Was your CIO on this call?

Just got off a call from CIO magazine in which Dell was hawking their MessageOne solution.

I am not happy about this. Maybe it's my fault, I expect more from CIO, or maybe I expect more from other CIOs.

If I wanted a sales pitch I could call Dell or anyone else to do it, so why bother me with this? Enticing it was to discuss issues corporations face when migrating to Exchange 2007 with other CIOs but that wasn't what it became.

The presenter not only related why 2003 was so bad, but why 2007 in some cases still is and only Dell has the services to help you. You'd think IBM Global Services gave it.

Although it was to be about Dell the last few minutes of the hour, it was about Dell from about 1/2 way through the call. You can try to listen here, but I don't vouch the link will work.

Companies are trying to conserve money, don't you think they could let their own employees do some work for a change? Everyone is busy, but Domino admins get their servers upgraded regularly and easily. Why do Exchange companies take 3 years to finish an installation then months at a time to do upgrades?

Both systems are unique and difficult in their own way and have similar issues of backup, down time slots, resources but somehow I never hear about Exchange admins getting servers updated the day a release comes out like Domino.

CIO should be providing harder sessions and questions to the CIO community out there than what is shown. In the last few magazine issues the stress has been CIOs need to do more with less, be proactive, reach for greater returns, yet they then provide wimpy sessions like this one. This could have been a solid session on what to do, how to do it or when to do it, but instead it was a "let Dell do it for you, as much or as little as you need".

IBM probably does similar sessions and I am against that as well if done purely in a sales selfish way. Speak to be understood, not to sell. No case study or client references were used either for recent work. If you do your job properly, they will buy from you or at least listen in the future.