Lotus Notes
OnX understands that many enterprises are in need of application migrations in order to address business priorities and to fully exploit collaboration products without compromising on interoperability or disrupting business.
Historically, collaboration-oriented products were generally proprietary and incompatible: proprietary because they predated pivotal industry standards such as XML, and incompatible because of application models that were often focused on addressing different needs. For example, Microsoft Exchange was initially developed well over a decade ago, with an initial focus on enterprise messaging and calendaring/scheduling, and subsequently added support for some other types of collaborative applications. More recently, there has been broad market convergence around a new model for collaborative applications, a model centered on:
Workspaces: virtual, shared spaces where people assemble and jointly work on projects, processes, and documents – for example, Microsoft’s Windows SharePoint Services-hosted document and meeting workspaces in Office 2003.
Channels: complementary to workspaces, channels are appropriate for subscription and notification oriented collaborative contexts – for example, email, web logs, and RSS news feeds.
Contextual collaboration: this is a trend toward pervasively integrated collaboration-oriented tools and services, with which people can more readily focus on their business tasks at hand and are less disrupted by tool boundaries. Microsoft Office Live communication services, for example, can provide real-time communication tools in collaborative workspaces and other applications.
Industry standards: broad compliance with real and de facto standards, such as XML and various real-time communication protocols has also facilitated convergence toward the new collaboration model.
OnX consistently encounters organizations seeking to overcome collaborative application challenges and optimize their collaborative applications. A full migration is attractive to an enterprise seeking to consolidate relationships with fewer software suppliers in order to reduce total costs or to take advantage of unique capabilities in a given collaborative platform. The most common migration scenarios include migrating:
- From Notes/Domino to SharePoint and SQL Server or Outlook/Exchange.
From Outlook/Exchange to SharePoint and SQL Server.
In line with the shifting market and the emerging new model for collaboration, OnX recognizes Microsoft as an organization that has significantly extended its collaboration-related product set during the last few years. Exchange and Outlook are still the focus for enterprise email, calendaring, and scheduling, but they are now complemented by:
- SharePoint – for workspace-oriented collaborative applications such as document and meeting workspaces.
- InfoPath and BizTalk Server – for XML-based forms-based, workflow-oriented applications such as expense report processing and sales reports.
- New smart document and smart tag technology extensions in Word 2003 and Excel 2003 – to provide more powerful collaboration functionality within these applications.
- Office Live Meeting 2003 (formerly PlaceWare), Office Live Communication Server 2003, and other real-time products and services – for in-context real-time communication and collaboration.
- Visual Studio.NET – Which can be used for a broad range of collaborative applications through the .NET Framework extensions that are included with Windows SharePoint Services and other Microsoft collaborative product offerings.
Microsoft’s information worker strategy is designed to fully exploit “smart client” devices running Windows and Office. Many of Microsoft’s communication and collaboration tools and services are built into the Windows Server System and Office System (e.g., Windows SharePoint Services in Windows Server 2003, and InfoPath in Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003).