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."

Comments

My company changed software too

[i kan reed]

Oh look, normal IT operations in a large corporation just happened. I don't see what's special here.

Re:My company changed software too

[stenvar]

Whether you like Google or not, it's "noteworthy" because this sort of thing means that "system manager" and "IT staff" may more and more become a thing of the past; you know, the kind of job a significant percentage of Slashdot readers actually hold.

Re:My company changed software too

[93 Escort Wagon]

I want to know how they did it without losing any functionality (or sanity!)

While our previous setup wasn't from IBM/Lotus, we switched to Google Apps a couple years ago. In our case the thinking wasn't "do we have 100% of our old functionality?", it was "is it good enough, especially given the cost savings (Apps is free since we're an educational institution)?" - and the answer to that question was yes.

It's sort of like all those places that switched to Hyper-V a few years ago. It was obvious Hyper-V was lacking in features when compared to VMware ESX; but in a lot of circumstances it ended up not costing anything up front, so the "good enough" argument combined with the cost savings won the day.

I'm not saying it was necessarily the right decision - it wasn't my decision to make, only to implement. But it sure seems like "good enough if it's cheap enough" rules the day much of the time, anymore.

Re: My company changed software too

[jd2112]

Notes and sanity are mutually exclusive.

Re:My company changed software too

[NeutronCowboy]

To some extent. They're going to disappear in small mom and pop shops, but they're going to grow in the service providers.

What you're seeing is a shift in the type of tools being maintained in companies, the types of skills needed to maintain them, and the companies where specific skills are needed. It's not going to be IT staff anymore, it's going to be tool admins and maintainers. It's not going to be IT helpdesk anymore, it's going to be department help desk. It's not going to be Woolworth IT anymore, it's going to be Google IT.

As always, if you're in IT, keep your skills up-to-date, stay up-to-date on business trends, and be ready to adapt at the drop of a hat. Or look for a job in a different field.

Re:My company changed software too

[ColdWetDog]

Switching from Lotus Notes to anything else (including Notepad) is likely going to be an improvement.

Sanity, functionality and Lotus Notes are not terms that belong in the same sentence.

Re:My company changed software too

[div_2n]

This is a bit of an overblown notion.

The need for system admins isn't going away anytime soon. The only thing that might go away are heavily specialized admins that don't diversify. Hint: if your resume title is "Notes Admin" then yeah, you are working on borrowed time.

There is still longevity in system admins for those that have diverse skill sets. Just browse job listings and you'll see it -- qualification listings are getting longer and longer. This DOES mean, however, that the number of admin positions that could be open at any one particular time is probably not growing as fast as other jobs.

What I personally have noticed is that the mid-range jobs have just about dried up. Companies either want someone fresh out of college that will work long hours for peanuts or they want seasoned experts that are worth the money. Maybe it was this way before the dot com era, but that's when I hit the workforce, so I only know how things were from then to now.

Re: My company changed software too

[CohibaVancouver]

All that sounds totally right, because after all terminals and networks don't need administrators or support staff.

Of course they do, but they need way fewer of them. No exchange server admins. No desktop admins. No server specialists.

Heck, the office manager could handle a lot of it:

"My Chromebook isn't working."
"Here you go." (Hands over replacement Chromebook from cupboard.)
"Thanks."

(Employee goes back to work.)

Re:Whirlpool

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one company that has sent most of its manufacturing to Mexico switching away from another company that has outsourced most of its IT to India.

Lotus suite sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Lotus suite sucks

[rickb928]

We switched from Notes to Exchange/Outlook a few years ago. I would take Notes back in a heartbeat.

And of course all the Notes databases and apps got ported over about 2 years late. And don't work very well. And go down regularly.

Notes was an elegant solution before anyone else got there, and it takes 2-3 major services to replace Notes. But, hey, it's progress, and getting IBM GS out of your app dev is worth it.

Re:Lotus suite sucks

[ColdWetDog]

A classic example of the Stockholm syndrome.

Re:Lotus suite sucks

[Belial6]

No, tons of people like Notes. It is just trendy in IT to hate it. People actually doing work like it just fine. One of the current reasons that Notes gets a bad rap is that it takes so much less resources to run it. You might have 1 or 2 guys running your Notes platform where it takes 6 or 8 guys to run other platforms within the company. So, when you sit down for a meeting, and there is a platform clash, you have 6 guys pointing out the flaws of Notes, with one point out the flaws of the competing product. This makes it look like Notes is inferior.

I'm not saying that Notes/Domino are perfect, but if you look at most of the complaints, it will be about versions from over a decade ago. Then most of those complaints will fall into 4 categories:

1) It was slow. This was a somewhat legitimate complaint. Notes was a big application with a lot of functionality. Almost the entire server code base was included with the client. This had the downside of making the application bloated. The upside was that your server based applications ran just as well locally, and would replicate to the server as soon as you connected. This is less critical today, and the added weight is less of an issue.
2) It would crash. This was true, although it didn't crash any more than most applications of the day. Complaints about Notes crashes fall into the same category as complaints about Win95's blue screen of death. Historical trivia.
3) It didn't follow standards. This is only sort of true. What it didn't do was follow 'Windows' standards. This is because Notes/Domino both predated Windows, and thus it's standards, and it was cross platform. Lotus had to decide whether to standardize it's application to itself, or to each of the platforms it ran on. It also had to decide whether to make a major revamp of it's interface or not. That is not a minor decision. Personally, I think they waited too long. At one point, the only OS the client was produced for was Windows. (Today it is Windows, Linux, and OSX) The day they decided to have the client be Windows only, they should have revamped the UI and key bindings. They eventually gave in, but they took a big hit by waiting as long as they did.
4) It wasn't pretty. It look good now, but when it was first put on Windows, Lotus created a UI that matched the Windows 3.1 look of the day. By the time that Windows 95 came around, The graphics were horribly out of date. The functionality was top notch, but we know how much people like their shiny.

All of these are legitimate complaints, but not only are they outdated, they are the kinds of complaints that would apply to any of Notes/Domino's competitors. I use that in the present tense, because the back when the complaints were valid, Notes/Domino had no competitors.

Wrong headline...

[rickb928]

Shouldn't this be titled "Whirlpool ditches Notes, doesn't choose Exchange"?

Another Notes customer gone...

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:IBM moved a lot of them out of the USA

[interval1066]

...racist crowd who demand everything be done domestically and think that foreigners are inferior.

What are you, a child? Outsourcing labor to other countries is about MONEY, and no other reason. If you think it has ANYTHING to do with rascism you need to put down your comic book, put away the skatebaord, put on your big-boy pants, and figure out how the world really works.