Turning In Exchange

That said, moving enterprise e-mail systems can't be done on a whim. A great deal of planning is required, and often only after careful comparison and study of the alternatives. Nonetheless, Exchange seems to be losing some ground. One of the biggest reasons has to do with Microsoft itself, which has made it more difficult for its customers to upgrade to newer Exchange versions.

"Microsoft has not provided a very comprehensive migration path from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000/2003," says Henry Bestritsky, principal of Binary Tree, a Lotus ISV with offices in New York and Red Wing, Minn., that provides the Common Migration Tool (CMT) used by millions to migrate from Exchange to Notes.

In addition, Microsoft requires the installation of Active Directory to support the newer Exchange versions, something that many customers aren't willing to get involved in quite yet. And yet another reason has to do with platform choices.

"Customers are feeling trapped by a single platform and technology and want to have more choices," Bestritsky says. "Since Notes runs on any platform and not just Windows, customers are consolidating their hardware into larger reliable servers like the IBM iSeries. When you can run 30,000 users on one box that is up most of the time, you immediately realize a huge savings."

Security Concerns
In comparison to the fullness of Notes' and GroupWise's collaboration solutions, Microsoft also seems late to the game by just now implementing its SharePoint Services, which improve access to information and collaboration.

"Get rid of Exchange," advises Tim Heywood, a Novell VAR based in Scotland. "Tell your customers it is time to use a flexible, robust e-mail system that understands the meaning of the word 'security.'"

Virus attacks on Exchange, in fact, have been another catalyst for migration. "Customers were tired of all the problems with Exchange," says Don Emery, a GroupWise consultant at MicroINT. "They have experienced multiple virus attacks."

Bestritsky agrees, and is finding customers receptive to migrating after one too many Exchange crashes. "Not one of our Lotus clients has ever complained about their systems going down because of a virus," he says.

So how do you help your customers? CMT and Caledonia's Exchange to GroupWise Migration Utility (GWMU) are the two main products that can accomplish the conversion. They have various programs to work with consultants and systems integrators, and both tools do a fairly solid job of moving not just the e-mail messages, but the associated calendars, archives and address books that are part of the overall messaging system.

In addition, Lotus and Novell are both offering various promotions to encourage customers to switch e-mail systems.

Migration Considerations
To aid with the transition, one VAR suggests running Exchange in parallel with either Notes or GroupWise. "It was imperative to ensure that users did not have to hop from product to product to read e-mail and get to databases," says Nick Nicodemus, director of IS for Danville, Ind.-based Hendricks Regional Health, a former Exchange organization that is in the process of migrating 500 users over to Notes. Nicodemus installed the Exchange-to-Notes connectors while he migrated to a 100 percent Notes operation.

What's more, migration isn't a completely automated process, and the cleanup afterward is where VARs can make some money in consulting, training and support. "Usually, the training of the users is done simultaneously with the migration of the data," Heywood says. "Therefore, user support is required immediately."

VARs will also need to consolidate contacts. "After the migration, users need to check their recurring appointments and move any mail to the appropriate GroupWise mailbox," says Emery, adding that the GWMU tool is very easy to install and use. "The hardest part is making sure you have the Outlook client with Service Pack 3 on your desktop along with the GroupWise client. If you want to move multiple users, you just create a comma-separated file with all the information."

For his part, Nicodemus praises the Binary Tree CMT product. "CMT is well worth the price, and we actually got more back from it than cost," he says.

The CMT product creates two e-mail messages in each new Notes user's mailbox that are actually automated scripts. "The first e-mail imports their contacts that were in Exchange into Notes," Nicodemus says. "The second e-mail will import their archived e-mails from the .PST file into Notes as a Notes-native database so that users can continue to operate in one platform and maintain the history of e-mail they wanted to keep."

Above all, remember that users are typically resistant to change, and it's the adept VAR who can manage the process.

"You get into a Chevy/Ford syndrome," Nicodemus says. "The truth is that both have functional headlights and windshield wipers; your problem is figuring out how they work."