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Microsoft's Methodology and Framework for Notes Coexistence & Migration

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Here is some background on our Methodology & Framework for how we think about coexistence & migration between Microsoft & Lotus.

Methodology: As many of you know, one of the first things you do with any large project is insure you have a framework for which you begin executing against. With Erik Ashby, Gary Devendorf, Scott Andersen, Ed Wu and others, we set out to build a framework a little over a year ago. We went on a series of face-to-face customer & partner engagements, kicked off a series of Notes “focus groups” worldwide, recruited external Notes experts, met with analysts, held\hold many hours of brainstorming meetings & specs reviews, visited (many personally) customers\partners thru-out the world, and more.

Our goal:

To hear & learn what our customers, partners & analysts had to say & needed from us to be successful in their adoption of Microsoft's Collaboration Platform.

From this we settled on a framework that aligns with our Plan\Prepare, Coexist & Migrate Steps - that Erik blogged about earlier. In addition, we map these three distinct steps to our three technical foundations: Directory, Messaging & Applications. That when layed out, gives us a nice 3 x 3 matrix we can begin mapping current & future solutions to.

With our framework in place, we engaged our partners to fully understand what we had collectively technically, what we needed to build & what we would work with them to provide. We built a detailed component roadmap, development plan & continue to use these today to prioritize our work-items & development activities.

In the end, we have the following:

  • technical framework for addressing the multiple challenges & setting development priorities

  • product roadmap for identifying the strengths, weaknesses & areas of improvement of our current\future products

  • strong partner community to assist with building addt’l solutions

  • world-class technical team that know IBMs products inside & out

  • fully staffed & dedicated product group of pm, test & dev resources to build, improve & prioritize the tools our customers need

We believe strongly this is a long-term commitment & are working to provide the tools necessary over these long engagements to enable our customers to be successful.

We have some exciting products in the pipeline now, are deliberate & methodical in our approach, & look forward to hearing your feedback on our progress, approach & products\tools we and our partners are providing.

-todd

wanke