Very good article on a very large Microsoft customer. They are really adopting the whole Microsoft platform, including the RTC stack, which will bring them huge benefits without a doubt. Proctor and Gamble is also a very large Lotus Notes user (some 80.000 users). They will replace Lotus Notes by the Microsoft Platform according to the article.
… To resist becoming a commodity business, P&G must constantly innovate in product development so it can justify raising prices every so often on “new and improved” Tide, Folgers, Clairol, and its 300-plus other household brands. Meantime, it must forge closer ties with suppliers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. And it has to do all that faster than ever because time to market and market share are nearly synonymous in consumer goods.
As part of that broad effort, P&G is introducing a set of desktop applications to foster real-time collaboration among its worldwide workforce of more than 100,000 people and with its vast network of customers and partners. The rollout consists mainly of five Microsoft products-the Office 2003 desktop suite, Outlook E-mail client, Communicator instant-messaging software, Live Meeting conferencing service, and SharePoint document-sharing portal-plus Windows Server 2003 and other server software. The deal represents the largest license to date of Microsoft’s real-time collaboration suite (Communicator 2005, Live Meeting 2005, and upgraded Live Communications Server 2005), introduced in March. …
…The Microsoft apps are intended to replace Lotus Notes on the company’s 80,000 Windows PCs, plus 12,000 more Windows PCs that are part of P&G’s $57 billion acquisition of Gillette, which closed Oct. 1….
Read the whole article over on : Information Week
Excellent news:
“20 terabytes of E-mail in storage.”
Microsoft will have to do some serious work on all its platforms to scale to this size. Interesting times, especially with P+G acting as “beta customer” for all this development work.
Perhaps this is why P+G are *not* discussing timescales and costs..
And all those Notes applications- how will they port them to the new environment ?
Or will they be like a host of other headline microsoft conversions – still run Lotus Notes for their applications ?
You see, if only the microsoft application infrastructure actually competed with Notes in terms of capability…
—* Bill
Bill,
You can rest asured that all of your critical questions have been raised assuming this is not an overnight decision. (If only you were part of the competing salesteam 😉 )
Furthermore this is not a unique one off situation, more Notes clients have migrated and are migrating (mail and application).
I do agree with you that the size of this environment has its challenges in whatever transition scenario.