Delimiter » novell

Westpac delays shift off Lotus Notes

Renai LeMay — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 05:20:55 +0000

blog Remember in May 2011, when we broke the news that Westpac confirmed it would finally shift off IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes/Domino platform, in favour of an organisation wide shift to a hosted version of Microsoft Outlook/Exchange? Well, it appears that shift isn’t going too well. iTNews reports today (we recommend you click here for the full article):

… the bank has decided to “defer the project until a later stage.” Sources told iTnews that Westpac CIO Clive Whincup and CTO Jeff Jacobs, both installed in late 2011, ultimately took the decision after a group-wide review of ICT priorities.

Presumably this means that the bank’s tens of thousands of staff will remain on Notes for the forseeable future — and that those working for the bank’s St George subsidiary will remain on Novell GroupWise. Fantastic.

Does it seem to anyone else that things have started to unravel in Westpac’s IT department since mid-2011? The bank’s superstar chief information officer Bob McKinnon steps back into a more limited role, the bank kicks off widespread offshoring initiatives that are hitting its Australian headcount, it confirms it’s still running Internet Explorer 6, chief technology officer Sarv Girn exits stage left and from our point of view the bank doesn’t have a long-term plan for dealing with its ageing core banking systems … a situation St George, for example, dealt with quite some time ago.

Furthermore, in this morning’s Financial Review, McKinnon’s replacement Clive Whincup is quoted as saying there is “little demand” from staff for the bank to implement so-called Bring Your Own Device computing policies, despite industry analysts flagging BYOD as one of the hottest trends in current enterprise IT thinking, and fellow financial services giant Suncorp going headlong down that path.

All of this is dramatically different from the road paved with gold vision which McKinnon was selling technology journalists in October 2010. At that point it looked like Westpac was poised to start challenging CommBank for the crown of Australia’s most technologically progressive financial services group. Today it is increasingly looking like that title might go, ironically, to NAB — historically one of the most conservative of Australia’s top banks. Ironic. From my point of view it looks like Westpac is now heading full steam ahead into cost-cutting mode when it comes to IT.

Westpac’s decision on its unified collaboration platform does also raise a number of questions about the bank’s capacity to deliver. This should not have been that complex a project in the grand scheme of things. It uses standardised software from the Microsoft stack, and was slated to be implemented with the help of several gold-class IT services firms — IBM and Fujitsu. It would have brought uncounted productivity benefits to the bank. If Westpac can’t get this kind of ‘basic hygiene’ IT infrastructure project off the ground, how will it go trying to implement the much more ambitious core banking overhaul projects which are going on at CommBank, Suncorp and NAB?

Image credit: Winam, Creative Commons

Novell to boost “best product” SuSe in Australia

Renai LeMay — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:12:38 +0000

blog If you’re after a good belly laugh, I recommend you check out CIO Magazine’s interview here with the Australian sales director for Novell’s SuSe Linux distribution. As far as we’re concerned, SuSe is dying a rapid death right now (much like Lotus Notes). But Novell’s Hamish Miles is bullish about its prospects locally. Some amusing paragraphs:

“Some of our key milestones in the past have included in working in partnership with IBM on Linux distribution for the mainframe in 2000. We’re [also] one of the biggest players working on getting Linux into the Cloud … We have the best product, and when I go to meetings, our clients don’t tell us that our product is rubbish.”

Yup. I bet they don’t. But then, how many meetings would you get as the sales director for SuSe, in 2011? Of course, I’m prepared to be proved wrong. If there are serious SuSe installations out there Down Under (on the server or desktop), drop us a line anonymously or post in the comments below.

Image credit: Francisco Rojas, Creative Commons

Qld Health dumps GroupWise for Exchange … 2007?

Renai LeMay — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:32:15 +0000

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.

AHL dumps Exchange for Lotus … and back again

Renai LeMay — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 01:19:21 +0000

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

Consulting firm ditches Google Apps for BPOS

Renai LeMay — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 04:18:23 +0000

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

St George is dumping GroupWise too

Renai LeMay — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 04:58:45 +0000

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

Melbourne college in 1,100-seat Win7 migration

Renai LeMay — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:37:30 +0000

Uniting Church school St Leonard’s College has in the past few months completed a sizable desktop migration to Microsoft’s new flagship operating system Windows 7, in a rollout that also saw its supporting server infrastructure switched from Novell Netware to Windows Server 2008 R2.

The migration represents one of the first in what is expected to be a large wave of desktop rollouts across Australia of what analyst firm Gartner has described as a Microsoft operating system that organisations cannot afford to “skip” as they broadly did with Vista. St Leonard’s rolled out Windows 7 to about 1,100 machines in a deployment that would affect some 2,000 students.

The college’s information services officer — network, James Bannan, said in an interview this week that the stimulus to migrate the college’s desktops from their previous Windows XP platform was the need to make a choice about the way forward for its server infrastructure, which was previously based on Novell Netware.

Bannan said Novell was no longer continuing to develop the platform. Although St Leonard’s did examine the case for migrating to Novell’s replacement Linux-based offerings, he said unfortunately “it’s a fairly inaccessible technology”, due to a lack of support from local partners and supporting materials.

The college hadn’t previously moved to Vista because of the back end. “The reason we didn’t deploy Vista was not because of any concerns with the operating system, but our back end was not quite ready to cater for it,” said Bannan.

A further stimulus was the fact that the college had a substantial rollout of 600 new desktops and laptops scheduled for the end of 2009. “It was probably going to take as much work to bring in those 600 to the existing structure as to roll out a new one,” said Bannan.

The server rollout went ahead of the desktop migration, as Bannan said it allowed the college to use Microsoft’s deployment tools. The college already had a small number of servers running Windows Server 2000 and 2003 handling some core applications running on SQL Server.

When the release candidate of Server 2008 R2 came out, the college implemented that version in its infrastructure, upgrading to the release to manufacuring version as it came out around May 2009. Several months later, it had also brought its Active Directory identity management system up to speed.

The physical rollout of the desktop machines started in December 2009 and finished in mid-February, with the college’s IT team taking advantage of the long Christmas break enjoyed by schools and their students. “We got back to work on January 4,” Bannan remembered.

Lessons
In general, Bannan (pictured) said the rollout went ahead without many hiccups. The school didn’t bring in any outside contractors and completed the upgrade with minimal financial spend. “All the technical information that we needed was available either through TechNet or through the community or through our own internal [expertise],” said Bannan.

The IT manager said Microsoft had done a really good job with its latest suite of products — both Windows 7, but also with its back-office bundle of Server, SQL Server, IIS, Exchange, Active Directory and so on. “It’s bulletproof,” he said, noting he was particularly impressed with the new integration between the various server products.

“They’ve actually achieved this relationship between the client and server side and are doing a good job of bringing all the other back-end products into play as well. What we’re seeing now is a tighter integration across the back end. That is wonderful.”

That sort of integration, Bannan said, was great for environments like St Leonard’s as it allowed the college’s IT team to manage most of their infrastructure through one vendor and thus saving on licensing costs and management overhead time.

“You see this benefit in environments like ours where you have a very small technical team compared to the size of the infrastructure,” he said. The one problem, Bannan said, was not that not enough IT professionals knew about the high degree of integration between Microsoft products.

“That’s a problem that they really need to overcome,” he said, noting the quality of the company’s Hyper-V virtualisation product as a further example.

The biggest problem that St Leonard’s had with its rollout was the need to deploy a number of old educational applications to the new desktops. The college used Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) tool to deploy Windows 7 and the software, and Bannan said its core applications deployed fine or could be easily virtualised.

However, he said, there were a number of smaller curriculum applications that couldn’t be deployed or weren’t compatible with the new infrastructure. Obtaining signed third-party drivers around devices like printers was also a problem — St Leonards actually ended up using a Verisign tool to certify drivers itself.

“That worked well,” said Bannan, noting the available documentation and availability of tools from Microsoft was “excellent”.

The college found viable alternatives for a number of the legacy applications — sometimes from the open source world. Bannan said there are “a number of very, very good cross-platform educational applications.

“We went back to the business and said ‘It’s probably time to find an alternative’,” he said. “Fortunately the business has been pretty comfortable with upgrading software.” However St Leonards is still looking at what to do about some problematic software — “probably some sort of application packaging,” said Bannan.

The rollout also had the side benefit that the IT team discovered there were some applications that nobody was using at all any more.

Bannan said he would have liked to have had more time to do application testing. “When you consider how much we could have spent on the project and didn’t spend on the project, you couldn’t be too upset,” he said. “There is always a price to pay somewhere and that was it.”

During the rollout, St Leonards had actually planned to be able to roll back to Windows XP and Netware as a “seriously last-ditch” fall-back option if the Windows 7 rollout went disastrously wrong.

However, Bannan said it went better than expected. The college’s standard operating environment isn’t quite the vanilla Windows 7 install, but Bannan said it has proved to be “pretty bulletproof” anyway.

In one example, the IT team actually rolled out the desktop version of the SOE to a bunch of laptops accidentally — and didn’t notice for a while because the operating system handled the mistake with only a few small hiccups such as a lack of Bluetooth drivers.

Similarly, St Leonards found that it was able to easily deploy and run Windows 7 on hardware that was one or two years old, rather than being brand new. “It has worked perfectly,” he said. “Actually when you think about it, it’s the first operating system created which needs fewer resources than its predecessor.”

Bannan said St Leonard’s IT team had been expecting a spike in calls to the helpdesk when staff and students came back from holidays to find their shiny new but probably slightly alien Windows 7 desktops. “But actually support calls went down,” he said.

The users responded well to the change, he said, noting he had expected the new technology to confuse people. Support calls went back up, however, once users realised they couldn’t access certain applications.

Ultimately it appears as if proper consideration of St Leonard’s back-end server infrastructure and its integration with the client (which after all, is part of Microsoft’s enterprise IT vision) was one of the keys to the college’s rollout success — and a fact that bodes well for other organisations looking to conduct a Microsoft upgrade to the Windows 7 platform soon.

“It’s gone much better than anyone expected. A lot of things that we haven’t had to worry about,” said Bannan.

Disclosure: When Renai LeMay was News Editor at ZDNet.com.au, he contracted Bannan to write various articles in his secondary career as a freelance technology journalist. Image credit: St Leonard’s College/James Bannan

Cloud email’s Australian thunderstorm

Renai LeMay — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:19:33 +0000

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)