what's running your inbox?

June 24, 2009

The NY Senate Office of the CIO is investigating options for enterprise e-mail, calendaring, and collaboration, and we are looking for your input.

Currently, the NY Senate utilizes the IBM Lotus product line for its enterprise groupware suite, which has served its purpose well. As part of a review of all major Senate software investments, and in recognition of the need to introduce new collaboration tools to increase the efficiency of Senate staff, we now have an opportunity to re-think how such software is utilized. Therefore we are researching other enterprise groupware suites in addition to researching the future capabilities of the Lotus suite.

We have divided the solution space into two categories:
1. Locally-hosted enterprise groupware
2. Remotely-hosted (“cloud-based”) enterprise groupware

In category #1, commercial solutions Microsoft Exchange and Novell Groupwise are market leaders, along with Lotus Notes.

In category #2, Google Enterprise (including GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and other Google projects) is a market leader worthy of strong consideration.

The focus of our current research effort is to learn more about the following locally hosted solutions, many of which are open source:

We would like to understand what experience you have with any of these aforementioned products. We would particularly love to hear from organizations that have successfully migrated from Lotus/Domino to another solution suite, and from organizations that successfully implemented open-source enterprise groupware solutions.