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Whirlpool Ditches IBM Collaboration Software, Moves To Google Apps
cagraham writes "Appliance maker Whirlpool has decided to stop using IBM's "Notes" collaboration software, and instead move to Google Apps for Business. The Wall Street Journal reports that the decision was based on both worker's familiarity with Google Apps, and lessening the IT workload. Because most workers have used (or use) apps like Google Calendar and Google Docs, Whirlpool's IT staff won't have to devote as much time to initial software training. This move lines up with recent enterprise reports, which largely forecast an increasing move to cloud based software. Whirlpool's contract with Google will cover all of their 30,000 employees."
Oh look, normal IT operations in a large corporation just happened. I don't see what's special here.
Isn't that the crappy brand of home appliances IKEA sells at premium brand prices?
My understanding is that Google Apps (regular or biz) allows Google to analyze your data and monetize it. Is this true? If so, it means that company confidential info isn't confidential. If it was my company, I wouldn't want to be "the product" that Google is selling to others. Please enlighten me!
Long ago in a galaxy far far away, software adoption at home was influenced by what was used at work.
Now what people use at home influences what is used at work.
Who would have thought about that.
I've worked for IBM and had to use notes and other stuff. Everyone that was forced to switch from outlook to notes wanted desperately to switch back. Notes should die already, it's junk!
Shouldn't this be titled "Whirlpool ditches Notes, doesn't choose Exchange"?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Let's just keep pushing all of our data to Google for the rest of the world to sift through. Brilliant job. I hear the same thing about managers pushing crappier software packages because of familiarity rather than the Cadillac packages. Then they run into issues trying to push forward because of limitations in the software. The flexibility of Notes is one of the reasons why my company still uses it. I don't see the Google Apps applying to the business processes as well as many people might think it does. Then again, I see many companies that focus on using third party software instead of using house developers to tool products to their business processes. I don't understand the logic in this other than some sort of short term gain through cutting software costs at the sacrifice of having to manipulate business processes to fit a mold that may or may not work for them. In the end, Go Maytag!
Place something witty here
Anything is better than Notes, I would rather chisel messages in stone than use Notes. Wish I was working for Whirlpool now.
I saw the first post was "what's so special about a company changing their collaboration software?" Allow the old man here from simpler times to explain. :-)
The reason why it's a big shift is because, at this point, Notes is beyond legacy status when it comes to email/collaboration apps. I don't know how much success Whirlpool will have with Google Apps, but I imagine their users will be happier. For anyone in the IT business in the early/mid 90s and forward, especially if you worked for an IBM shop, you probably have had some exposure to Lotus (now IBM) Notes. My company is still a Notes customer, most probably because of a sweetheart licensing deal or just inertia (I work in our product engineering group, corporate IT is handled separately in my company.) Notes was one of the first "groupware" applications, and companies built huge, complex applications for it. (Oh yeah, I forgot, that's the other reason we're still Notes customers -- rewriting the few remaining mission critical apps with tons of mystical business logic embedded in them hasn't been done yet.) Anyway, email was just another application, and it was never Notes' strong suit. One thing it did have that was very important for 90s era road warriors dialing up from the middle of nowhere was the ability to truly work offline and replicate messages when you had the chance. Outlook only got good at this around 2003, so Notes also had a pretty big following in consulting shops and places that had a lot of disconnected or poorly connected locations. Remember, kiddies, when Notes got its start, the Internet was still an academic exercise and as early as 1998 or so, slow dial up was the norm. That's the environment Notes was built to run in.
Anyway, IBM has been keeping Notes on life support for ages ,along with Lotus Symphony which it inherited when it bought Lotus. The latest clients have almost completely been rewritten in Java with some native front end code, and it's very slow. One thing Microsoft has done a pretty good job with is the Outlook/Exchange combo in terms of user responsiveness. But Notes still has some of the 90s look and feel in it, and it really seems like they gave the recent client upgrade project to a bunch of new grads in India (which, given that it's IBM, isn't a shocker.)
Notes is a good lesson in what happens when a formerly decent software product gets ignored for a long time -- a sort of "software rot" slowly sets in and competitors just keep adding new stuff while you stand still. MS Office isn't exactly the same thing -- they're constantly bloating it with new stuff; not really standing still the way IBM has done with Notes.
It'll be interesting to see how quickly Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Apps are taken up by businesses. It'll sure change the landscape for IT guys -- lots of my "professional" colleagues who rely on knowing strange obscure software features over systems engineering work are going to be very surprised one day when companies are just renting applications and need fewer in house people to feed them. I've seen this coming for a while and have been preparing -- even if the whole thing fizzles out, it's good to be multi-talented.
They're the best ISP in Australia!
Except all the others, aside from Telestra.
IBM moved a lot of them out of the USA
IBM? Who is IBM?
well alot of the low level IBM ones are inferior and they don't pay to get the good ones.
Lotus Notes is a botched abortion... It's amazing anyone still uses it. It is by definition cheaper to use ANYTHING else, including carrier pigeons.
One thing Lotus Notes has going for it is really nice, tight, secure email integration with Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). Now that Blackberry is on the way out, I wonder if that will be the impetus for more Notes shops to jump ship to other infrastructure technology?
I was exposed to Lotus, then IBM Notes, in the mid and late 90's, and it was atrocious.
The users at Whirlpool will think of Google Apps as... the savior. And not because Google Apps is so good in absolute terms.
The comment you're quoting does NOT say it's not about money. It asks if the poster who said that "IBM moved a lot of them out of the USA" is a racist.
Your Hyper-V argument makes the perfect case for totally short-sighted cost savings.
Hyper-V may work "well enough" for a lot of single host implementations with very basic VMs, but once you get to shared storage and clustering environments (where virtualization really gets interesting), Hyper-V blows.
I work with a VAR who does both and we see lots of organizations implementing Hyper-V because its cheap and then we also help fix it when it blows up, like one client who had a fuckup with their Windows host SAN integration software that corrupted a volume and took out the whole cluster. At least 30 hours of after hours consulting time plus who knows how much lost productivity time for the network guy on site plus outage costs...
That's a ton of fucking money for upfront savings.
... and I HATE it. It's inferior in every way regarding usability as compared to Outlook.
E-mails are more difficult to compose. There's only very basic formatting options. No format paster. In the world of browser tabs, it's very annoying that I now have to find the e-mail tab as opposed to switching between active programs to get my e-mail and calendar.
The calendar is harder to use. It keeps moving the start of the 5 day week to the current day, making it hard to use. (On a more positive note, I like the temperature forecasts built in)
The notifications suck. Suck suck suck. I tried the standard Google Notifier and the messages were left too long in the upper-right hand, blocking important information up there which lasted too long. They aren't customizable. And I've already missed so many meetings because the calendar reminders don't stay on the screen! You have to be actively watching for those reminders to do anything.
I know it's fashionable to hate Microsoft and love Google, but come on. Outlook was a great product, and I was just forced to return to a technology that is 5 or 10 years behind.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Ok... I know there aren't many alternatives, but seriously... moving to Google Docs doesn't sound good in the current climate. It means that all business mails and documents will be easily accessible by the U.S. government.
I don't know whether Whirlpool stores and information that is considered customer confidential, but I'd imagine that they have documents regularly stored on their systems that are marked "Corporate Confidential". Does voluntarily choosing to store files on a server owned by a U.S. corporation that regularly breeches confidentiality by providing their records to the U.S. government (NSA, FBI, etc...) no violate those terms of the agreements?
Of course, pretending like it's not happening might count as "not voluntarily doing so". The only reason I like Offie 365 is because of Office 365 Enterprise which can be hosted by non-Microsoft corporations in countries with privacy laws.
Probably part of the decision is due to data retention and e-discovery policies. Passing the cost for those requirements could be a real savings.
I wonder how long it takes for the CIO to get fed up with all the reported missing emails? It is hard to notice when you don't exactly know it's supposed to be there. We switched from our own MS Exchange environment to Google Apps about a year ago. The shear number of reported missing emails is really odd. Some have been proven. Others we eventually just tossed our hands up in the air (the one offs that just weren't worth any more cycles to chase down). In one case an end user wasn't getting their Go To Meeting information. Yet others were. Went back and forth with Google for weeks trying to track it down. Then it mysteriously started working with no additional input from Google Support. I've been here almost 6 years and every year I get MS renewal licensing alerts via email in June-August. This year none of them showed up. And I have at least another two dozen known cases. At least when we had our own mail system we could review the logs and see if we ever received it. Not much you can do except open a ticket and wait when you can't find it in the Google logs. Not always a zippy process.
Google support is ok. Better than some, but not all. You do at least get Canadians to speak with so the language barrier is easier to overcome (no offense to non-English as a first language speaking tech support reps). In one case I didn't hear back from a tech who took my case. A couple of pings and four days went by with no response. Tech came back and told me he was out on a medical issue for a few days. Ok. But how did my issue not get ported to a tech that was available? Very weird.
Then there are times when Google goes offline. Like a couple of weeks ago when their outage left us hanging almost the entire day. And that's happened a few times this year.
Ya, ya, I know. Saves $$$$ right? More versatile? And whatever other cloud marketing speak you want to tag it with. I'm not convinced we should be buying into all that just yet. Our CTO would of course certainly claim the opposite.
Just my own experience with gApps so far. So don't think I'm just off to bash Google here. I've been in IT for going on 20 years. I can use whatever you throw at me. Slightly more difficult for those in most other departments. Especially if there is any learning curve involved. The lost emails does have me worried though. We're small and gApps may only cost us $2500 per year, but what if one of those lost emails doesn't gets noticed and later it is revealed that a sales person lost a big deal in the process by not getting back in a timely manner? Anyway, I feel that's a big enough deal for not moving to gApps. C-level certainly disagrees.
Anyone else move to gApps and experienced the same missing emails issue?
Thank you.
After IBM tried to replace RETAIN (A data retrieval system written in mainframe assembler) with Notes several times, and failed each time, they decided to just use it as their internal mail system to try to recoup their $6 billion. They're probably $8 billion in the hole now due to lost productivity. Lotus Notes did replace their old mainframe mail system, Profs, but Profs was better. Much better. Stabbing yourself in the eye with a spork would be better than having to use Lotus Notes for any length of time.
Really it's a surprising move on IBM's part, sticking to that stinking pile of shit. For a company with over a century of business experience and an otherwise sane-ish track record, it's a strange thing for them to get stuck on. Continuing on with an extremely bad two-decade business decision really isn't like them at all. They'd be better off if they pulled Profs back off the ol' A-Disk and started using that again.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Notes is the biggest POS ever invented. I work at IBM and my co-workers and I all say it makes you WANT to use Office. And that is pretty crappy!
Does this change mean that Whirlpool has decided to store their customer data in The Clown?
Speaking as someone who was involved in this setup for almost 6 years (not going to go into specifics), but I truly believe Whirlpool will be much happier, both the corporation and the employees.
In the time I spent at Whirlpool, I don't think I ever once heard someone say "I love Notes" or "Notes makes my job so much easier". More often than not, the comments were about how poor the system works and "When are we getting Outlook?". To most of these employees, email is a critical tool to their job and they found it a hindrance, not an enabler, to their productivity.
As for Notes itself, I find it does some amazing things with the backend. I have often said "the backend of Notes was written over many years by many talented programmers. The UI and design were written by a bunch of drunk monkeys with a typewriter in a week". The least of which is that I have never seen a program perform so horribly with the amount of resources it takes up. I had the misfortune of needing to run 2 different versions of Notes on 2 separate computers. Notes 6.5 bogs down a dual-core system. Notes 8.1 bogs down a core i7 with 16 gb memory.
My favorite Notes story will always be when I was trying to install Notes for a user on a freshly imaged machine. I had selected a wrong option during the install and tried to cancel the installation. Notes didn't like that. After 5 hours of trying to fix it, the tech support lead and the "Notes guru" each spent significant amounts of time with it. The end result? Reimage the system. How horrible is it that a cancelled installation required a reimage to fix?