A different way of doing things

I’m visiting a customer and we have talked about the different initiatives they are working. They are a medium size business unit that belongs to a big corporation and that due to the agreements they have, they keep some type of independence in terms of IT. They have their own IT road-map and budget.

Both companies, the main and the BU, have in their long term road-map the same goal: move from LN platform to MS-Office 365.

The difference? the way to reach that goal.

First approach, the big corporation has started migrating the e-mail. They have had so many issues with the migration and the transformation of workflow and document management applications have still not started (more than 8 months of delay). The users are not happy with the individual productivity they have due to they still have to open LN for the applications and they mainly are working with 2 e-mail tools.

It’s clear the complexity of the project is huge, but the expenditure associated to the project delay: more project teams budget, OPEX generated by having to maintain two e-mail platforms is huge. When reviewing the assumptions done for that program, so many of them are unrealistic.

The second approach, the business unit have started migrating customized applications in a SharePoint Farm. They have not so much budget to spend, they cannot plan million dollars projects and they need to keep the expenditure as minimum. They have commented that the savings proposed by Microsoft are based in a conditions that they do not have, their system is small and the #users are not so big. This added to the fact that the productivity of their system is very high, supposes that the migration project requires so much time to have positive ROI.

They are developing SharePoint applications, starting with simple ones and having the real feeling about how to work with them. They have found that the maturity of the platform needs to increase and that the user experience is also something that they expected to be higher. They understand that to have the complete package of Office will increase the productivity, but the real fact is that they cannot pay all these amount of licenses. They are happy with the LN applications: they do what they have to do, no more.

For sure the annual investment they are doing is not so high, so the business is happy with the approach and the expenditure.

For sure they will migrate to Outlook, but just when all the applications will be out of LN, the basic principle is: do not pay two licenses.

I’m willing to see in some years how these two programs evolved.