Queensland Transport wants to rid itself of Lotus Notes once and for all

Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) is preparing to bid farewell to the last vestiges of Lotus Notes after shifting its staff to Microsoft Office 365 in 2019. 

The department has begun looking for a managed service provider to help decommission its legacy Notes environment by the end of next financial year.  

It expects that all current Notes applications and functionality will progressively transition to a “suite of modern alternatives aligned with TMR’s 0365 environment or COTS [commercial off-the-shelf] alternatives”. 

TMR rolled out O365 and SharePoint 2016 to all 8500 staff and 9100 devices in March 2019, according to the department's latest annual report. 

But request for information documents reveal that 734 instances of actively used Notes applications and 2267 instances of applications where the use is clear remain. 

This includes 688 active document management system instances and several instances relating to the state’s ageing transport registration and integrated licensing system (TRAILS). 

“Our vision is for all existing Notes environments and applications to be decommissioned and/or transitioned by the end of the financial year 2020-2021 or at least to be well into those transitions by the end of FY 2020-2021,” the department said. 

TMR wants the successful provider to “assess the Notes application list … to determine recommended transition, replacement or decommission options”. 

But given a short turnaround for submissions, the department is happy for providers to prepare the assessment “in the early stages following the transfer of the Notes environment”. 

The provider will also need to “take on the current Notes environment, its management and support, delivering Notes services back to TMR as … the transformation plays out”. 

TMR currently has Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and public cloud environments, though it is still “building capability” on Azure, including with Dynamics 365. 

Submissions to the request for information will close July 2, with shortlisted providers to be invited to a discovery day with the department to demonstrate their proposed approach. 

A number of other agencies have moved off Notes in recent years, including the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services. 

DHHS completed its year-long migration off 11,500 staff to O365 for email and calendar last June.

Earlier this month, NSW Police also completed its migration of 23,000 staff to O365, having accelerated its shift to allow non-frontline state to work from home during coronavirus lockdowns.