news Queensland’s Griffith University has become the latest educational institution to shift its staff email accounts into Google’s cloud, announcing yesterday that it would ditch IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes/Domino suite as it did so.

The university had previously shifted its 120,000 staff and alumni onto Google’s Apps platform in early 2010. However, up until now, the institution’s staff had still been using Lotus Notes/Domino, hosted on-premise in its own datacentre. According to a statement issued by the university last week, however, all that is about to change. Pilot groups of staff will move to Google Apps this month (October), the statement said, and most staff will move after the University’s examination period in November. All staff will be migrated by March 2012.

Google Apps will provide opportunities for staff and students to enjoy deeper, richer collaborations and tap into “the world’s latest communication innovations, according to Griffith’s pro vice chancellor (Information Services), Linda O’Brien.

“We were drawn to the fact Google shares similar characteristics to Griffith, with both organisations being innovative, youthful, fast moving, and committed to advancing knowledge — Griffith through its research and teaching, Google through making the world’s information and knowledge accessible,” O’Brien said. “Griffith is a leading research university that cares about its students and staff, so it makes sense to create an environment that places our staff and students in the same space, facilitating collaboration and learning.

“Our academics need the ability to collaborate globally, to communicate, share, and build strong research relationships if we are to advance knowledge and solve the world’s biggest problems. Google makes this borderless collaboration easy,” she said.

Griffith will give its staff access to the complete Google Apps suite, with 25GB of email storage space being unlocked and tools like Google’s Docs office suite, calendar and Talk collaboration suite being made available.

“We are very happy to see yet another leading University in Australia adopt Google Apps,” said Stuart McLean, Google’s Head of Enterprise, Australia and New Zealand. “Education cannot be restricted to the walls of a classroom, it is when ideas can be quickly expressed, shared and developed that learning takes a whole new meaning.” Google Partner Dialog IT will aid with the migration.

A number of major Australian educational institutions have migrated both their staff and students to Google Apps over the past several years. However, Microsoft has won more business than Google in the sector over that period, with its Live@EDU and Exchange platforms proving more attractive than Google Apps for most organisations.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons

It was only five years ago that diversified Australian company Amalgamated Holdings (AHL) caused controversy in Australia’s IT sector by becoming one of the few major groups to dump Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform in favour of IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes/Domino suite. But now the company has gone back to Microsoft.

In December 2006, AHL revealed it would ditch an Outlook/Exchange install which was being used by parts of its business, as part of a wider consolidation plan. At the time, the company said it made sense to standardise the entire company on Notes, given the fact that it had dedicated business applications running on the IBM suite, as well as the more standardised collaboration tools.

AHL operates a number of entertainment and leisure facilities around the country and overseas — over 50 hotels and resorts, some 60 movie cinemas, the Thredbo Alpine Resort and more. Back in 2006, some of its core businesses — for example, the Rydges Hotel chain — was using Notes, and over the next year or so the company would, with the assistance of systems integrator IMC Communications, extend that install to the rest of its operations.

However, in a media release issued this week, IMC revealed AHL had gone back to its Microsoft roots.

“Due to the increased use of new technologies such as iPhones, PDAs and other smartphone technology, it became imperative that AHL update its Lotus Notes email collaboration platform,” a case study published by IMC this week states.

“The business decided that it needed to migrate over 2,000 mailboxes and users from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Exchange platform,to further enhance business functionality and take advantage of easier ways to connect staff and enable staff productivity.”

“AHL investigated the options of managing the migration to Microsoft Exchange in-house, however it was deemed that the cost, time, skills and resources required, were too large for the business to independently cover. The answer was to outsource the migration process to IT specialists.”

In the end, as a number of other large Australian organisations have recently done, AHL and IMC decided to shift the company’s collaboration system onto Microsoft’s hosted Business Productivity Online Suite.

The decision meant the company’s several thousand email accounts were transferred across to Microsoft’s BPOS server farm, which IMC noted was based in Hong Kong. Microsoft has never directly disclosed where Australian BPOS customers have their data hosted, but the company does not maintain a BPOS datacentre in Australia.

The company’s closest BPOS facility geographically is believed to be located in Singapore.

The news comes as Australian organisations are increasingly migrating off platforms such as Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, which were popular throughout the past several decades but have not been able to maintain their position in the market compared with Microsoft’s popular Outlook/Exchange ecosystem, which is now extending into cloud computing services.

Google’s Apps platform is currently seen as the main competitor to Microsoft’s offerings for new email system installations, but the search giant has so far failed to make major in-roads into either the financial or public sectors in Australia, despite building a strong presence in small business and firms with distributed or franchised operations.

Image credit: Aidy Spencer, Creative Commons

Westpac Banking Corporation, one of Australia’s largest users of IBM’s besieged Lotus Notes/Domino ecosystem, has finally confirmed it is ready to dump the platform in favour of Microsoft’s rival Outlook/Exchange system, in a move which constitutes the latest nail in the coffin for Notes in Australia.

The bank has been a Lotus user for more than a decade, backed by its lengthy comprehensive technology outsourcing agreement with IBM. But despite renewing its vows with Big Blue for a further five years last November, Westpac today confirmed it had filed divorce papers with its troubled email platform.

“Westpac is currently reviewing its email requirements,” a bank spokesperson said in a brief statement this afternoon, “and looking forward to migrating all Westpac staff to Microsoft Outlook.” The bank could not confirm any further details, but people with knowledge of the situation said it intended to migrate to the latest version of Microsoft’s platform — Exchange 2010 — over the next 18 months with the support of both existing partner IBM and Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu.

The move will constitute one of the largest Lotus to Exchange migrations in Australia’s history, as the bank has some 39,000 staff — dwarfing even the shift by Qantas in 2010 of its 20,000 staff to Exchange, and other rollouts such as the ones conducted by financial services giant AMP and Coca-Cola Amatil.

It is not known to what extent Westpac uses Notes’ broader functions in its operations beyond email. Many organisations who have been using the platform for years, as Westpac has, have taken advantage internally of the all-encompassing development environment which Notes provides. It can be a complex exercise for much of that functionality to be migrated onto Microsoft’s platform — often involving the use of the software giant’s SharePoint collaboration portal, for example.

Some organisations are still happy with Lotus, however — such as Australian youth charity BoysTown, which has remained with Notes/Domino and even upgraded the platform, citing the extensibility of IBM’s solution compared with that of rivals.

The next major known shift from Lotus Notes/Domino to Exchange will likely take place at new super-agency the Department of Human Services, which in June last year revealed it was likely to end the long-running relationship which some of its component agencies have had for years with Notes, as part of its massive technology consolidation — which recently received a funding boost worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the Federal Budget.

Various agencies to be consolidated — especially Centrelink and Medicare Australia — have used the ailing Notes platform for years. But in an interview last year, the department’s technology chief John Wadeson said it was likely that the new super-department would standardise on Exchange.

“I couldn’t say that it was set in stone, but we are at this minute certainly looking at moving to a Microsoft platform in that layer,” he said.

Opinions differ vastly between technology sector workers about the merits of the two platforms, with many preferring either one — or even Google’s Apps suite. However, common reasons cited by chief information officers for the ongoing migrations from Notes include the belief that it doesn’t support third-party devices such as mobile phones as well, and the powerful integration between Outlook/Exchange and the rest of Microsoft’s enterprise software stack and unified communications platforms built by vendors like Cisco (which Westpac also uses).

Image credit: Winam, Creative Commons

opinion If there is one thing I am absolutely sick to death of, it is the pathetic rantings of die-hard Lotus Notes fanboys about how technically superior their product is, and how everyone else who isn’t drinking the IBM kool-aid is somehow incredibly “biased” and don’t understand Notes’ obvious superiority.

Let me walk you through an average day in these people’s lives.

Courtesy of their Google Alerts set on key search terms like ‘Lotus Notes’ and ‘Domino’, when they slouch cringingly into their Office Space-esque working environments just before 9AM every morning, they receive an annotated list of stories posted on global websites about how yet another mega-corporation has dumped Notes, typically in favour of the ultimate evil and hated destroyer of worlds, Microsoft Exchange.

Instantly, and despite the fact that this happens every day, the fingers of these Lotus Notes’ fanboys tighten in terror around their 1980′s IBM-branded coffee mug filled with weak herbal tea. Their throat seizes up as if they are having an asthma attack, and a series of short, disjuncted noises issue from their mouth as they gaze fixatedly at the screen, their beady eyes unable to look away from what they perceive as a horriffic event.

Then, setting the tea down shakily, these Lotus fanboys scrabble with gnarled fingers at the keyboard and mouse until they find the comments section of the website concerned. “BIAS!!!” they scream. “This journalist must be BIASED against Lotus! He’s on the Microsoft payroll! Look at all the Microsoft advertisements on the site! It’s a CONSPIRACY!”

They then proceed to outline in amazingly detailed prose the technical reasons why the Lotus Notes/Domino ecosystem is inherently better than Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange alternative. The extensibility of the platform. The number of third-party additions. Its easy upgrade path. The fact that you can now get it “in the cloud” with Lotus Live. Its better security and integrated collaboration features.

And the list goes on.

Without fail, they punctuate their article with yet another, slightly more veiled jab at the journalist writing the article, before collapsing briefly into their chair as their anger dissipates and they raise their mug of herbal tea once again as a knight in the Crusades would have raised his sword, believing that they have righted all wrongs and put the world to harmony once more. “I showed him,” they think, and start preparing the daily email to their chief executive justifying why their company’s Lotus email system won’t sync with his mobile phone.

We received the perfect example of this yesterday, after we published an article about local company Steinhoff shifting to Microsoft’s hosted BPOS platform.

“This is the most emotive and biased article I have read for a long time. This is not information, it is Microsoft propaganda and shows your organisation and your so-called reporting to be nothing but an arm of the Microsoft marketing,” screamed an individual named Paul. “Grow up and give us some real news backed by facts, not your obviously biased opinion.”

Thanks Paul. I deleted your comment, because unlike those of other readers, it had nothing constructive to add to the conversation. Actually, I enjoyed doing so, because I am a former systems administrator and I can be petty like that at times (see the Bastard Operator from Hell). But I re-publish it here as a prime example of the case I have described above.

The problem with Lotus Notes fanboys is that they are incredibly hypocritical. Long-term readerswill know that this author has written dozens of articles over the past several years about email platform migrations in large organisations. Yes, many of the stories have been about Notes/Domino customers migrating to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, and there is an undeniable trend in this direction. However, we’ve also written many stories about organisations migrating off every platform under the sun and onto Google’s Apps suite, which is in direct competition with both IBM and Microsoft’s options.

But here’s the thing: The Lotus Notes fanboys never come out of the woodwork to discuss the situation when a Microsoft customer goes Google — or even onto another platform like Zimbra. They only get excited and jump up and down when Lotus is involved. They have absolutely no interest in discussing organisations’ actual email needs logically and rationally in the context of their businesses — they just want to impotently scream bloody murder whenever their personal lovechild takes a bodyblow.

Ironically, whenever we write a story about an organisation ‘going Google’, it’s the Microsoft fanboys who list us as their number one public enemy. I’d bet Microsoft fanboys are probably a little better dressed than Lotus fanboys, but they still scream similar things at us.

“BIAS!” they scream. “Gmail is not ready for the enterprise! It’s insecure because it’s hosted overseas and the US Patriot Act means the Government can see up your skirt! Look at all the Google ads on the site! This journalist must be on the Google payroll! It’s a CONSPIRACY!”

It’s remarkable how similar Lotus and Exchange fanboys are — almost as if they were separated at birth. It would be as if Pauline Hanson and Sarah Palin were originally twins but grew up in separate households and came to form the same ridiculous views but for completely different reasons.

Right. Now that I’ve insulted all of the Lotus Notes fanboys sufficiently to get their attention and send the Google Alerts emails springing like demonic hyperactive mice into their inboxes, I want to get to the real point of this article: To issue an open amnesty and invitation to them in bulk.

The thing about most technology journalists is that although each probably has an email platform that they prefer, because we’re all heavy users of email, we’re not usually paid to express an opinion about that (although sometimes we do) — we’re usually paid to report on the news of the day and describe what’s happening out there in IT departments around the world.

I say this to make the point that I would LOVE to report on new deployments of Lotus Notes/Domino. I’m FASCINATED with the current state of enterprise collaboration (as geeky as that may sound) and I’ve been reporting on this space for the better part of a decade now, after working as a systems administrator on mail systems and other assorted and sundry items myself.

The problem is that I simply have not been able to find any new deployments of Lotus Notes/Domino in Australia at all for the past several years, so despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have to go on reporting new Exchange and Google Apps deployments — and even new Zimbra rollouts — because I simply do not know of any new Lotus ones.

Where possible, I have reported on Lotus Notes upgrades. I really enjoyed doing that, because I got the chance to tell a different story from the same old, Organisation X dumps Lotus Notes for Exchange/Google Apps yadda yadda yadda. And also, again, as dumb as this sounds, I like talking to IT managers, systems administrators and CIOs about their systems. I’m just wired that way.

So today I am issuing an OPEN INVITATION and AMNESTY to Lotus Notes fanboys.

If you come up with an Australian organisation who is deploying a new installation of Lotus Notes/Domino of 100 seats or more, I will guarante to interview them. I will guarantee to write a story of at least 500 words and probably longer about their deployment. If they will let me and it is in Sydney, I will even physically travel to their office and do a video interview with them.

This guarantee also extends in part to those upgrading old installations of Lotus Notes. I guarantee that if you can come up with an organisation of 500 seats or larger who is upgrading their copy of Notes/Domino, I will guarantee to interview them as well and publish a story.

I issue this amnesty so that it is on the public record that I am not a “BIAS” journalist and that I am interested in email platforms of all stripes. If I break my word on this, please feel free to slander me in public as much as you want to.

But, Lotus Notes fanboys, here’s the kicker.

If I do not receive any invitations to interview Australian Lotus Notes customers over the next 12 months, you must acknowledge this. You must acknowledge that IBM’s precious email and collaboration platform is suffering a slow and prolonged death by a thousand cuts, and that it will shortly be consigned to the graveyard of history as Microsoft and Google divide up its once strong empire between them.

If, Lotus Notes fanboys, you do not come up with the goods in the next 12 months and let me know about some new Notes/Domino customers, you must quit your incessant bitching that journalists are “BIASED” and walk away. It would make me extremely happy if you then undertook Microsoft or Google re-education and admitted the error of your ways, because then I could laugh at you and point out that you had sold out to one or both evil empires, and that if you were real men, the truth is that you should never have stopped using EMACS in the first place and that graphical user interfaces are for wimps.

Happy?

Image credit: The film Jerry Maguire, the “Show me the money” scene

update Microsoft has inserted yet another nail in the coffin of IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino suite and is hammering it home, with the company and partner Telstra convincing furniture specialist Steinhoff to dump its Lotus installation and shift to the Telstra-branded version of Redmond’s Business Productivity Online Suite.

Steinhoff operates the popular Freedom Furniture, Snooze and Bay Leather Republic brands, and has a substantial presence in the Asia-Pacific region — with 154 retail outlets and some 2,500 employees.

A statement published this morning by Telstra, Microsoft and partner HubOne revealed the company had bought some 1,050 BPOS seats through Telstra’s T-Suite portal. BPOS operates on a hosted model, with customers getting access to products such Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server and Live Meeting through a web browser.

The company is believed to have been previously using IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino package, although the migration to BPOS is not yet complete.

400 of those staff will be limited in the feature set they receive, as they will receive collaboration tools through what Microsoft describes as its Exchange Online Deskless Worker tier, while the other 600-odd will have access to the full suite of BPOS tools.

HubOne will manage migration of Steinhoff’s services to the cloud, with the company expecting the integration process to be complete by May. ”We are absolutely delighted to have played a part in this success,” said HubOne managing director Nick Beaugeard. “Once again, this proves the viability of the new cloud computing business model for all industries, regardless of size or vertical focus”.

Steinhoff Asia-Pacific IT manager Clive Nichols said in a separate statement that the on-premise version of Notes the company had been using was “out of vendor support”, and as a result Steinhoff was experiencing technical and compatibility issues

“We found that by implementing BPOS, Steinhoff will not only be able to address these issues but will be able to reduce our email and Blackberry operating expenditure by approximately 10 percent,” he added. “This is without even factoring the infrastructure capital savings resulting from the fact that our email servers will no longer require a refresh. The solution will also provide Steinhoff with good scalability, simplified management and a platform that will allow a speedy deployment of further communication enhancements at an appropriate time.”

The executive notes that the terms and conditions of the BPOS deal were still being finalised, but once these were done, he expected a 10 to 12 week deployment time for the new systems. Steinhoff considered various options for its future email platform, he said — on-premise Exchange, on-premise Domino, hosted Exchange and Domino in the cloud (Lotus Live).

Some organisations have flagged a reluctance to host their email in Microsoft’s cloud because of the fact that the data will be hosted overseas, instead of in Australia in a local datacentre.

“Overseas hosting was certainly a factor in the decision making process,” said Nichols, “but we are very satisfied that Microsoft Exchange Online/Telstra will meet our email security, speed and reliability requirements. Steinhoff will not be using the solution to host customer sensitive information (for example customer credit card information, customer details etc) and so in terms of a cloud deployment our risk is reduced.”

In terms of other major projects, Steinhoff is also in the final stages of the tendering process for a desktop refresh, he said.

The news comes as large Australian organisations are increasingly dumping Lotus Notes/Domino wholesale, with many seeing it as a legacy platform unsuited to modern enterprise needs.

In February last year, national airline Qantas confirmed it would ditch IBM’s suite for Outlook/Exchange, and other such as Coca-Cola Amatil and AMP have done the same. Microsoft appears to have been the primary beneficiary from the moves, although a number of Australian organisations have also deployed Google’s Apps suite instead.

Some organisations are still happy with Lotus, however — such as Australian youth charity BoysTown, which has remained with Notes/Domino and even upgraded the platform, citing the extensibility of IBM’s solution compared with that of rivals.

Image credit: Aidy Spencer, Creative Commons

Financial services giant AMP this afternoon revealed that it would ditch its Lotus Notes/Domino installation as part of a shift to Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform hosted by CSC Australia.

The shift to a hosted platform was revealed this morning in a CSC statement touting the strength of its Australia-based cloud computing offering. But responding to questions this afternoon by email, AMP IT director of service management Sharmini Sivathas said it wasn’t a simple Exchange to hosted Exchange migration.

“AMP currently uses Lotus Notes managed by CSC,” she said.

The revelation adds AMP’s name to a long and growing list of large Australian organisations which have over the past several years revealed decisions to dump IBM-owned Notes for Microsoft’s platform – and sometimes Google’s Gmail.

In February it was Qantas confirming it would migrate off Notes. Just the month after it was Monash University phasing out Notes and switching to Gmail. And in June the newly formed Department of Human Services confirmed plans to end its long-running relationship with the troubled IBM platform.

There are some IBM customers in Australia who continue to be happy with Notes — such as Australian youth charity BoysTown, which recently decided against Exchange or Gmail and instead upgraded its Notes installation – but in general there have been no large new Australian Notes customers reported for some time.

Sivathas said the cloud email migration came about because AMP had been undertaking a review of its email, productivity and IT collaboration tools.

“Recent changes in the enterprise mail market, have created opportunities both in terms of cost and functionality which aligns to AMP’s collaboration strategy,” she said. “AMP has evaluated and piloted a number of cloud and on-premise email offerings, and found that CSC’s Microsoft offering best suits AMP’s needs.

The executive said AMP saw productivity benefits in being able to provide its staff with an email system that was “more tightly integrated with other desktop productivity tools”. In addition, financial benefits were a “key consideration”. The financial services giant has more than 3,500 employees and also works with more than 2,000 financial planners in Australia and New Zealand.

CSC was picked for the rollout, Sivathas said, because it had been AMP’s infrastructure partner for over 10 years, and was familiar with AMP’s environment and the financial services giant’s specific needs.

Image credit: Aidy Spencer, Creative Commons

When Australian youth charity BoysTown was looking at the future of its Lotus Notes/Domino collaboration platform late in 2009, ICT manager Julius Bergh (pictured) knew that the group had to make a decision.

“We have seen in the press, that a number of organisations have changed over to Exchange,” he says in an interview this week. “We thought to ourselves that we had better investigate this thing thoroughly.”

There have been quite a few revelations of Australian migrations off the Lotus Notes/Domino over the past few months — with one high-profile move being that of Qantas, whose shift was revealed in February. Centrelink is also likely to end its long-running relationship with Notes as part of the welfare agency’s integration with the new, broader Department of Human Services.

And analyst firms such as Longhaus have questioned Notes’ future in the face of Exchange’s dominance and competing cloud-based services such as Google’s Gmail, which are speedily encroaching on Notes’ traditional turf.

So Bergh sent a few members from his team over to a conference in Brisbane on how to move to Exchange 2010 to scope out the Microsoft platform — check out the lay of the land and see what would be involved in a migration of Boystown’s 480 staff. What they found disappointed him.

“They came back and explained to me that it’s quite a lengthy procedure … a rollout that will take months and things like that,” he says. In addition, the featureset of Microsoft’s latest collaboration opus didn’t impress Bergh that much. He noted that there were new additions to Exchange 2010 that “Domino has had for two or three years already”.

In comparison, Bergh says the eventual upgrade of his company’s Notes environment — which took place last December to version 8.5.1 of the software — took just 15 minutes one morning when only a few staff were using their collaboration platform.

“One of our blokes came in early one morning at 7AM, alerted users and did the upgrade,” he says. “At 7:15AM the system was up. He walked around and people hadn’t even noticed that it had happened.”

There were some clear advantages if Boystown did choose the Exchange platform, Bergh admits.

For example, the organisation is a charity — which Bergh says translates to some “nice discounts” from Microsoft. In addition, users are generally more familiar with Exchange’s user interface because they often use the software on their personal PCs, or have used it at other workplaces. “We did take it quite seriously,” he says.

However, ultimately what swung Bergh to upgrade the software was one aspect of Notes that its userbase in Australia often cites as one of it’s main strengths — the extensibility of the platform compared with its rivals. Bergh points out that Notes is much more than just an email server. For example, he says, Boystown does not use a content management system in its intranet. Instead, it simply uses Notes’ document management facilities — which are web-enabled.

“What I said to the board of Boystown is, ‘we will deliver you an intranet which will not need any propellorheads or intranet people [to maintain it]‘,” says Bergh. “Intranet, for example, is just a stock standard part of the Domino server.”

Another aspect of the platform which Boystown uses is its in-built database templates. “One which we use which we find quite useful is forums,” he says. “If we are going to tender for a particular contract, 10 people can prepare the tender — share documents and information.” The ICT manager notes that this functionality, too, is a stock standard part of the Domino server. It can also be extended to allow external parties — in Boystown’s case, a university and hospital that it was collaborating with — to work together on documents.

If Boystown was to use a rival collaboration offering, Bergh says, he would need to buy quite a few more corporate applications just to match the functionality that Notes already offers.

Google’s software as a service Docs platform allows similar functionality, and Bergh notes that he is a personal user of the search giant’s offering.

But when it comes to his own company, the executive says Google Docs isn’t as powerful for corporate use — especially when it comes to features and the ability to format documents. “I’m just not convinced for Google Docs on spreadsheets,” he says, noting the platform is OK for light use, but that accounting specialists in the company like to do “a bit of fancy footwork” in spreadsheets that Google Docs wouldn’t support.

The ICT manager adds that when he investigated Gmail “quite thoroughly” as an alternative to Notes, he found through using Google’s own calculator that the service would be quite pricey. “There is a little calculator and it will tell you how much it will cost you – it’s not cheap at all,” he says. Google prices access to Gmail and its Apps suite at US$50 per user per year.

Some of the advantages of the upgraded version of Notes which Boystown is now using includes better support for devices with small screens like mobile phones – Bergh is seeing increased uptake of iPhones in the organisation. He also likes the granularity that Notes offers, praising the ability of the software to retrieve employees’ whole mailboxes from a certain date – a feature that could be useful when tracking down internal information or communication from the past.

Asked what features he would like to see added into Notes, Bergh says the situation with the software is similar to that with Microsoft Office 97 – for most people, the old releases are good enough, and 80 percent of people don’t use more than 20 percent of the functionality. “MS word has powerful, almost publishing-type features. But Most people just want to do paragraphs and bold things,” he says.

But ultimately when speaking about Notes, for Bergh it all comes back to the inherent flexibility of the platform — arguing that it’s so much more than an email platform.

“If you buy Lotus Domino because you like the email system, it’s like buying a porche because you like the ashtray,” he chuckles.

Image credit: Boystown/Julius Bergh

The newly formed Department of Human Services has revealed it is likely to end the long-running relationship that some of its component agencies have had with IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes/Domino suite and standardise on Microsoft’s rival Outlook/Exchange platform as part of its long-term integration project.

In December last year the Federal Government announced the consolidation of a number of agencies – including Centrelink, Medicare, the Child Support Agency, Australian Hearing, CRS Australia and the existing Department of Human Services into one mega-department, with its technology support operations to be led by long-time Centrelink chief information officer John Wadeson, who received a bump in title to deputy secretary of ICT Infrastructure.

Various of the agencies to be consolidated – especially Centrelink, but also Medicare Australia, which runs Lotus Notes on its users desktops but uses Exchange on the back end – have used the ailing Notes platform – which is struggling to win new customers in Australia against the Exchange juggernaut – for years.

But in an extensive email interview, Wadeson this week said it was likely the new super-department would standardise on Exchange.

“I couldn’t say that it was set in stone, but we are at this minute certainly looking at moving to a Microsoft platform in that layer,” he said. “First of all, the Child Support Agencies and the Human Services Department are already there, and there’s a view that, because of the central role that this new group will play, and our requirements to connect to everybody, that’s a much more ubiquitous platform.”

Such a shift is the latest nail in the coffin for Notes in Australia, which is facing ongoing problems maintaining its customer base in the face of the Exchange threat and newcomers like Gmail. Qantas, too, has recently confirmed it would dump Lotus for Exchange, and IBM has not disclosed any major new customes of Notes for some time.

In a wider sense, the massive integration project that Wadeson will steer over the next few years will touch almost every aspect of the new super-department’s systems.

The CIO confirmed that email, unified communications, human resources (including payroll) and financial management systems were all in-scope to be integrated under the merger, as well as the combined desktop PC footprint of the portfolio.

Centrelink is currently planning to upgrade its 27,000 desktops to Microsoft’s latest Windows 7 platform, with the migration to start in the second half of this year. The other agencies are using Windows XP but will probably eventually follow suit. In total Human Services has about 55,000 desktop PCs, giving it one of the largest fleets in the country.

“Once again, if I hold to my principle of no-one goes backwards, then everyone will be on Windows 7,” said Wadeson. “Because we won’t be going backwards. But I don’t have to give a timeframe to do that, it’s just expected that we do it as we get opportunity to. Sometimes we get government projects that allow us to do these things as part of the project,” while the bonnet’s up.”

The different agencies are all using different versions of SAP for their finance and administration platforms, but the CIO noted the new super-department would consolidate these onto a single SAP platform, with one guidepost along the way to be the move to a single staff agreement, that would enable “a complete start”.

“Generally if you talk to Human Services secretary Finn Pratt he talks about dates like 1 July next year for those sorts of things,” said Wadeson. “So whoever’s got the latest version, that’s where we’ll all go.”

Going to market
It’s obvious that DHS’s relationship with vendors will need to be consolidated over time due to its much larger purchasing scale. But Wadeson wouldn’t be drawn just yet on what such a strategy might entail. Centrelink and Medicare have had significant relations with IBM for some time, and Centrelink has also in the past handed off quite a bit of work to other companies like CSC and Dimension Data.

Wadeson said while DHS would “undoubtedly” consolidate its vendor relationships, any such announcements would not be made at this stage. “The department will work with multiple vendors to achieve the best outcome for the end-user – just as before, but especially so given the scale and scope of the services that will be delivered,” he said.

“Commercial relationships will no doubt be formed as and when required to equip the system with what it needs to perform properly. These relationships will be managed with the usual high levels of transparency and integrity that we expect from the public service.”

The department will also take some of its cues from the Australian Government Information Management Office — which has a strong role to play in coordinating IT usage across the entire Federal Government sector and which Wadeson said Human Services had a good working relationship with.

When asked whether the systems integration work would be undertaken in-house or externally with the assistance of IT services providers, Wadeson said in general there was a theme for the project of service delivery reform being cost-neutral, in that “efficiency dividends are ploughed back into the work of creating more efficiency”, with IT acting as a “key enabler of the whole process”.

“There isn’t a big bucket of money for this or anything right now,” he said, “so we will probably just implement as we go when the opportunity is right — “while the bonnet’s up” — perhaps as part of a government program or similar.”

In some ways Centrelink — which had the biggest IT operation out of all the agencies — will take a prime role in the work. For example, Wadeson said the welfare agency had already had a datacentre reform agenda which it was achieving through the Federal Government’s interim datacentre panel of suppliers (the final arrangements have yet to take force). “In a beautiful way, these things come together,” the CIO said.

Likewise, Centrelink’s new contactless smartcard for staff identification — which it has been rolling out to staff — will “in time” be extended across the Human Services portfolio. But in another areas, other agencies will take the prime focus.

“Medicare applications will continue to be handled by Medicare chief information officer Graham Gathercole,” said Wadeson when asked what role his team will have in the $466.7 million e-health national Health Identifier project announced in the Federal Budget. And some areas won’t be consolidated at all.

For example, Wadeson echoed statements in December that DHS would not be building a single database containing joint customer data for those who access both Centrelink and Medicare services, for example. “The Minister made that breathtakingly clear in December,” he said, noting the Office of the Privacy Commissioner was involved in making sure data was kept discrete.

“Databases will be separate and any sharing of parts of customer records across agencies will be at the express choice of the customer themself, through choosing a “tell us once” option that can pre-populate forms with relevant information so that you don’t have to keep filling in the same information on different forms. If you choose not to “tell us once” then your separate records remain entirely separate as before.”

Likewise, agency specific applications themselves — such as Medicare apps that run the medical and pharmaceutical benefits schemes will remain separate as they are, although their underlying infrastructure may be consolidated. “I think people in IT can understand that you can house these things on one mainframe, there is no risk of leakage from one database to another,” said Wadeson.

The CIO wouldn’t be drawn on the project’s total budget — with agencies operating off business as usual funding. “There will be some up-front expenditure but business cases need to be drawn up. It’s early days,” he said. And staff roles will change (see right for the new DHS IT organisation structure under Wadeson), but there are expected to be no redundancies on the IT side of things.

Overall, the reform under Wadeson over the next few years is likely to be one of the biggest packages of technology work undertaken in Federal Government circles this decade. So does the CIO consider it risky?

“People use terms like probably the largest integration to be undertaken in Government, all those sort of terms, but on the other hand, because of the focus of these agencies on business as usual, we can’t afford to let anything drop, and the timetable is very much in our hands.”

Image credit: Department of Human Services

On 11 January this year, Macquarie University issued a statement that left Australia’s IT industry in no doubt as to how the institution felt about its ageing in-house email systems.

“We were spending a significant amount of money each year maintaining our own inferior email infrastructure that, despite our best efforts, was falling further and further behind staff expectations,” said the university’s vice chancellor Steven Schwartz. “That’s money we would much prefer to spend on better teaching and research facilities for our staff and students, or on scholarships enabling students from disadvantaged backgrounds to access a university education.”

The net result of that stark evaluation? Macquarie is currently in the process of dumping its in-house Novell GroupWise email infrastructure and moving 6,000 staff to Google’s Gmail platform; a move that comes after the university already shifted some 68,000 students into Google’s cloud.

Some may find such a switch dramatic and risky. After all, many questions abound about security, privacy and the degree to which cloud computing/vendor-hosted email platforms offer a sophisticated enough platform to be compared with a traditional email solution.

And yet, Macquarie’s tale is a story that is becoming increasingly common in Australian organisations as many re-evaluate just what they want from an email platform, what they truly need or would settle for, and often most importantly, what they’re prepared to pay.

The switchers
Google’s marketing spiel for its cloud computing platform exhorts organisations to dump their legacy infrastructure and “Go Google” with the search giant’s Apps suite — Gmail, calendaring, messaging, an office suite, and web site creation and hosting.

And in Australia (and over the river at our Kiwi neighbour), many organisations have done just that.

In the corporate sector, AAPT revealed in November last year that it had decided to use Google Apps for its 1,300 staff, with the telco’s chief operating officer David Yuile saying the choice was towards a fundamentally new way of working. Just one month earlier it was home loan company Mortgage Choice making the switch, moving 1,000 users onto Gmail.

In July the Postal Service Group of NZ Post shifted 2100 users over. And even the Commonwealth Bank of Australia has examined Google’s offering — as early as February 2007 — but ultimately found the product wanting.

“Absolutely, we’re seeing it every day,” says Google’s Asia-Pacific head of market development Deepak Ramanathan, when asked if Google has swapped out any instances of the dominant corporate email platform, Microsoft Exchange, in non-educational Australian institutions. “We see that the line between the person at work and person at home is disappearing, and we see people demand the same web applications they use in their personal life at work, so this change is happening fast.”

But it’s in the education sector that Gmail has really found its home.

The NSW Department of Education and Training has migrated 1.3 million students to Gmail, dumping one of the world’s largest implementations of Microsoft Exchange to do so. Monash University and Adelaide University are other examples of institutions that have also pulled big numbers for the search giant, with 58,000 and 16,000 students apiece being shifted across.

“Interest in the cloud in general and in Gmail in particular is certainly high in Australia,” says Ramanathan. “At a recent forum we arranged for CIOs from some of Australia’s largest businesses, it was clear that talk has shifted to when and how to migrate to the cloud, given that the event was easily fully subscribed … we were turning people away.”

The flipside for the the search giant, of course, is that so far Google has not yet — that anyone knows of — managed to convert staff accounts in the tens of thousands at any Australian organisation, despite its success in the education sector. And even in that education sector, despite Google’s stunning success, it has had its progress limited by that most unlikely of cloud adversaries — Microsoft.

If you were to make a list of Australian educational institutions who have recently migrated their student base to a cloud email platform, Microsoft’s Live@EDU system would be just as prominent on that list as Gmail — and probably even more so.

Over the past several years, Edith Cowan University, Flinders University, TAFE South Australia, Curtin University, WA Central TAFE, Sydney University and the Australian Catholic University have all migrated their student bodies onto Live@EDU. And many of those institutions have picked Microsoft in the last 12 months.

There is some degree of history repeating itself to be found in the massive wave of Microsoft migrations to cloud email platforms in Australia’s education sector. If you ask corporate workers what they think of Microsoft Outlook, many will reply that they dislike the software, but find it essential for daily use. And, of course, Microsoft has achieved dominance in that field — a 2009 survey by Australian analyst firm Longhaus found 53 percent of organisations surveyed used Outlook/Exchange as their primary email platform.

It’s a similar situation when it comes to the migration to cloud email platforms in Australia’s education sector. A recent protest held by students at Sydney University, for example, focused on the fact that they didn’t like Microsoft’s Live@EDU platform. And the encroachment of Microsoft software into the University of NSW’s traditionally Linux-dominated School of Computer Science and Engineering has been met with open hostility.

But increasingly, Australia’s education sector appears to have taken a strong slant towards Microsoft’s Live@EDU platform over the past twelve months, eclipsing Gmail’s early successes. Of course, the company’s hosted Exchange solution — the corporate equivalent of Live@EDU and part of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite — does not appear to be gaining as much headway on office desktops. But Microsoft’s strength in cloud email in general is now undisputable.

The rationale
If you’re an IT manager outside the education sector, you might very well be asking yourself why the universities and education departments have moved their students so strongly onto cloud email platforms, when mainstream government departments and private enterprises (with a few exceptions) have so far preferred to maintain their in-house systems.

According to Steve Hodgkinson, the director of analyst firm Ovum’s government practice, it’s all about need.

Universities, he points out, currently are compelled to make a strategic decision on email as their “severely outdated” student email platforms reach end of life. In 2010, he says, any forced decision on email infrastructure would need to closely examine the cloud alternatives due to their advantages compared with the legacy style of in-house platforms.

“To be frank,” he says, “if you were making a strategic decision to change your email platform [in 2010], serious questions would have to be asked if you opted for an in-house solution. There would have to be a strong security driver.”

In contrast, Hodgkinson says, not many government agencies and private enterprises are in the position of being forced to change their email platform. Usually, changes in email platforms come across through mergers and acquisitions — for example, a company using Lotus Notes shifting away from it as it merges with another company using Microsoft Exchange.

“There’s no real case for idly entertaining the case of maybe changing the email system,” Hodgkinson says. “Your back’s got to be against the wall in some way to make you do that.”

There is one case where organisations have an in-house email system and have their back against the wall anyway, he says: If an organisation is using Novell GroupWise, which is speedily getting left behind in a very competitive market. Hence Macquarie’s speedy switch.

Another reason why organisations switch to cloud email platforms, according to Hodgkinson, is where they have a serious lack of in-house skills. “Don’t use cloud computing for things in your organisation that are already working fine,” he says. “Cloud computing creates new options for bits and pieces that are broken. Some organisations do have broken email systems … they have reached a point where they need to focus their energies on applications that add business value.”

One final motivation for switching is also clear. Education CIOs agree that the sorts of financial arrangements that Microsoft and Google have offered IT chiefs to bring their thousands of students across to cloud email platforms have been just too good to pass up.

The next step
If you accept Hodgkinson’s argument, it’s easy to foresee a future — at least in the medium term — where most large Australian organisations outside the education sector will remain reluctant to switch to a cloud email platform. There’s simply no immediate need, and without that need, as the analyst says, “it’s not something many CIOs would consider lightly”.

However, some argue the decision to migrate to cloud email systems won’t come as a big bang process, but more like a creeping vine.

Longhaus managing director Peter Carr is able to give a number of examples where cloud email platforms — particularly consumer-grade offerings such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or the freely available Gmail — are speedily making their way into semi-official use in Australian organisations.

Just last week it was revealed that Qantas was planning to dump its Lotus Notes/Domino staff email system for Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

However Carr says the far more interesting internal email migration was the decision some time ago to stop providing Qantas flight attendants with an official company email account. Instead, he says, the flight attendants simply provide Qantas’ HR staff with their own personal email address — “Hotmail or Gmail or something like that”. They are then paid an annual fee for their professional use of personal technology.

The reason this system works, according to Carr, is the low volume of official company email Qantas flight attendants need to deal with — just work schedules and so on. Most other official company communications can go through the unions. Effectively, Qantas has outsourced part of its corporate email platform to Hotmail.

It’s a similar situation in emerging nations such as exist in the Pacific Islands.

Carr says many Governments in the Pacific Islands never got around to implementing their own in-house email systems as most westernised countries did in the 1990′s. The reason? Poor infrastructure and a lack of skills meant it was usually easier for public servants to sign up for a free email account from Hotmail or similar, and use it for normal government work.

“You’ll find email servers over there, but they’ve probably got a pot plant sitting on them or something like that,” says Carr. “They’re actually just skipping the middle bit, saying: ‘Screw it, we’ll just go straight to cloud’.”

When you extrapolate this phenomenon into different Australian sectors, you can predict some drastic shifts in employee behaviour when it comes to use of IT systems. For example, Carr highlights the fact that many nurses — essentially low-level public servants — enter the hospital system through doing unpaid practical work during their degree.

“They don’t get paid, so they don’t need a corporate email account,” he says. “They basically show up to their shift. These students will have their own cloud-based email accounts” — Hotmail, Gmail and the like.

As those students transition into professional employment, Carr points out, they will often work casually at multiple hospitals and for nursing agencies. This means they won’t need permanent corporate email accounts and could potentially spend much of their career simply using their personal Hotmail option instead.

“You could probably come up with a list of 5-6 things, which show that it makes no sense for hospitals to come up with collaborative platform and email servers for their support staff,” he says. “It’s a massive cost to take out of the health system.”

Once the business case expands past Qantas to the healthcare sector, Carr can imagine it going elsewhere. “How could they not employ similar policies in counter workers in things like service centres and so on?” he asks. The analyst calls this type of staff “boundary workers”, because they work on the edges of the corporate technology footprint.

Extrapolation
Applying Carr’s analysis to Australia’s education sector, it’s possible that it was so easy for so many institutions to switch to cloud-based solutions like Gmail and Live@EDU because for universities, students are more or less on the boundaries of the their IT infrastructure. They’re not specialised, high-end users. They just get a bulk service that is battened down to cope with potential security breaches and demand.

But this same analogy raises questions about the future of staff email at Australia’s largest organisations. After all, Macquarie University was one institution that proved what worked on the boundaries would work at the centre as well.

Or, to put it in more colloquial terms — what’s good for the goose might also be good … for the gander. It will be interesting to see just how many Australian employees are living the cloud full-time, this time next year.

Image credit: Mek Kormik, Google, Microsoft (respectively)

Qantas today confirmed that it would shortly migrate its corporate email platform from IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino platform to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

Confirming a report this morning in the AustralianIT, Qantas executive manager of corporate services and technology David Hall said the process of migrating to Exchange had already begun, with piloting underway across the airline’s executive team.

“This is part of the Qantas technology group’s focus on leveraging technology to improve efficiencies for the business and enhancing communication effectiveness across our workforce,” said Hall.

“Subject to satisfactory piloting, we anticipate the migration to be substantially completed by the end of the year.” It is expected that around 20,000 staff will be migrated to the Microsoft platform.

Hall said Qantas would also be consolidating “a large number” of Lotus Notes applications and databases as part of its drive to “standardise, reduce and simplify” the number of business applications and tools it used.

Since moving up to his current role in October 2008 from his previous position as chief financial officer at Qantas subsidiary Jetstar, Hall has made dramatic changes to Qantas’ IT support operation.

In a landmark speech in August 2009, Hall said he believed Qantas could cut its IT costs by $100 million over the next financial year. Over the past couple of years the airline has pursued a number of IT outsourcing initiatives. For example, in mid-2009 some 200 Qantas staff were offered jobs at IBM as Big Blue took over responsibility for the airline’s project delivery servies.

Image credit: Qantas