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

blog Queensland Health has become the latest Australian organisation to ditch Novell’s ageing GroupWise platform in favour of Microsoft Exchange. iTNews, which broke the news, writes:

“Queensland Health has revealed it will bring the first of at least 50,000 users onto an Exchange 2007 email system early next year.”

This all sounds good and proper. After all, a stack of organisations right around Australia are currently migrating off GroupWise and IBM’s Lotus Notes platform onto Microsoft Exchange, or in some cases, Google Apps.

But what I can’t work out is why Queensland Health would move to Exchange 2007. As I’ve previously explored, Exchange 2010 comes with a number of features which are attractive to organisations. Better storage management (a key issue with Exchange), an improved Outlook Web Access platform and more. And it was released to manufacturing in October 2009, so it’s not exactly cutting edge code.

It’s not precisely clear at this point, but I’ll ping Queensland Health to ask the question. I guess it’s not outside the bounds of possibilities that the organisation is simply following the ‘N-1′ approach to software upgrades. We’ve seen this before … notably when the Federal Parliament deployed Windows Vista just last year.

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

Well, well, well. Looks like it’s not only Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise customers who are dumping their collaboration suites for the Microsoft option. According to a case study published on Microsoft’s site on 14 July and quickly and mysteriously removed, Redmond has pulled one back from arch-rival Google.

We’ve still got a copy of the now-deleted case study, which concerns a Melbourne-headquartered IT consulting firm named Enterprise Architects, which apparently has about 100 staff. Some quotes from the document:

“To try and deliver collaboration resources to its widely distributed consultants, Enterprise Architects adopted the Google Apps suite of online messaging and productivity services. But after almost a year, the company was still struggling to integrate Google Apps with its IT infrastructure, and to manage and share knowledge across the organization. In November 2010, just before it had to renew its Google Apps agreement, Enterprise Architects switched its entire PC environment to the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite.”

…

“With Google Apps, administrative staff found it difficult to organize a meeting or attach a candidate’s resume when scheduling an interview”

…

“With Google Apps, we had some ability to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets,” says [Craig Martin, Chief Architect and Director of Products and Innovation at Enterprise Architects], “but not the functionality we were familiar with to edit, format, import, export, or otherwise make spreadsheets, documents, emails, and presentations presentable for customers.”

…

“When we took into account the extra services we had to adopt to fill the gaps in Google Apps, our business case showed that Business Productivity Online would be substantially less expensive,” says Martin.

We can’t say we’re surprised this sort of thing is happening from time to time. An enterprise IT architectural consulting firm, getting fed up with the technical limitations of Google Apps? Who would have thought? As we’ve reiterated several times, Microsoft’s alternate Outlook/Exchange environment is more suitable for organisations with complex requirements and jurisdictional hosting difficulties (although that doesn’t cover most organisations, we should note). Especially now that Microsoft can do everything “in the cloud”.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons

We didn’t realise it when we broke the news that Westpac would be finally dumping IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes platform for a Microsoft solution, but it’s not just Lotus that’s getting the turf. Courtesy of its merger with St George, Westpac also has a substantial number of staff using Novell’s even *less* popular GroupWise suite. That, too, will be being replaced, according to a number of tips today and this report by iTNews:

“Westpac’s retail arm had been “locked in to a very old version of Lotus Notes for a very long time”, McKinnon said, while St George ran on Novell GroupWise and BT Financial Services used Microsoft Exchange.”

And St George isn’t the only organisation still using GroupWise. According to comments posted under our recent article on NSW Health’s decision to ditch the Novell platform, Queensland Health and the NSW Department of Finance & Services are also still tied to the Novell shackle.

Now, we don’t want to give people the wrong idea (after the sledload of criticism we received following our last GroupWise post). GroupWise, in its time, was a great suite, with a number of standout features that were ahead of its time. With its roots back in the 1980′s, for many years GroupWise was a leading collaboration suite. Web access to an email platform in 1996? Who would have thunk it?

However, as with Lotus Notes, GroupWise has not been updated fast enough to take advantage of enterprise collaboration trends, and we hear regular complaints from those who are forced to use it in a corporate environment. In 2011, most large organisations should be switching to the industry standard Microsoft Outlook/Exchange platform, or, if you want to placate your growing Generation Y workforce, take a look at Google Apps. Using GroupWise these days is a recipe for alienating valuable staff.

The fact that large Australian government departments and banks are still using GroupWise today says more about the glacial speed of technological change in those organisations than it does about the veracity of GroupWise as a modern platform.

Image credit: a4gpa, 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

opinion Yesterday I dipped my proverbial toe in the water of public opinion about the respective merits of different email platforms, and boy — did I get burnt. That calm-looking summer pool was actually boiling hot with conviction.

The issue was kicked off by the news that two major Australian universities had made contrasting choices about what email platform they would migrate their tens of thousands of students to.
Going along with the current trend, the University of Technology Sydney revealed it will migrate its students off an in-house Sun platform and to Microsoft’s hosted Live@EDU system. In contrast, the University of Melbourne picked Gmail.

Now, the fascinating thing about the Melbourne rollout is that the institution actually polled students before it made its choice, to ask what platform they would prefer. The answer was something that I have long suspected — if given the choice between Gmail and a Microsoft platform, most young people in 2010 would pick Google.

I’ve suspected this for a long time because of anecdotal evidence. As a journalist I heard of actual protests being held at the University of Sydney when it picked Live@EDU over Gmail. And I don’t know many young people who prefer Microsoft’s Live platform over the Google alternative. Certainly the early technology adopter crowd made its choice for Gmail over Hotmail — or even Yahoo — long ago.

However, what I didn’t expect was the vehemence of response to my comment to the effect that people would be crazy to pick Live@EDU over Gmail. Immediately, people came out of the woodwork on Twitter defending Microsoft’s entire email and messaging platform — Outlook, Exchange, the cloud Business Productivity Online Suite and so on.

As I further explored my ideas that many large Australian organisations would shift to Gmail if Google would guarantee the data could be hosted in Australia, the discussion intensified. People demanded to know what I had against Exchange, what was wrong with Outlook’s interface, why I thought that Gmail’s simplistic and rudimentary interface was better, why I wanted to host my email in Google’s ‘insecure’ cloud and so on.

Many claimed that the email needs of a small business like Delimiter could not be compared with the email needs of a large organisation. And the discussion ultimately culminated in a public claim by a long-time Delimiter reader that my journalistic integrity had been compromised. Well, I don’t think it has. And certainly I don’t go easy on Google just because I like some of its products.

What happened next was equally as interesting. I later issued a question to the Australian Twitter community to ask what email platform they preferred — and why. An absolute stack of responses came back.

Going through the responses this morning (you can see them here if you keep on scrolling over several pages), two clear trends can be witnessed. Firstly, the number of people who preferred Gmail over Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange stack was substantial — at least double, potentially more, depending on how you classify the responses.

The second trend, however, was a little more interesting.

Many people stated that they preferred either Gmail for personal use and Outlook for work use, or that they preferred to use Gmail as the back-end hosting solution for their email, and then to use Outlook as the front-end client on their desktop.

Now, I’ve investigated this issue of corporate email platforms a great deal over the past year. I wrote a feature on cloud email in the Australian context earlier on in the year, and I’ve also been looking into the issue of Exchange 2010 upgrades, as well as hosted email with BPOS and even what’s happening with Lotus Notes.

My opinion about corporate email is this:

Firstly, if you are setting up a new organisation in 2010, you should clearly go with an externally hosted solution such as Gmail, Microsoft BPOS, or even just managed Exchange — which can be hosted in Australia. Lotus Live might be an option as well — but most people would argue against it these days — I haven’t seen any new Lotus installations in Australia for some time.

Email has become a commodity for all but the most highly secure organisations and should be outsourced to someone who has it as their core competency. It’s just not worth your IT department’s time to manage this — it’s costly, cumbersome and it can be done better by someone else. It’s a classic outsourcing argument.

For existing organisations, the choice is more complex. They likely have substantial investments in email infrastructure, and it’s a non-trivial change to migrate to a new platform.

If you are a flexible and dynamic organisation like AAPT or Mortgage Choice, or you have a large number of non-core users, or ‘email light’ users such as a university student population, I would recommend you to outsource your email to Google. I believe most employees — especially young employees — prefer Gmail over Outlook/Exchange, and the holdouts can still use Outlook as the front end if they wish to do so — and many do.

Flexible and dynamic organsations in 2010 are strongly averse to capital expenditure and focusing on non-core competencies. They are usually attempting to hire young and talented generation Y staff, and Gmail’s story plays well into this picture.

This, of course, depends on whether your security policies — especially with respect to the US Patriot Act — allow you to do so. Google’s lack of Australian hosting will preclude most of the financial services, legal and government sectors from taking up their offering for the time being. That’s a simple reality which I’ve been pressuring Google on all year.

Secondly, if your organisation is using a legacy platform like Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise, I would strongly recommend you to put a business case to your board to migrate to either Gmail, or an on-shore managed Exchange platform if you need the security, added control, or corporate apps integration. Keep in mind that you can also run a combination of in-house Exchange, for highly secure accounts, and on-shore managed, or even globally hosted BPOS if you need more flexibility.

The reason I recommend a switch from Notes or Groupwise is that I am seeing a lot of pressure at board levels, as well as among employees, to switch off these platforms, especially for greater compatibility with third-party applications and mobile devices. My opinion is that Lotus and Groupwise are ‘legacy’ platforms — and it will often disadvantage an organisation to be running them.
I’ve seen a stack of Lotus to Exchange migrations over the past few years — Qantas, Coca-Cola and AMP to name a recent couple.

Lastly, for many (actually, most) organisations, internally hosted Outlook/Exchange is going to be the best platform in the short to medium term. It gives you way more control and flexibility over your email systems than Gmail does, and it mitigates all security risks. And Microsoft has done a lot at both the front-end and the back-end over the past few years to alleviate pain points with the platform.

I have been particularly impressed with how Exchange 2010 has much better storage functionality, and the ability to integrate with cloud hosting on a very granular level. Then, too, Outlook Web Access is now fantastic — almost on par with the desktop version, and supporting most browsers — and Outlook is no longer the overweight monstrosity that it used to be. And of course, Exchange will integrate well with other Microsoft tools such as SharePoint and Active Directory.

If you want complete control, Outlook is going to be the way to go.

One final note: I don’t know what to think of Zimbra. I haven’t investigated the platform enough yet — it’s kind of the ugly stepchild of email systems in Australia, yet one that appears to be gaining some traction.

I hope this clears up how I feel about email. Personally, I still believe that you can get vast productivity benefits from using Gmail. I couldn’t run my business or my life without it — and I constantly hear tales of people auto-forwarding all email from their Exchange work account to their Gmail for this reason.

However, for organisations, what solution you go with will be a little bit more complex — and that’s fine. Please feel free to use the comments function below to tell me why I’m wrong — I’ll be here all day ;)

Image credit: Shinkai, Creative Commons

opinion If your company or organisation is not currently considering migrating its email systems onto a cloud computing platform, then you’re in danger of being left behind.

That’s the conclusion I have reached after six months of closely following the Australian technology sector’s growing fascination with cloud computing, in all its variants and according to all the different definitions.

There’s a lot of hype around cloud computing at the moment. Giant companies like Fujitsu, CSC, Microsoft and more are jumping headstrong into the cloud as fast as they can, following the lead set by early cloud enthusiasts like Salesforce.com and Google.

Giant private sector companies like the Commonwealth Bank of Australia have spent a great deal of time and effort examining how cloud computing will affect their business. And even the conservative public sector is fascinated by the same topic.

Not all of the various hyped aspects of cloud computing will come to fruition. But of those, it looks like email will be the first one to really deliver on cloud computing’s promises of delivering a cheaper, more flexible and more innovative future than traditional IT infrastructure models have offered.

So whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, here are five reasons why your organisation should shift its corporate email platform into the cloud — as soon as possible.

1. Everyone else doing it: Just a few years ago, it was a rarity to find an Australian organisation which had migrated its email system onto a cloud computing platform. But over the past two years, things have drastically changed.

The email norm for new small businesses in 2010 is to setup a Google account and supply your employees with Gmail, and more and more companies are “going Google” in this way. In the education sector, it’s a similar case — almost every unversity has already picked a cloud email solution from Microsoft or Google over the past several years for students, and several education departments have as well.

In the corporate and public sectors, things are a little more unclear, but several high-profile customers — AMP, AAPT and this week Coca-Cola Amatil — have recently flagged migrations. And in the government sector NBN Co set tongues wagging when it opted for a hosted Exchange implementation upon its creation in mid-2009.

2. Local servers: There are now several companies — notably, CSC, which won its first high-profile cloud email client in AMP — providing cloud email solutions with servers hosted in Australia instead of in offshore datacentres (the kind that raise tricky data sovereignty issues).

Google still won’t host a Gmail datacentre in Australia, however. But some customers have expressly stated they don’t see it as a problem.

3. Generation Y is increasingly demanding it: Australia’s impatient internet generation has no patience for those that don’t get how the online environment is changing their lives, and is increasingly reaching management level after being born in the 1980′s.

Do you really want to be the IT manager who tells their top staff that they can’t access their email from whatever device they want — and that you can’t upgrade the server to Exchange 2010 because you don’t have the budget? Cloud email was made to solve all of these problems.

And if the server goes down, you can blame the vendor.

4. It’s cheaper — and sometimes free: Australian education sector chief information officers couldn’t believe how cheap it was to migrate their students onto Gmail and Live@EDU — it was almost as if they were being paid by the vendors to do so.

Now that phenomenon is coming to the rest of the market. Many small Australian companies can already get Google Apps for their domain name for free, and even if you do end up paying for the premium version, it’s only $50 per user per year.

If you factor in the extra time you won’t have to spend administering your own servers and the ease of use services like Gmail provide, you’ll quickly realise what the ROI is: Awesome. It’s not quite as good (as far as we can see) when it comes to Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite — but it’s probably still better than running your own Exchange server.

5. It’s a good excuse to finally get rid of Lotus Notes.

There are still a stack of Lotus Notes/Domino installations hanging around in Australian organisations. And while most CEOs won’t fork out for a migration off Lotus to a rival platform just to keep up with staff expectations, they will do so if you can demonstrate (through the cost and flexibility advantages of cloud) that it’s financially worth doing so.

If you can cut costs (or shift them into the operational budget) and keep staff happy and productive, the CEO and the board will fork out for a cloud email migration.

We don’t have anything against Lotus Notes, by the way. It remains a great email platform. But the email market is increasingly coalescing into a two-horse race around the more modern Gmail and Exchange platforms.

Image credit: Grzesiek Hidden, royalty free