Customers who buy into Microsoft's claims will quickly learn from their technical teams the enormous challenges associated with conversion.

To migrate from Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft involves more than converting email. Many Notes/Domino applications are mission-critical, extensive and global. Disrupting them would be costly in terms of both money and business continuity.

But some IT executives, contrasting traditional mainframe-based systems with their more formal procedures and policies, often view the "freewheeling" Lotus Notes/Domino environment with skepticism and consider Notes applications incapable of handling sensitive data or workflow processes.

This attitude may be the push behind an organization's desire to migrate its Lotus Notes/Domino installations to a more "mainstream" development environment. However, it is when they take a step back and look that they learn that their Notes applications are both mission-critical and extremely expensive to replace.

Since it was introduced back in 1989, the Lotus Notes/Domino claim to fame has always been rapid application development. Yet there are many other Notes features and benefits that help make organizations run more efficiently. I'll touch on these areas throughout this commentary.

Security
The perceived lack of security features in Lotus Notes/Domino is a fallacy. Over time, Notes has developed into a rich development environment that provides sophisticated application server features, including powerful database and content-level security.

Along with its powerful collaboration platform and seamless integration with most Web and communications protocols, it provides an extremely flexible and consistent user security model. Notes offers a wealth of security features that can provide IT organizations with the peace of mind that their information assets are secure, as long as they are properly managed.