TRANSACT TRANSFORM RUN RECYCLE WHITE PAPER Lotus Notes modernisation A rough guide IBM NOTES MODERNISATION bell-integration.com Options & considerations for modernising your Lotus Notes & Domino Estate You’ve loved Lotus Notes and it’s served you well. But time stands still for no one, and you’re ready to think about your collaboration strategy for the future. Whether your organisation is using IBM® Notes® and Domino® just for Mail, or also with a portfolio of rich Notes Applications, this white paper is designed to help you define a Notes Modernisation strategy and implement it with confidence. Contents Introduction 3 Defining your Notes Modernisation strategy 4 Options for your Notes Modernisation journey 5 Maintain and Protect 6 Extend and Evolve 7 Transform Operational Model 8 Replace and Migrate 9 Revolutionise 10 Bell Integration – your Partner on the Journey 11 Next Steps 12 2 | LOTUS NOTES MODERNISATION WHITE PAPER IBM NOTES MODERNISATION bell-integration.com Introduction The first release of Lotus Notes was shipped in 1989 and has become one the most enduring enterprise software applications of all time. A popular email client and server application with millions of Notes end-users in enterprises globally, it’s loved by many for its high-end security features, workgroup tools and ability to rapidly create applications. For over two decades, Notes has been the engine driving communication and collaboration within many organisations. But collaboration technology has come on a long way in the intervening years and today relies on richer, smarter, and more context-rich channels that can be used by any person on any device at any time. Failure to address this changing communication landscape has the potential to place your relationships with customers, partners and employees at risk. So where does that leave organisations that are still running and maintaining mature Lotus Notes and Domino estates? Like many organisations you’ll have invested significant resources in building your Notes and Domino infrastructure, developing custom applications to manage mail, workflow, collaboration and more. Some of these applications may span your entire organisation, while others will be confined to single departments or teams. The strategic question you now face is: How best to modernise? In this white paper we outline the choices you face, and the journey options available to you. 3 | LOTUS NOTES MODERNISATION WHITE PAPER IBM NOTES MODERNISATION bell-integration.com Defining your Notes Modernisation Strategy As you prepare to embark on a modernisation strategy, you’ll need to consider a number of questions to determine the best direction to take: è Stay with Notes but move to cloud? Are you happy to stay with your Notes platform, but want to make the move to a cloud solution? è What’s your focus? What are your main focus areas and priorities for change? Client, server or applications – or all three? è Looking to reduce costs? Are you looking predominantly to reduce the total cost of ownership of your Notes estate? è Struggling to maintain Notes applications? Do you have Notes Applications that you’re struggling to maintain, or need to web-enable to extend their reach? è Wanting contemporary UX? Is the desire for a contemporary user experience one of the drivers? è Looking to improve collaboration? Are you looking to improve staff collaboration, remote access and mobility? è Interested in transformation? Is your company interested in starting a social business transformation? è Planning to migrate? Are you planning to migrate from Notes to Microsoft Office 365, but need help with the project? è Any specific challenges? Do you have any specific migration challenges to handle such as archived or encrypted mail? 4 | LOTUS NOTES MODERNISATION WHITE PAPER IBM NOTES MODERNISATION bell-integration.com What are your options? Whether your focus is client, server or applications, this white paper will help you explore which options are best for your business – both now and in the longer term. To help you navigate your way, we outline five primary journey options for you to consider. Maintain and protect Safeguard the value of your existing investment, while reducing the burden and cost of ownership of maintaining and hosting your current Notes Mail and Notes Applications. Extend and evolve Integrate new capabilities and modern user interface features to meet a rising business need for increased social collaboration and mobility. Transform operational model Move to the cloud with a per-user subscription model and Bell Integration managed service to unburden your IT team and free them up for other projects. Replace and migrate Replace your Notes infrastructure and applications with alternatives such as Microsoft, Google or IBM Verse. Revolutionise Radically change how work gets done in your organisation by moving to a next-generation collaboration and messaging platform. The decision to remain or migrate away will be driven by a number of factors, including your business goals and IT priorities, skills, resources, time and budget. Identifying which route option is best for your organisation can be challenging, but our decision tree on the next page is designed to help you confidently plot a route for your migration strategy. 5 | LOTUS NOTES MODERNISATION WHITE PAPER IBM NOTES MODERNISATION bell-integration.com Options for your Notes and Domino Journey – should you stay or should you go? What’s driving your decision? Business goal Stay/Go Journey Solution/Service Page IT We need to maintain business Availability and risk continuity and data integrity while management we migrate 23 We’ve made a strategic architecture Notes Mail Migration decision to move away from the 20 Notes platform REPLACE AND MIGRATE We have a formal enterprise architecture strategy to move to Enterprise architecture the cloud compliance GO Migrate Application Hosting 10 We want to provide mobile and tablet access for Notes users TRANSFORM We want to reduce the cost of OPERATIONAL MODEL maintaining and hosting 18 Notes applications Migrate to SmartCloud Notes 9 We want to reduce the cost of email Improve mobility service hosting We want to reduce the cost and burden of Notes application and mail support Notes support services MAINTAIN AND PROTECT 7 We want to reduce client footprint and provide web access to improve user productivity Reduce cost of ownership Notes application Line of business modernisation 11 We want to improve the user EXTEND AND EVOLVE experience & provide web access 12 13 We want to add social features Notes infrastructure STAY to improve collaboration Improve user modernisation 16 17 productivity We want to collaborate with customers and partners more easily Move to IBM verse & REVOLUTIONISE Connections Cloud C- S u i t e 25 We want to shift collaboration from Improve collaboration email to a social business platform 6 | LOTUS NOTES MODERNISATION WHITE PAPER MAINTAIN AND PROTECT bell-integration.com YOUR CHALLENGE: We want to reduce the cost and burden of Notes application and mail support BUSINESS OBJECTIVE: Reduce cost of ownership SOLUTION: Notes support service Safeguarding and prolonging your existing investment You may decide that keeping your existing estate is the right decision, and that you’d like to extend the useful life of your current deployment while reducing the cost and burden of ownership. The immediate benefits of staying where you include: less disruption for users, lower up-front hardware and software costs, and fewer time/resources – plus you can take advantage of patches and fixes if you have a support contract. But keep in mind the growing complexity of managing legacy architecture with a plethora of in-house fixes, particularly if you are running release 4 or older. Staying with an older version of Notes will ultimately risk your ability to engage with customers and partners across emerging channels. Our best advice is, as a minimum, to upgrade to Notes 8.0 or later in order to maximise support, gain increased security, better performance and richer user functionality. Longer term, you should consider the overheads and cost associated with maintaining an older system. You may have already experienced, first hand, the difficulty of recruiting from a diminishing pool of IT resources with a background in a Notes Domino infrastructure or Notes applications. 7 | LOTUS NOTES MODERNISATION WHITE PAPER MAINTAIN AND PROTECT bell-integration.com Reducing the burden and cost of Notes support One strategy is to complement in-house skills without outside assistance or to completely outsource management of your Notes estate, freeing up internal staff to focus on core skills and projects. A Notes service provider can offer a range of flexible options for supporting, maintaining and hosting your mail infrastructure and applications. Look for proven, customer-evidenced IBM Notes and Domino knowledge that enables the source of the problem to be pinpointed quickly – even within highly integrated enterprise applications - and rapidly resolved. Benefits of utilising a specialist Notes service provider Access to senior certified Notes and Domino consultants and engineers who can quickly integrate with your existing IT team to manage your infrastructure and applications. Ability to work across multiple deployment models including on-premises, hosted, cloud and hybrid. Proactive monitoring of servers, reducing time and effort spent on internal fire-fighting. Escalation point and access to a team of product specialists with extensive experience of supporting a broad range of environments. Capacity and staff availability to reduce the impact of personnel-based events such as holiday, sickness and staff turnover and reduces need to recruit expensive Notes Domino experts in-house. Planning for the longer term Organisations that opt to carry on with their existing system for now will still need to engage in conversations about what the future holds for their business longer term – especially when it comes to supporting their collaboration needs. In our experience, it’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’.