They claim 3rd party vendors have better tools and that the lack of a free tool may reduce the migrations due to the cost involved.
Michael Crowley, an enterprise/ messaging administrator with Germantown, Md.-based Microsoft product integrator Planet Technologies, Inc., said Microsoft's decision to stop offering its free tools is "a bigger deal than people realize."
Crowley said Lotus moves are usually done for cost reasons -- not because of any issues with IBM's mail server products, and POP3/IMAP4 to Exchange migrations are far more common.
Just what we have been saying for a long time, the issue is NOT the server. Of course the issue is not the price either when it is broken down properly.
And he goes on to say, and perhaps he is slightly confused by the Lotus admins as well:
"Generally the Domino administrators are happy with their software and sometimes even resist the migration," Crowley said.
Resist it? Sure we resist it, because it's a waste of money to leave a perfectly good platform for another one.
Most likely licensing is an issue, but really, aside from the initial expense, keeping your maintenance up is cheap next to whole new licenses. But if you had an older version, say 5,6,7 and stopped maintenance, then what do you expect IBM to do?
The licensing issue doesn't go away in the Cloud nor does it go away by going to Microsoft. In fact other licensing expenses go up, as does hardware costs.
The free tool that MS offered was not used in the migration I was on and a third party tool was used instead, although I thnk the third party tool used some of the functionality of the free MS tool!
ReplyDeleteMS's offering of a free migration tool was a selling point for those considering the move. Hopefully, now decision makers will have to consider one of the hidden costs of migrating.