"cover the costs of consulting and integration services for migrating from the legacy Lotus Notes to Office 365 for email and calendar."
$250,000 to go from their 15 year old software. We're talking about a migration here, not just a clean cut. I kind of doubt that $250k is going to cut it. Especially when you consider the additional hardware that they will have to invest in. (Assuming that if they are running 15 year old software, they likely aren't on most recent windows operating system--xp most likely. Of course, Office 365 min requirement is vista sp2 or better) I would have gone with google. Then all you need is a decent web browser and you're not even locked into to the vendors web browser either -- firefox or opera certainly suffice.
Having done this migration in the IT department at the university I worked for, I can say you are quite right that $250k will likely not cut it.
However, the main reason many universities did not go with Google was because they failed to meet 508 Accessibility guidelines. Some universities got around this limitation, and Google eventually pulled its collective head out of its ass, but for quite a long time they simply refused to do accessibility compliance.
You don't have to use Internet Explorer with Office 365. Safari and Firefox both work on the desktop for Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Web Apps. You can also use Mobile Safari and Mobile IE.
Well, yes and no, they do work on these other browsers, but most of the document features are disabled in Sharepoint/Office Web Apps are disabled outside of IE, at least as of 10 months ago when we migrated this stuff in.
$250,000 to go from their 15 year old software. We're talking about a migration here, not just a clean cut. I kind of doubt that $250k is going to cut it. Especially when you consider the additional hardware that they will have to invest in. (Assuming that if they are running 15 year old software, they likely aren't on most recent windows operating system--xp most likely. Of course, Office 365 min requirement is vista sp2 or better) I would have gone with google. Then all you need is a decent web browser and you're not even locked into to the vendors web browser either -- firefox or opera certainly suffice.