Domino @ Symetrik Design

Last week, I met with Microsoft regarding one of our sites that is not currently on Domino. We will call this Site A. We built 2 clustered Domino servers for that site in September of last year and put it on hold because we didn’t want to go through the labor/cost of migrating 300 existing Outlook clients to Lotus Notes if we were only going to migrate them back to Outlook a few months later.

We’ve been waiting on how the contract negotiations with Microsoft will go and then determine through the Microsoft design, planning, and scheduling to see how long it will take.

The problem is that this site relies on a 3rd party host provider. We have no guarantee of backups, no resolve if the company goes bankrupt, no compliancy capturing, and then the added cost of paying for the external service.

Their existing mail setup is Outlook 2003 or 2007 accessing POP3 mailboxes with local .pst files. The meeting was to determine how we should proceed in the next few weeks because the management at that site is now very concerned several months after we had planned on bringing this service in-house that data is not secure and protected.
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Yesterday was a rough day being a Domino mail server admin.

First, let me explain our environment. Most of our company is on Domino and Notes 6.5.1.-6 (mostly Notes 6.5.4).

There is one division that refuses to move to Notes because they love outlook, and their main excuse is that there is the 100 mail rule limitation of Notes. They actually use email as a system like I’ve never seen. They manage a fleet of ships, and each ships sends different kinds of messages, these messages are sent to groups that are nested several times, so many many people receive them. Some people need them for one reason or another. These messages also go into a linux application server and are search able via a web interface.

So basically, they cannot live without having sometimes 200 mail rules. They are pushing electronic mail to the boundaries. I’m sure there is a better way for them to do all of this, but who has the time to pitch a better idea to them, especially when they have no budget. Read the rest of this entry »