Microsoft Targets Domino Users with Migration Kits

Corrected: January 18, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft upped the ante in its quest for collaboration tool supremacy yesterday when it yesterday announced a suite of tools for helping IBM's Notes and Domino customers move to Microsoft's own suite of collaboration tools, anchored by Exchange Server. IBM and Microsoft have been the leading providers of e-mail server software and collaboration tools for many years, but is the balance of power finally shifting to Redmond?

That Microsoft is attempting to pillage IBM's lucrative Notes/Domino user base, and pick off disaffected and unsatisfied Domino and Notes users, should come as no surprise to you. After all, IBM does much the same thing from time to time, harping on some of the weaknesses of Microsoft's collaboration offering (read: those painful Exchange Server 5.5 upgrades), and attracting them to the Yellow and Black with discounts, rebates, and other freebies.

But with IBM's gala Notes/Domino event, Lotusphere, just a two weeks away, Microsoft decided that now was an opportune time to rain on Domino's parade with an updated collection of Domino-to-Exchange migration tools.

Microsoft's announcement covered enhancements to several existing tools, and some tools that are brand new. Chief among the enhancements to the existing offerings is Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino, which Microsoft says will "significantly improve" the process of analyzing a Notes/Domino environment and provide a framework for making recommendations to transition them to Microsoft's platform. This tool will be available sometime in the first quarter.

Next up is a new tool, called Microsoft Data Migrator 2006 for Lotus Domino, which will become available in the second quarter, and which will allow organizations to migrate data from Domino applications to Windows SharePoint Services. Microsoft has also added three new templates for Windows SharePoint Services, including Discussion Database, Team Work Site, and Document Library. These templates were designed to closely mirror existing Domino templates, Microsoft says.

Microsoft has improved several other tools for the purpose of migrating from Notes/Domino environments to Exchange, or running both environments at the same time. These tools include the Migration Wizard, the Exchange Connector, and the Exchange Calendar Connector. The company also committed to developing a new SharePoint Template for developing in the same type of workflow that Domino users currently have using Microsoft's portal technology.

Microsoft says it is beating IBM in the battle for collaboration supremacy. As evidence, it points to hundreds of companies that have moved from Notes/Domino to Exchange over the past six months, including customers like Arcelor, First Data, and Wolters Kluwer.

Microsoft also got a little help from systems management tool vendor Quest Software, in terms of anecdotal evidence of Exchange's supremacy on the e-mail and collaboration front. David Waugh, a vice president at Quest, says "Over the past eight months we have seen a definite trend of larger organizations choosing to move from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft collaboration platform."

But when it comes to market share figures, there is only one true arbiter of what's fact and what's fiction, and that is IDC. Unfortunately, the analyst firm only has market share figures going back to calendar year 2004, depicted in a June 2005 report, which shows that Microsoft gathered about 51 percent of the market's total $1.85 billion in revenue, and IBM accounted for about 40 percent. Microsoft also surpassed IBM's figures in 2003, when Microsoft had a 47 percent share, and IBM 43. IBM owned the top spot in 2002, when it had 45 percent share, and Microsoft had 44.

Microsoft's announcement even drew some retaliatory fire from Teamstudio, a Beverly, Massachusetts, software company and IBM business partner that develops administrative tools for Domino environments.

"Microsoft has greatly underestimated the value and financial investments associated with organizations' Lotus Notes assets," said Nigel Cheshire, the company's CEO. "As conveyed by our customers, the benefits associated with migrating applications from the Lotus Notes platform to another proprietary system, do not justify the risks and costs associated with such a migration."

This article has been corrected. Teamstudio is based in Massachusetts, not England. IT Jungle regrets the error.