Migrating IBM Lotus Notes and Domino to the Cloud:
Selecting Microsoft
®
versus Google
Table of Contents
introduction . . . . 3
Microsoft Office 365
. . . . 3
Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE)
. . . . 3
Email and Calendaring Migration and Coexistence
. . . . 4
Migration and Coexistence Tools
. . . . 4
The End User’s Migration Experience
. . . .
6
End User Adoption
. . . .
6
Microsoft Outlook Integration
. . . . 7
Unified Messaging, Instant Messaging, and User Presence
. . . . 8
Offline Capabilities
. . . . 8
Migrating Applications and Data
. . . . 9
Application Platform Comparison
. . . . 9
Application Data Migration Tools
. . . . 10
Full Lotus Notes/Domino Retirement
. . . . 10
Links and Resources
. . . . 12
microsoft links . . . . 12
Customer Case Studies
. . . . 12
Introduction
More and more users of legacy IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino systems today are considering migrating to other systems. The advent of cloud computing makes this migration much easier to consider. For Lotus Notes/Domino users, cloud-based, hosted messaging and application services can provide the latest technologies along with an attractive alternative to costly upgrades. But if your organization is considering migrating to the cloud, you should carefully examine which hosted services can most easily inherit existing technology investments, and identify tradeoffs that might adversely impact IT teams and end users.
This white paper showcases the migration approaches and challenges involved in moving from IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino to either of two cloud-based options: Microsoft Office 365 (the predecessor of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS), and Google Apps Premier Edition. We will clarify the differences between the two options, and describe their benefits in detail to help you make an informed decision about them.
Microsoft Office 365
The successor to BPOS, Office 365 is available in beta form today and will be released as a product suite in 2011. Office 365 has a variety of services to meet your needs, which include:
Microsoft Office:
• The world’s leading productivity tool on the desktop (Office Professional Plus) and on the web (Office Web Apps) now seamlessly connected and delivered with cloud services — for a comprehen
-sive productivity experience across the PC, phone, and browser
Microsoft Exchange Online:
• Cloud-based email, calendar and contacts with the current anti-virus and anti-spam solutions. Includes the ability to get email on virtually any mobile phone and options for voice
-mail, unified messaging and archiving
Microsoft SharePoint
• ® Online: Cloud-based service
for creating sites to connect colleagues, partners and customers. Includes enterprise social networking and customization options
Microsoft Lync™ Online:
• Cloud-based instant mes
-saging (IM), presence, and online meeting experi
-ences with screen sharing, and voice conferencing and videoconferencing
Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE)
Google Apps offers reliable, secure web-based office tools
for any size business. GAPE provides the following hosted software services:
Gmail:
• A web-based email service that lets a business run their email by using Google’s systems
Google Calendar:
• A web-based service for managing personal, corporate, and team calendars
Google Talk:
• Lets users communicate with each other in real time through instant messaging
Google Docs:
• Provides web-based tools for creating and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations
Google Sites:
• Lets users create web sites to publish internally within a company or externally
Google Video:
• Lets users upload videos to a shared repository and view them through a web-based player
Google Message Security:
• Lets administrators create rules for handling messages containing specific con
“In a five-month
timeframe, we migrated
roughly 30,000 people
to a hosted [Microsoft]
solution, without
impacting their business
or interrupting their
day-to-day operations.”
— Esat Sezar, CIO, Coca-Cola Enterprises
Email and Calendaring Migration and Coexistence
IBM Lotus Notes/Domino uses a proprietary message storage and calendaring format, so migrating its data to the cloud with complete fidelity is difficult. During migration, Lotus Notes/Domino may have to coexist with the cloud-based service for months, depending on the size of the organization. Maintaining coexistence between Lotus Notes/Domino and the cloud-based service is paramount during this transition period so that everyone can still send messages, reserve conference rooms, schedule meetings, and perform other tasks.
Migration and Coexistence Tools
Microsoft provides state-of-the-art email and calendaring migration and coexistence tools to help you move IBM Lotus Notes email and calendar data quickly and efficiently to Office 365. Microsoft and its partners have an excellent track record in preparing organizations for the transition from IBM Lotus Notes and other messaging systems to Exchange Online. Microsoft has developed a comprehen-sive, well-tested Microsoft Migration Planning Process to
minimize the impact on Lotus Notes/Domino users during migration. This migration process is successful without manual intervention more than 98 percent of the time, with safeguards that enable Microsoft to identify and correct problems before they become visible to end users. The CIO of Coca Cola said:
Many Microsoft partners offer services and tools for enterprises that want to move to hosted services. For ex
-ample, BinaryTree offers a speedy migration service called “Weekend Express” that can move up to 10,000 Lotus Notes user accounts along with all their message data to Office 365 over a single weekend. BinaryTree also provides coexistence solutions that enable free/busy lookups for Lotus Notes calendars, integration processing for workflow applications that send custom emails, and middleware intelligence to transform recurring calendar invitations and other complex messaging items so that they work correctly between IBM Lotus Notes and Exchange.
Google, by contrast, provides only lightweight tools for converting Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino email messages and some contact and calendar data to Google Apps. Google’s tools do not support archived mail, contacts, meeting rooms, tasks, and advanced calendar items in Lotus Notes. IT personnel or end users must install the Google Apps Sync application, or use forms in admin-generated email messages, and then move much of their data manually. Google provides also offers only simple coexistence capabilities during migration. For example, users cannot handle all meeting requests or business-process workflow messages during migration added additional cost to any transition. Lotus Notes applications that send messages including workflow buttons, embedded forms, or doclinks will be unusable when delivered to Gmail.
For a side-by-side comparison of how well email data migrates from Lotus Notes to Exchange versus Google Apps Premier Edition, see the table on the next page.
Email Data Migration from Lotus Notes to Exchange Online versus Google Apps Premiere Edition
Migrated content
or feature
Exchange
Online
Apps
Gmail Differences
E mail (messages
with read state) Yes Yes Email messages are automatically combined into threads based on subject line.
Mail folders Yes Partial Folders become labels, and names are end-truncated if over 40 characters.
Attachments and
rich formatting Yes Partial Executable attachments (including self-extracting zip files) are not copied. Rich formatting layout is altered in the conversion to HTML.
Flags, reminders,
and importance Yes No Flags become stars. Follow-up reminders are lost.
Inbox rules Yes No Not migrated to Gmail
Signatures Yes No Not migrated to Gmail
Delegations and
sharing Yes No Delegations and sharing settings don’t import to Gmail
Encrypted mail Yes No Lotus Notes users must decrypt all email before the migration to either BPOS or GAPE.
Calendar
(all calendars) Yes Yes
Free and busy status Yes Yes
Attendees and
responses Yes Yes
Event reminders Yes Yes
Attachments and
formatting Yes No Attachments are stripped from calendar events, and rich formatting in calendar events does not import.
Personal Contacts Yes Yes Users must synchronize their personal address books before migration .
-Personal groups and
D/Ls Yes Yes
Attachments, notes,
and links Yes No Attachments are stripped. Links are no longer clickable. Notes larger than 16k are truncated.
Global Contacts
(GAL) Yes Yes
The End User’s Migration Experience
Migration to any new environment will almost always impact end users, but you can minimize that impact by choosing the right hosted service provider. During migration to Office 365, Microsoft’s tools help you move end-user email and calendar
-ing content with full fidelity and provide a viable coexistence experience for messag-ing and calendar-ing. Coexistence with Office 365 during a transition period doesn’t require you to redevelop or remediate any IBM Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino applications. Even after their email is moved to Office 365, end users can continue to use Lotus Notes to reserve conference rooms for meetings and interact with workflow messages generated by business-process applications.
The experience of ends users during and after migration from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps can be unsatisfac
-tory because there is no integrated coexistence for recurring calendar items, complex mail messages, or business process workflow messages. Users must continue to check a secondary mailbox on Lotus Notes for any business-process messages generated by applications. What’s more, unread messages are marked as read after the migration to Gmail, and users cannot act upon Lotus Notes-specific content such as forms, buttons, and document links in Gmail messages. What’s more, the default setting for all messages in Gmail is “conversation view”—threading messages in an unorthodox manner, which can frustrate many users.
End User Adoption
Office 365 provides users with the same familiar, easy-to-use interface in Microsoft Excel®, Word, PowerPoint®, and OneNote that users may already have on their desktops. Users are usually already familiar with the tools and options in these products from past experience, so they can get started with them right away, rather than facing a potential loss of productivity. These applications are also available in online versions in Office 2010 Web Apps to help users maximize their productivity when they’re away from their desktops. Office 2010 Web Apps have the familiar Office Fluent user interface and offer essential editing capabilities, without loss of data or formatting.
With Office 365, IT can leverage role-based access controls to help you save time and to lower operational costs 15-20% by reducing the burden on your IT staff. A new role-based security model, self-service capabilities, and the web-based Exchange Control Panel, let you delegate common or specialized tasks to your users without giving them full administrative rights or increasing help desk call volume.
By contrast, Google provides very basic functionality with limited capabilities for users and administrators. For example, Google Apps converts any Office or OpenOffice document into HTML, which permanently alters content, often removing critical elements such as charts without warning the user.
With Google Apps, IT administrators have either full or no
control over accounts. They cannot delegate tasks, and anyone who has administrator access can decommission an entire email service. Because of these and other problems, organizations that use Google Apps have to train end users and IT support staff, and reset expectations because of reduced Google Apps functionality. Organizations must also deal with risks from Google Labs applications, third-party widgets, and fixes that Google slipstreams into the environment as unsupported installations.
To find out more about the many missing features and file-fidelity problems that users experience in Google Apps, visit the following page, and in the Unified Business Platform section, click Discover how “Gone Google” could impact your IT Landscape:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/ why-microsoft/Pages/google-apps_20100816.aspx#fbid=-XJ4SNPkSt9
Microsoft Outlook® Interoperability
Microsoft Outlook is the most popular email client in organizations of all sizes. With Office 365, users have access to mail and calendaring via a rich client, the web, or phone. Organizations that are used to a rich-client experience, including integrated off-line access for email and calen
-daring, should understand the support requirements for Outlook with Google Apps.
Google heavily publicizes Gmail’s integration with Outlook. But Gmail only partially synchronizes data with Outlook, and in some cases, requires users to manage two different inboxes. Among other features, Gmail is also missing:
Robust security features.
• Gmail does not offer en
-terprise-grade security features such as Digital Rights Management, message encryption, digital signatures, and policy-based email management, which Exchange with Outlook includes at extra cost.
Outlook data types.
• A Gmail account will not store in the cloud data such as Outlook Categories, Tasks, Notes, Journal Entries, rules, signatures, delivery receipts, importance levels, follow-up flags and re
-minders, meeting invitation attachments, and other meeting invitation content such as images, links, and bold text. This presents a risk of data loss, as the data is stored only on client machines.
Offline features.
• Offline features that Outlook sup
-ports such as out-of-office responses, recalling sent messages, recovering deleted items, and personal distribution lists do not synchronize with Gmail.
Scheduling features.
• Gmail does not offer suggested meeting times, conference room availability, optional attendees and other scheduling features that Outlook includes.
Access to a Global Address List (GAL).
• Gmail does not offer access to data such as additional contact phone numbers, company name, organizational hierarchy, employee titles, group addresses, and out-of-domain contacts that users can find in the GAL in
Outlook .
Other Outlook features.
• Gmail does not provide document preview and many other features that come with Outlook.
Alerts.
• Users typically want to know when new email messages and instant messages arrive. Unlike with Outlook and Exchange, if Gmail isn’t open in browser, the user will not receive these alerts. The customer must also deploy Google Talk to receive this function
-ality.
Presence.
• Information that shows whether users are free or busy is extremely helpful when users need to schedule meetings and contact other users. With Gmail, users or IT teams have to deploy and configure two separate utilities from Google to obtain presence information.
In addition, supporting Outlook synchronization with Google requires installing a separate tool, Google Apps Sync for Outlook. For IT, this means deploying client-side connectors on every PC as well as setting up a server to synchronize the company’s LDAP directory with Google Apps for a Global Address Book. Besides Google Apps Sync for Outlook, to provide Gmail with the same functionality that you get at no additional cost in Exchange Online and Outlook, you could require the following extra applications and browser add-ons and plug-ins:
Exchange to Google Apps Migrato
• r for bulk migration of email messages from Exchange to Gmail
DirSyn
• c or another application to synchronize the Gmail directory with Active Directory®
MyOneLogi
• n or a similar identity service to provide single-sign-on to Active Directory
Postin
• i to provide message archiving
Google Chrom
• e to use the latest features in HTML version 5.
Unified Messaging, Instant Messaging,
and User Presence
Microsoft uses instant messaging functionality in an innovative and integrated way: IM functionality is both a messaging vehicle and a presence indicator in Outlook and other Microsoft applications. The presence indicator shows who is online and whether they are available or busy at a given time. Microsoft applications track the presence of users who are part of an organization’s Active Directory in
-frastructure in all communications and documents. Without leaving an application, users can click a presence indicator to invite people to chat. Features like the presence indica
-tor are possible because Microsoft integrates applications from the ground up to improve user productivity.
Thanks to Microsoft federated services, users can even see presence indicators for any partners and customers with whom their organization has a federation agreement. This further enhances productivity by letting people securely communicate with people in organizations associated with their own.
Many IBM Lotus Notes customers have implemented the Lotus Sametime infrastructure on-premises to provide instant messaging and user presence capabilities. Google offers a basic IM and PC to PC or web-based calling system called Google Talk, which is available as a stand
-alone Windows application. Built on the open Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for IM, Google Talk connects with other XMPP-based IM networks so users can chat beyond the bounds of their organization.
However, Google Talk does not integrate with other Google products, so it cannot be used as a central management point for user presence. Unlike in Microsoft applications, with Google Talk, there is no automated set of rules for how to communicate with contacts based on their presence.
Offline Capabilities
Microsoft applications present security-enhanced offline capabilities. Outlook users have the same client experience while disconnected from the Internet. Office users can make changes to documents offline and synchronize just the delta updates when they are online by using SharePoint Workspace 2010. This allows users to take full SharePoint list types, including: Discussion, Announcements, Links, and Custom Lists offline. Even workflows can be taken offline so that every time a user synchronizes it will correctly trigger any workflows that are idle and listening to activity. Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) allow line-of-business application data to be pulled offline. Combine BCS with the support for InfoPath forms inside of Outlook and SharePoint Workspace 2010, and users can work with all corresponding business data and applications whether online or offline.
By contrast, Google Apps’ lack of offline capabilities are a big gap in Google’s offerings. Google Apps users are much less productive when they cannot connect to the Internet. Google’s answer to this problem is Google Gears, a browser add-in for which Google abandoned support on May 4, 2010 and which the GAPE SLA does not support. GAPE
provides offline caching for mail and calendaring ONLY. All creation and updates to documents, spreadsheets, or pre
-sentations must be done while connected to the Internet. Google Gears must be deployed for every user, and data is stored locally in an unencrypted state.
Migrating Applications and Data
Document repositories, itemized tracking systems, and forms-based business process applications also run on IBM Lotus Notes/Domino servers. To transition these applications to the cloud, capabilities such as built-in workflow, role-based security and business logic must be redeveloped and supported. Google’s strategy document for transitioning IBM Lotus Notes applications states that if an organization’s “migration costs don’t justify an appropriate return on investment, or us
-ers and business processes depend on a small set of Notes applications in a way that complicates migration, then continuing to support a Lotus Notes installation may be the logical path.”
If you want to transition away from IBM Lotus Notes completely, you must consider the custom applications running in your environment. Many organizations that have moved their email to Exchange Online have hesitated to move their Lotus Notes applications to SharePoint. But the release of SharePoint 2010 has changed this dramatically. Microsoft has added a great deal of functionality in customization and development to help organizations migrate to SharePoint from IBM Lotus Notes. For instance, organizations can use SharePoint Designer, a free downloadable application, to customize hosted SharePoint sites without writing any code. Using SharePoint Designer, developers can create custom workflows, extensively customize pages, edit master pages, work with complex web parts, add custom action buttons, and more.
Application Platform Comparison
Both Microsoft and Google offer application-development environments as target platforms for IBM Lotus Notes applications. But only Microsoft lets you deploy applica
-tions both on premises and in the cloud. You can deploy SharePoint business applications in the cloud, on premises, or in a hybrid manner—both in the cloud and on-premises. SharePoint 2010 offers development capabilities that require no coding, and advanced content-management features such as Managed Metadata to address the busi
-ness needs of customers.
Another new feature that will be particularly popular with Lotus Notes developers is the ability to specify simple input validation formulas for data fields, including the messages that should be displayed if the validation tests fail.
By comparison, Google does not provide an on-premises option for deploying business applications. All applications must be redeveloped in their hosted services environment and supported in the cloud. If you cannot re-platform your IBM Lotus Notes applications to Google’s hosted services environment due to redevelopment costs, security con
-cerns, or data-management issues, then you will likely need to retain your IBM Lotus Notes environment.
Google’s version of an application development platform is a mixture of solutions, including Google Sites, Google Apps Scripts, Google Spreadsheets, Google Gadgets, and Google App Engine. For custom development, you must rebuild
Custom Forms Development
Redeveloping a Lotus Notes application requires rede
-signing the forms for creating and editing data records. Microsoft InfoPath 2010 is a popular solution for building data-entry forms for custom business applications. InfoPath is designed for both advanced business users and develop
-ers, depending on the type of forms-based solution you need. Many Lotus Notes customers see InfoPath as the best choice for redesigning Lotus Notes forms that contain user-friendly field layouts, integrated tables, non-trivial data validation rules, and interactive functionality such as hide-when formulas.
SharePoint 2010 also introduces a great way to simplify data updates called InfoPath List Forms. This feature allows developers and power users to use InfoPath forms as the content editor for SharePoint list items. This mimics how Lotus Notes applications work, with custom forms in which to enter and display record data stored in the application. There are two options for hosting custom forms within the Google Apps environment, but neither is as flexible or powerful as what you can do with SharePoint or InfoPath. Both options use the basic Google Spreadsheets capability to generate a form with data fields. The first option feed the form’s results directly into a spreadsheet repository in Google Docs. A second option uses Google Sites to embed the Google Spreadsheets form inside a custom location.
Business Process Workflow
Lotus Notes workflows are almost always implemented as code segments attached to various action buttons, form events, and agents. By contrast, the Microsoft platform encourages the use of declarative workflows expressed as rules that even non-programmers can understand, enter, and modify.
Declarative workflow capabilities have improved sig
-nificantly in SharePoint 2010, with a much richer set of out-of-the-box workflows to use in applications. Workflow templates in SharePoint 2010 include an Approval Process, a Collect Feedback review process, a Collect Signatures review process, and a Disposition Approval workflow for managing content lifecycles. Developers and even end users can customize the out-of-the-box workflows if needed, or design their own from scratch by using the new capabilities in SharePoint Designer. These new workflows can be created, tested, and deployed without writing any code, and they can address most of the workflows in Lotus Notes applications.
By contrast, any workflow capabilities in Google Apps must be developed in Java and linked to HTML forms or forms created within Google Spreadsheets.
Application Data Migration Tools
Once you have developed or redeveloped the application in the target platform or identified the content manage
-ment repository in the new environ-ment, you must still migrate application data to the new location. Microsoft has many partners that can migrate IBM Lotus Notes applica
-tion data to SharePoint, either on-premises or in the cloud. These partners’ migration tools can directly provision SharePoint sites and lists, and transition content with high fidelity, including the author/editor identities as well as the original creation dates associated with the data records. In addition, they can move all content formatting intact as well as the metadata tags, document links, and cor
-responding file attachments from the original application repositories.
Google, on the other hand, provides no such partner tools for migrating data to a new application built on Google Apps. Instead, you must write your own data migration scripts by using the import APIs that Google supports. These import options do not provide the same level of data fidelity and content-mapping capabilities delivered by
Full Lotus Notes/Domino Retirement
Transitioning an entire portfolio of IBM Lotus Notes items to the cloud or an on-premises platform often requires rebuilding highly customized, mission-critical business-process applications and migrating data to the target platform. Some of these applications need the advanced data-management features of a relational database, flexible security models, and customizable user interface capabili
-ties. If you cannot migrate these complex applications to the cloud, you must continue to pay for the infrastructure and support of IBM Lotus Notes in your environment. Many mainstream business decision-makers may want holistic hosted services that can accommodate custom development of complex business applications. Google is quickly building the disparate elements of the Google App Engine (GAE), Google Gadgets, and Google Apps Scripts. But how these solutions will be integrated and how they will scale with the appropriate data management and security levels is not clear. Google has not yet released a clear roadmap for the future of the Google application platform.
Microsoft, on the other hand, continues to release road
-maps that outline the future capabilities that SharePoint 2010 will bring to hosted-services offerings for content management, simple item tracking, workflow and collabo
-ration applications.
Microsoft is also creating a comprehensive cloud environment in which you can develop highly scalable custom applications: Windows Azure™. This platform consists of a group of powerful cloud technologies that provide specific services to application developers. Windows Azure provides a Windows-based environment for running applications and storing data on servers in Microsoft data centers. The components of the Windows Azure platform are:
SQL Azure™:
• Provides data services in the cloud based on Microsoft SQL Server®.
Windows Azure platform AppFabric:
• Provides cloud services for connecting applications running in the cloud or on premises.
Developers in the Windows Azure platform can build ap
-plications that use the Microsoft .NET Framework, unman
-aged code, or other approaches. Developers can write these applications in popular programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic, C++, and Java, using Visual Studio or another development tool. Developers can create web
Integration with On-Premises Application
Environment
Both Windows Azure applications and on-premises applications can access the Windows Azure storage service, and both do it in the same way: using a RESTful approach. This service allows storing binary large objects (blobs), provides queues for communication between components of Windows Azure applications, and even offers a form of tables with a simple query language. For applications that need traditional relational storage, the Windows Azure platform provides the SQL Azure Database for all relational database functions. An application that uses the Windows Azure platform can use any combination of these storage options.
Running applications and storing data in the cloud can have clear benefits. Rather than buying, installing, and operating your own systems, for example, you rely on a cloud provider to do this for you. Also, you pay only for the computing and storage that you use, rather than maintain
-ing extra servers only for peak loads. And if your applica
-tions are written correctly, they can scale tremendously to take advantage of the enormous data centers that Microsoft provides.
Just as IT organizations have had to adapt to the changes brought by PCs, mobile devices, and other new platforms, they now need to decide how to adapt to cloud platforms. And just as Windows played a huge part in those earlier shifts in computing, Windows Azure is poised to take an important role in the new world of cloud computing. If you are responsible for charting your organization’s IT path, it makes good sense to evaluate and understand the Windows Azure environment.
By comparison, the Google App Engine is limited in its enterprise capabilities. GAE lacks a true relational database management system to provide robust RDBMS functional
-ity. In addition, Google offers only limited support for the GAE database APIs. And unlike Microsoft, which offers a financially-backed Service Level Agreement for Windows Azure, Google still offers no SLA for GAE, so if GAE is down, you have no recourse for your lost time and money.
Links and Resources
For more information about hosted service offerings from Microsoft, visit the following links and resources.
Microsoft Links
Microsoft Office 365:
• office365.microsoft.com
Business Productivity Online Standard Suite:
• www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx
Microsoft Exchange Online:
• www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-online.mspx
Microsoft SharePoint Online:
• www.microsoft.com/online/sharepoint-online.mspx
Microsoft Office Communications Online:
• www.microsoft.com/online/office-communications-online.mspx
Microsoft Office Live Meeting:
• www.microsoft.com/online/office-live-meeting.mspx
Customer Case Studies
GlaxoSmithKline
The second largest pharmaceutical company in the world, GlaxoSmithKline supplies a quarter of the world’s vaccines and produces some of the leading prescription medicines and consumer healthcare products.
Business Situation
GlaxoSmithKline needed to improve collaboration with partners, to improve effectiveness in growing markets, to move away from customized solutions, and to lower the cost of operations and investments.
Solution
GlaxoSmithKline chose to replace the Lotus Notes, Domino, and Postini services with the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite – including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and the Microsoft Deskless Worker Suite to deploy to all of its employees worldwide. Everything would be hosted by Microsoft at Microsoft data centers around the globe.
Benefits
Reduce Operational Costs
•
Drive Innovation
•
Improve Collaboration
•
Simplify User Experience
•
“We have chosen Microsoft
Online Services because
it promises to deliver a
simple intuitive Information
Workplace that should
not only bring value to
the company through
simplification, but provide
an improved user experience
and ultimately create a more
productive GSK.”
Godiva Chocolates
Godiva Chocolatier is a premier purveyor of hand-crafted chocolates, available from its 400-plus global boutique stores, other retailers, and over the Internet. Godiva is based in New York City and has 1,400 employees.
Business Situation
Godiva needed to upgrade its aging IBM Lotus Notes email system, but felt that the move would be expensive and consume valuable IT staff time. Also, users were dissatisfied with the Notes interface. Godiva also looked at LotusLive, a cloud-based email service from IBM, and Google Gmail.
Solution
Godiva licensed the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services, which provides Microsoft communications and collaboration pro
-grams for a monthly per-user fee. They worked with Binary Tree, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to migrate their email into the “cloud,” using Microsoft Online Services. By delivering email over the Internet, Godiva eliminated U.S.$250,000 in annual Notes maintenance and hosting fees, achieved cost-effective email scalability, and freed its IT staff to focus on supporting business growth.
Benefits
U.S.$250,000 annual savings
•
Faster response to business needs
•
Easier scalability
•
Cost-effective availability
•
Microsoft Migration Partners
Microsoft works closely with scores of partners that have experience in migrating Lotus Notes installations to Microsoft products. Three key Microsoft partners have migrated more than 35 million users from Lotus Notes to Microsoft products in the past decade:
Binary Tree: • www.binarytree.com CASAHL Technology: • www.casahl.com Quest Software: • www.quest.com/
“I’ve been able to provide
equal or better email service
at a much lower cost, which
is a big win for Godiva.
We’re looking at a $250,000
annual savings from
eliminating Notes.”
— Steve Whitelam, Director of Information Technology, Global Shared Services, Godiva Chocolatier
