Another chapter in the saga surrounding millions of missing White House emails was written this week, when judge John Facciola ordered the Bush administration to collect and preserve all emails stored in .pst files including data copied onto portable media such as flash drives.

While there are many theories about the missing emails, reaching from government conspiracy to sheer incompetence, I would side with the latter.

I have witnessed the decision by some companies to switch their enterprise messaging vendors over recent years. Often these decisions were driven from the top down based on personal preference, false promises of massive cost savings by the new vendor and utter ignorance of existing infrastructure dependencies. I’m not sure what the driving force was behind the decision to move from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange at the White House, but the mistakes made follow the same pattern as seen in numerous other corporate cases. If your company considers the move from Notes to Exchange, review these key points in your planning and assessment to avoid making the same mistakes:

• Make sure that any existing 3rd party applications (anti-spam, anti-virus, archiving, records management, system monitoring, etc.) will still work with the new platform. Don’t forget to include any 3rd party upgrade costs in the overall migration budget.
• Include audit and retrieval costs in your evaluation. Moving to a client-based storage model (e.g. pst files) may seem like a great idea for reducing server load and storage cost, but will inherently make auditing and retrieval at a later time almost impossible. Retrieving data from remote and portable media is extremely difficult and costly, but apparently that will not be a valid legal excuse.
• Assess the skill set of your existing IT staff. Large messaging systems are complicated and require highly skilled IT workers to manage and administer. Switching platforms may require a significant retraining of existing staff, or worse, cause the defection of key resources.
• Evaluate other dependencies. Lotus Notes is much more than email, a fact that is frequently overlooked by people unfamiliar with the platform. Companies that have been running Lotus Notes for years have often custom-built rich enterprise Notes applications running mission-critical corporate functions. These dependencies are often downplayed or simply overlooked. Migrating these applications can be expensive or simply impossible, which has forced some companies to continue running both Outlook and Notes on the desktops after the migration.

Technorati Tags: lotus notes migration, missing white house emails, John Facciola

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