Migration From Domino to Exchange Is Easy for E-Mail, but Applications Prove More Challenging
22 February 2006
Matthew W. Cain
Source: Gartner
Note Number: G00137480
RSM McGladrey, an H&R Block subsidiary, is a national business consulting, accounting and tax firm that focuses on midsize companies. The company migrated 7,000 users from Lotus Domino e-mail and calendar services to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.
RSM McGladrey demonstrated that Domino-to-Exchange e-mail migrations can be done quickly with minimal user angst. The company, however, faces challenges in moving Domino applications to the Microsoft environment. Migration was justified less on hard dollar savings (which may or may not materialize) and more on the desire to boost user satisfaction and longer-term alignment with the Microsoft stack.
Changing dynamics in the enterprise e-mail market has led many organizations to reconsider long-term commitments to incumbent vendors. Although few enterprises have actually switched suppliers, there is considerable interest in the experience of organizations that have made this migration.
RSM McGladrey, based in Bloomington, Minnesota, decided to move from IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft's Exchange Server 2003 for several reasons.
Broader Options
Increased Alignment With Microsoft Strategy
RSM McGladrey's goal was to move all users from Domino e-mail and calendar services to Exchange/Outlook 2003 and, at a later time, to migrate away from all Domino applications. The company was also using this exercise as an opportunity to standardize mail systems and policies for employees, as well as the 2000 users it recently acquired as the result of the purchase of a tax division of American Express.
RSM McGladrey took a two-stage approach to migrating users from Domino to Exchange. In October 2005, it migrated all 2,000 Domino users of the newly purchased American Express tax group. In November, it migrated the remaining 5,000 users to Exchange. The company employed a migration tool from Binary Tree, which facilitated rapid migration. For the November migration, the company set up a grid of 30 laptops loaded with the migration tool, which methodically worked through each individual user. The November migration worked flawlessly (four IT group personnel oversaw the effort), with all users migrated during one weekend.
In preparation for the migration, the Exchange infrastructure had already been built — a four-node mailbox cluster including one passive failover server, two Outlook Web Access front-end servers, a pair of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) servers and one public folder server for free-and-busy calendar data. The Outlook 2003 client had already been manually loaded by the IT group.
The company gave users the option to migrate some data over or start with a clean slate on the Exchange system; approximately 80 percent of users opted to migrate data. The firm left the old Lotus Notes on the desktop to enable continued access to messages not migrated, and to access Domino applications. RSM McGladrey will decommission Domino e-mail when it sees a significant reduction in access traffic to older messages. The company maintained its Port 25 hygiene service provided by Tumbleweed Communications.
The enterprise created a Web site for employee information about the migration, along with usage tips. It also created a laminated one-page Outlook usage document to disseminate to all users. Finally, it established a series of optional one-hour training courses delivered via Web conferencing by three IT personnel. Approximately one-third of the company's employees attended this training. Some training events were canceled, however, due to lack of participation.
The company used Microsoft's consulting service for Exchange architectural planning, which it was pleased with. Microsoft provided no special incentives to encourage the migration.
RSM McGladrey has numerous Domino applications, and those were left in place for the time being. Some applications are being rewritten in SharePoint, and others will be rewritten at a later time in ASP.NET, Visual Basic or Groove. The company had six Domino developers who made the transition easily to the Microsoft development environment, although two Domino developers chose to leave the company rather than learn the new skill set. The company plans on completing the application migration within two years.
The impetus for the migration was driven by the IT group for reasons listed above. Management did not lean heavily on the IT group for solid return on investment numbers, but the company believes it might save money in the long term via increased user productivity (through the Office/e-mail integration). The primary justification for the migration was to improve employee satisfaction — employees had ranked IT services as one of the top five "pain points" in the company — and the firm hopes the migration appeases these IT services concerns.
RSM McGladrey viewed the migration as a complete success. It received no complaints about the loss of the Notes client as the primary e-mail/calendar tool. All targeted data (95 percent of the total Domino data) was migrated successfully. Help desk queries doubled as a result of the migration for the first two weeks, with approximately 40 percent of calls being functionality related, and the remaining questions related to password/user ID and duplicated or missing information. After three weeks, the help desk load returned to normal levels.
The company believes it spent about $1.5 million ($214 per user) for the entire migration, with about half of the cost going to capital procurement (such as licenses and servers) and half going to soft costs (such as training, deployment, planning and consulting). Although the firm has not done thorough estimates, it believes the ultimate cost of migrating applications will be in the range of another $200 per user, although we believe that estimates of application migration costs are difficult to forecast.
The company standardized its mailbox size allocation and purge cycles, which had been different between heritage RSM McGladrey users and the new American Express users. The company is now standardized on 150MB mailboxes with no automatic purging. In general, the company believes that managing the Exchange environment is easier than managing the Domino e-mail infrastructure.
Critical Success Factors/Lessons Learned
