterprise developer for The Cloud may also be the end of selecting the best-of-breed.

How to Pick Your Tattoo

Tattoos have a tribal association to them. They can describe class, or a vocation, but they always reflect an era. If the most important criterion for choosing a hosted, SaaS email platform is to reduce operating costs, then it will be selected on the current needs of the current situation (that's what defines the operating cost). Choosing by price will fix the messaging framework to the past.

Do you trust the provider for the future ?

What about Unified Telephony ? Email, IM, voice, video and collaboration on a single interface ?

How is email to be integrated into business workflow ? Invoicing ?

Is social networking integration going to be more important ?

Where do you think mobile devices will be in two years ? Three years ? It's important because there is an acceleration of momentum for smartphones and other devices. Windows Mobile is on the wane, the iPhone and the Android are climbing charts and the outlook for Blackberries is not as strong as it was a year back. The iPad brings a new consumer medium to messaging.

If a device is manufactured by the same vendor as the messaging platform, do you expect the vendors to remain neutral in functionality and support, or to maximize their devices for the benefit of their own platforms ?

Security is a completely new field of investigation. How is access monitored ? What about moving clients into Virtual Desktops ? VPN support ? How about data ownership when the court serves the remote data-center with a subpoena? How is eDiscovery supported ?

How is older email to be archived ?

Cross-browser support on mixed platforms ? HTML5 ?

What about document formats and document management integration ? Sharepoint ? Documentum? Quickr/Alfresco ?

Directory integration and management ?

Go with an entire repositioning or, instead, a hybrid model with some accounts or capabilities left on-premise ?

Maybe you have enough insight from the "lessons learned" that were listed above. And, you appreciate that hosted, SaaS email platforms are going to have development capabilities to exploit. You've marked your path through the thicket of choices and their consequences. Do me a favor, if you step into Fatty's parlor, please tell him I sent you. Maybe I'll get a discount when I make my pick.


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