So, yesterday I was in Manhattan, again. This time it was to attend IBM’s “Microsoft Exchange Alternatives” seminar, held at IBM’s building on Madison Avenue. I had to get up at 0400 to drive to Detroit and catch the first flight in to LGA; despite that, the flight was delayed. (That gave me time to finish a paper I’ve been working on, which I emailed from the back of the taxi on the way to IBM. Good news: I can send email from taxicabs. Bad news: sometimes I have to.) As Ed said, the seminar was well-attended, with about 20 folks in the room from a variety of customers.
There were four presenters: Ed did his overview of IBM’s collab strategy; Jennifer Meade from ThroughBox IT did a somewhat lackluster review of three customer case studies, Henry Bestritsky from Binary Tree talked about their Common Migration Tool (CMT) and how it can be used to move from Exchange to Notes, and Brendan Crotty wrapped the morning up with a solid demo of the Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) tool.
Overall, I thought it was a good first effort. As I pointed out to Ed when I met him afterwards, there wasn’t any convincing discussion about quantified business value. Interestingly, IBM had several Linux sales folks in the audience, and a common theme underlying Ed and Brendan’s presentations was that IBM is promoting server OS choice. I’ll save my analysis of that meme for another day 🙂 I don’t think the seminar content accurately reflected Microsoft’s current collab strategy and why IBM thinks theirs is better. In fairness, that’s not what this event was intended to cover. IBM did a good job of positively conveying their message, though, and I think mixing in the partners was a good touch.
How does this compare to our “Optimizing Collaboration and Communications” event? We have more demos, including an extended “day in the life” demo that lets me show how I actually use Microsoft’s tools to get my daily work done. We also have a lot more quantitative information about the business benefits of extending Notes/Domino infrastructures with MS’ tools. We’ll see what Ed thinks when he attends our Chicago event.
Unlike Ed, I made it out of LGA before the weather turned bad 🙂
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