Evidence is mounting that Office 365 as much as Windows 8 is the linchpin of Microsoft Corp.’s future success as the software company is leveraging a tool licensed from a partner to lure IBM Corp. Lotus users to its cloud-based productivity suite.

According to published reports, Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., has licensed a tool from Binary Tree Inc., which eases the deployment process and lowers costs of switching from conventional Lotus email and digital communications applications to Office 365.

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[From Information Week 03/22/2012] IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals face a similarly unfamiliar situation as they wade through challenges associated with serving an increasingly mobile workforce while their traditional email solutions are re-engineered for the cloud.

Mobile isn’t the only thing dominating IT conversations these days–cloud services are right up there too. As companies feverishly examine cloud-based services to shave cost and operational responsibility, email is one of the first candidates they consider offloading. In fact, Forrester finds that 45 percent of IT decision makers are either significantly interested in moving, or have definite plans to move, email out of their data center.

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IBM is planning to open two data centers in Japan by the end of this year. One IBM Cloud data center which will provide enterprise services and another for LotusLive services.According to IBM, the cloud services in that region has been growing rapidly. After the earthquake in March many businesses migrated to the Cloud services.

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Migration to the Cloud could be challenging and especially to the LotusLive Cloud. First off, the challenge it to sell to a customer which is almost made a decision to go with the one of the well known competitors in the cloud business. Even when a customer is currently running Lotus Notes, the business strongly feels that moving to Google or Microsoft cloud will solve magically all their problems. More over, almost 99% of small business owners have never heard anything about LotusLive. Oh well… I can talk about the lack of IBM marketing program in regards to LotusLive cloud environment for a very long time.

Finally after  months of demoing, encouraging and finally preparing the migration to LotusLive cloud environment it’s happening. During this weekend our team has started to work on the phase 1 of the migration. We have planned to have 2 migration phases which are defined by the hybrid configuration of the LotusLive environment. In this case the customer’s LotusLive hybrid environment will consist of  Lotus Notes/Domino databases resided in the private cloud and the Lotus Notes email resided in the LotusLive cloud.

The Phase I of the migration has been planned to move all Lotus Notes/Domino environment including Notes databases and email files over to the private cloud environment. This part is almost done and the challenges we had during the preparation as well as during the migration time were not very tough perhaps except one.  Moving a very large size  of email files data over the internet from the in-house server over to the private cloud server was not well thought and as a result we had to think out of the box. The solution was to move only 4 weeks of the email data over the WAN which decreased the size of the moving data by almost 80% and then replicate the rest of the email records while connecting directly to the in-house server. This approach guaranteed no down time for receiving nor sending email.

During the next weekend, the Phase II weekend we hope to migrate the customer email to the LotusLive cloud environment and I will report on this soon.

About IB Systems.
IB Systems Inc, was founded in 1996 and has been providing consulting services in areas of Lotus Notes and Domino support, administration and development. Since the beginning of 2011 the company has started to engage in  migration of small business companies to the cloud environment. IB Systems is based out of Tampa Bay FL area and  serves Tampa Bay, the state of Florida and the East part of the US.

I am very much disappointed by LotusLive Technical Support. It’s taking longer than a week to troubleshoot a simple issue related to the user’s email account. It would take probably an hour for a Domino Administrator to take care of that issue. Now error 3000… After 1003 has disappeared. I hope that IBM will do something about the LotusLive support to make it easy for the small business customers. There is a few alternatives to LotusLive cloud and all of them are not only targeting small business but also provide outstanding customer service, technical and sales support.

Photo Credit: IBM