I have been trying to evangelize in a Microsoft shop for three years. During my three year stint the Lotus Mail and Application services have been bulletproof, with the only failures to date being related to disk, processor, and power. While enduring the political and technical hothouse, I was constantly engaged in debates revolving around Lotus as a viable solution. In this memo I will reflect on some of my favorite myths here which allowed the IT decision makers to go Microsoft and sometimes end up on a burn.

In reading these myths you should know we are a 300 person organization with 200 PCs in-house and our offices are spread over 14 disjointed locations.

This essay is a little militant, but I have indeed been in a war zone for years. Only the worker bees have seen the impact of my efforts, and they are not heard by the decision makers.

Myth #1 (Late 2001) Lotus is dead
"IBM is trying to stop selling the Lotus products." Alrighty then, next...

Myth #2 Lotus database data can't be exported or queried by other systems because it is closed
It only took about 4 hours to make a proof of concept on this. Most of the time was making valid XML. In from Medical Manager (closed text database system), in from Microsoft Exchange, in from Microsoft Excel, in from .mdb, in from XML, in from HTML, out to SQL, out to Excel, out to 1-2-3, out to .mdb, out to pdf, out to .doc, out to XML, out to HTML.

Myth #3 The Lotus Server and Client architecture is small-time and unreliable
The reliable mail system was MS Exchange 5.5 for mail using Outlook clients (98/2000/XP). OWA (Outlook Web Access) was officially broken until I volunteered to fix the .asp objects programmed by Microsoft.

The reliable database system was our dated UNIX text databases (c.sv with index files) and laughably Excel spreadsheets. Never have stopped laughing at that one.

Myth #4 The Lotus solution costs too much, Exchange is cheaper
Oh yeah? I couldn't help but chuckle when the overall expense of upgrading from the old Exchange 5.5 system on NT 4 to Exchange 2003 on Server 2003.

Software and hardware ended up costing the organization no less than $15K (at that point my eyes became blinded to the costs) and Microsoft support had to dial into the system for 49 hours to move one mailbox!