The November 17 announcement of Microsoft Exchange Online included a case study in which a company migrated away from Notes using Microsoft Exchange Online. This is mainly marketing gloss.
Microsoft has been announcing the death of Notes for five years. Ferris survey data indicates that in the enterprise, Microsoft and IBM/Lotus are on the whole maintaining their penetration. There is a small amount of churn in both directions as a result of a mergers and acquisitions.
The dilemma for Notes shops is that it is just too hard to migrate all but the most basic "out of the box" Notes applications to SharePoint. Thus even those Notes shops that wish to migrate to Exchange plus SharePoint often find it too costly or too risky to proceed.
The cost of Microsoft's Business Productivity Suite Online at $15 (or less) per user per month does reduce both the initial cost, and more importantly, the wasted costs if migration doesn't proceed. Ferris, therefore, expects to see a rash of pilot Notes migrations to Microsoft's Online offerings. Whether these will progress beyond the trial stage, only time will tell. We suspect that many of them will not.
... Nick Shelness