It is often said that the only constant is change, and as those of us responsible for managing change within the enterprise can attest, there is nothing that users detest more. Moreover, the need for change often comes at an inopportune time. The latest project here at Amkor Electronics -- a mass migration from Novell's GroupWise to Lotus Notes -- is a case in point.

Amkor Electronics, Inc. is the sales, marketing, and support division of Amkor/Anam, a global leader in semiconductor IC packaging, assembly and test. A multi-national corporation, Amkor/Anam runs offices and factories in the United States, France, and the Pacific Rim.

Point of origin

Early 1997 saw the majority of Amkor's U.S., Philippine, and European users either actively working with GroupWise 4.x, or in the process of being converted thereto from Office Vision (an AS400-based e-mail package by IBM). Anam, Amkor's Korean counterpart, used Office Vision extensively. This had begun to cause the kind of compatibility and support nightmares that multiple solutions to a common problem inevitably do.

The decision was therefore made as part of Amkor/Anam's worldwide integration effort to establish a company-wide groupware standard.

The primary network operating system (NOS) at Amkor/Anam is NetWare 4.x. Since, in addition, we were already making heavy use of GroupWise - Novell's cost-effective, e-mail based groupware product, we naturally wanted to upgrade to and deploy GroupWise 5.0 across the enterprise. (See IDM's Cacheworthy blurb on GroupWise for background.)

After several months of meetings, demos, and evaluations, however, GroupWise was sidelined, mainly because of the lack of Novell support in Asia. Since IBM dominates the Asian software market, offering unparalleled support, it was decided that Lotus Notes would be the better choice. It was decided that Amkor/Anam as a whole would be going with Lotus Notes as a corporate standard for e-mail, calendar, scheduling and document management.

From my webmaster's perspective, Notes promised good Web-based access to e-mail and other applications through Domino, Lotus' Notes-to-Web server. I looked forward to taking it on.

Traveling blues

Looked forward, to a point. The logistics behind a large-scale migration such as this tend to be a real pain at best. There are the infrastructure issues: hardware compatibility, network connections, software installation on servers and clients, and so on. There are integration issues. And of course, there are "people issues" from setup to training to support - especially critical in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual environment like Amkor/Anam's.

Amkor Electronics had only cut over from Office Vision to GroupWise two years prior, in 1995. That migration took some doing, as Office Vision runs on terminals or through terminal emulators, without a graphic user interface (GUI). GroupWise, by contrast, is GUI-based, and makes extensive use of visual desktop conventions. Our users groaned but were, I like to think, on the verge of learning to love their mice.

Then, just as most of our users were becoming comfortable with GroupWise's myriad features and quirks, we had to break the news that we were abandoning GroupWise for Lotus Notes. Suffice to say that the subtleties of IT decision-making are scant comfort to people who depend on computers to do their jobs. For Amkor/Anam users, it was a shot heard around the world. I am pleased to report that we offset this trauma by investing users from the outset in the migration.

The move

We set to work in mid-1997. As soon as all nine Notes servers were in place, we began setting up beta groups of users to test the system and get feedback. Many of us including myself traveled off-site for user training and application development courses.

One of the biggest challenges we encountered was the need to migrate existing e-mail and calendar items from GroupWise to Notes. Most of our users had hundreds or thousands of archived messages and schedule items. Luckily, we were not the first to face this chasm, and a commercial migration tool from maker Binary Tree exists to help automate this task. Users had to migrate their own archives, however.

To make this as smooth as possible, e-mail notification was sent to each user about to be migrated. The message contained instructions for running the program and completing the conversion. Average conversion time for most users was about an hour. Before being moved from GroupWise (or, in some cases, Office Vision) to Notes, users are required to take an in-house training course covering the basics of Notes' e-mail, calendar, and scheduling functions, as well as remote access via dial-up or the Web.

The migration is still going on. At this writing, some 69% of our users in the US and Europe have been moved from GroupWise to Notes. Amkor Electronics expects to have the rollout completed by the end of March 1998. Korea and the Philippines are running under their own schedules dictated by local events.

Once Korea and the Philippines come online, a rollout of Domino.doc, Lotus's document management product will follow.

Towards an enterprise web

A big part of rolling out Lotus Notes 4.6 was being able to give users Web-based access to e-mail from both our Intranet and the Internet. Lacking a clear off the shelf solution, we originally hired a consultant to build a custom add-on for this purpose. But shortly afterwards we learned that Lotus actually provides a free Domino-based application for Web-based access to e-mail and calendar functions. Right out of the box and without any modification, this program turned out to be exactly what we were looking for.

Since Amkor/Anam maintains post offices all over the world, it was necessary to build a front end to tie all of our Notes servers together. This was accomplished using Cold Fusion, a powerful web-to-database development tool from Allaire Corp.

From the Internet, or the Intranet, users need only point their browsers to our Notes server's URL. From there, they are presented with a list of locations to choose from. After they choose their location, they are prompted for their "short name," used to identify them to the Notes server. At this point they are they are authenticated - one of Notes built-in strong points.

Given a valid username/password combination, access is granted to the Notes Web-based client. This application bears a strong resemblance to the regular Notes client and functions in much the same way. The Web-based interface is intuitive and snappy. Most users report being pleased with the performance improvement over the older GroupWise Web Access application. In addition to performance improvements, the Notes application also allows for the attachment of files via the Web. This is accomplished via HTTP file upload and is supported by Netscape 3.x, 4.x, and MSIE 4.x.

Directions

For our purposes the chief features lacking in the Notes Web-based application are its inability to use personal address books, and its inability to forward e-mails to other users. I regard these as minor omissions that the product's features and ease of use more than make up for.

With the better part of Amkor/Anam's major groupware migration behind us, we are starting to look at business process enhancements well suited to the growing Notes/Domino infrastructure. Among these are two document management projects using Domino.doc.

Domino.doc is a pre-built Notes application available from Lotus for document management. The first project we envision involves setting up an EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) between Amkor Electronics' factories and offices. This system would be used primarily to store engineering data on particular packages Amkor designs and builds.

The second role I am investigating for Domino.doc is managing the large number of office documents that currently reside on our Intranet. (See my earlier Reader's Web for details on AA/Net.) Domino.doc appears to provide a comfortable and reasonably rich metaphor for maintaining document collections, while at the same time managing security, check in/check out, versioning, etc.

Finally, it may be of interest that besides those projects explicitly mentioned above, Amkor/Anam has no other plans for Domino/Notes based applications. Most of our line-of-business applications require access to "live" data - a functional area that, at least to this observer's eye, is not among Notes' strengths.

Yet I do believe that in this business "the only constant is change," so I would not be too surprised to discover new benefit potential in Amkor/Anam's new messaging infrastructure. I'm intrigued by the unique workflow abilities Notes/Domino brings to the table, for instance.

From its proprietary roots Notes has come a long way towards making groupware work in an open Internet/Intranet environment. It will be interesting to see whether, and how, IBM/Lotus can stay this course as collaborative computing functions become features in low-end, commodity software like web browsers.