IBM Lotus Notes to SharePoint Migration

If you are one of the earliest users of email suites, you must be familiar with IBM Lotus Notes (now called IBM Notes). Once a dominant player in collaboration technology, IBM Lotus Notes is considered an outlier in the field today.

Businesses today need solutions with more agility which does not fit in with the near-ancient Lotus Notes platform. Therefore, many businesses that were once loyal to Lotus Notes are now moving to better platforms such as SharePoint on Office 365.

Obstacles in Lotus Notes to SharePoint Migration

While migrating from Lotus Notes to SharePoint, what are the possible obstacles one may face? If you are thinking to migrate Lotus Notes to SharePoint Online, the first problem that you would face is determining where to start? Many organizations had already invested a lot in the legacy platform, not just in terms of physical infrastructure but also in getting familiar with early technology. To begin with Lotus Notes to SharePoint migration, they must build a lot of databases and finding the right spots to get away with old systems and usher in the new. Another obstacle for moving Lotus Notes to SharePoint would be the lack of resources required for a successful migration. A lot of organizations are trying to do more with less and when it comes to legacy systems, they simply do not have the right amount of resources to tackle the migration project. There should be a systematic plan at the topmost level on how to approach the migration project.

How Should Businesses Approach Lotus Notes Migration to SharePoint?

It is no secret that Lotus Notes migration lags in comparison with other email migrations. The primary reason for the success of organizations migrating their email into the Cloud is because it was commoditized well, and it was easy. There are three approaches when it comes to migrating Lotus to SharePoint – Cutover, Staged, and Hybrid migrations. If you want to move all your Notes data at once, we recommend a cutover migration – which is also the most preferred migration for most of our customers. During a staged migration, depending on your teams at different points in time, migration happens in a phased manner. A hybrid migration allows you to keep some elements on your on-premises Notes while some can be moved to the cloud-based SharePoint.

When organizations are fully committed to moving away from legacy systems such as Lotus Notes, it takes more than just a structural change. It takes the shift in mindset. Once the migration is finalized by the decision-makers, the business should start saying ‘no’ to add anything new to Lotus Notes. No more items in the Lotus Notes databases. It is important to draw a line and stop building new contacts in the legacy system until your migration from Lotus Notes to SharePoint is successfully achieved. That is the first step.

How Does Lotus Notes to SharePoint Migration Take Place?

Once the first step is taken, the next steps include functional items such as establishing a plan, assessing the tools, and building the budget, which can be taken care of by the executives. The first thing would be to address the content space. When you have a Lotus Notes database, typically you have a fair amount of content accumulated over the years. This content must be migrated to SharePoint first. Migrating such a huge amount of content from Lotus Notes to SharePoint will take a fair deal of expertise and migration knowledge. Therefore, an expert’s help will be required.

If you need to move a lot of content stored on Lotus Notes including documents, emails, notes, contacts, documents, archives, or a bunch of databases, a third-party migration can tool can easily automate the process of consolidating Lotus Notes implementations into SharePoint Online.

Each type of data can be seamlessly migrated using different tools. The tools allow organizations to streamline the data transfer easily from Lotus Notes to SharePoint, plan migration tasks as per business requirements, and map all associated metadata during the migration.
There are various third-party tools that can be used to migrate some or all components of Lotus Notes to SharePoint. We have discovered that tools such as MigrationWiz and BinaryTree that are better than the rest. Since every migration is different, we use a combination of the above tools to migrate different components of Notes as per user requirement.

Microsoft Online Notes Inspector (MONTI)

If you are planning a Lotus Notes migration, a special-purpose application is designed to assist you with the migration planning. This lightweight application of 9.5 MB is called Microsoft Online Notes Inspector, simply stylized as MONTI app.

The MONTI application can of great help. This is an application helping you to evaluate the amount of data required to be migrated from Lotus Notes environment to SharePoint environment. In Lotus Notes’ domino environment, the MONTI application assists in collecting specific information with reference to Motes mailbox storage data.

What data does the MONTI app collect?

• User information from the domino directory
• Complete mailbox size
• Complete calendar and contacts size
• Groups items size

Running on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP, MONTI processes email files to decide the complete size of the database, total document count including calendars, contacts, groups, mailboxes, and tasks. It creates reports to allow you granular updates of your data files in terms of size and days. The comprehensive report on your data helps you plan your Notes migration better. Then, you can determine how to use the MigrationWiz tool for each of the data types.

What components of Lotus Notes will MigrationWiz migrate to SharePoint?

Using a tool such as MigrationWiz, you can migrate mailboxes, documents, personal archives, and public folders from the source Lotus Notes environment to the destination SharePoint environment.

• Mailbox migrations

  Supporting a wide range of scenarios, Lotus Notes mailboxes can be migrated from the source to destination with the use of the MigrationWiz tool. No local installations are required on Notes Domino environment, as MONTI already does a good job.

• Document migrations

  As a part of the user migration bundle, all the documents and files (such as on OneDrive, Dropbox) can be migrated without impacting the current workloads. The file hierarchy and permissions can be maintained on the cloud as well as the on-premises environment. As document migrations are simple, it doesn’t create much of a hassle.

• Archive migration

  The archived content (including PSTs, vaults, and more) can be discovered, collected, and migrated to SharePoint Online without any downtime. The messaging functionality is maintained to enable end-users to reply to exported and archived emails.

What is impossible to move?

MONTI tool does not retrieve the files in the trash folder of Lotus Notes. Since trash content is provided for migration, the migrator tool skips it. The solution would be to move trash files to the archive folder and migrate the folder with the help of the tool.

Get Quality Expertise from a Top Provider

Let our migration experts evaluate your infrastructure and we can guide you with the specifics. Lotus Notes migration to SharePoint is not very easy. Both platforms must co-exist simultaneously for a specific period before Lotus Notes Domino infrastructure can be decommissioned.

Depending on the requirement, Apps4Rent approaches the migration in three ways: domino mail server integration, directory integration, and application migration and coexistence. A well-defined process must be followed to achieve the goal of migration apps from source to the destination environment. When it comes to migrating your legacy content to SharePoint, we are undisputable specialists of the same.

Since 2003, Apps4Rent has performed over tens of thousands of seamless SharePoint migrations. We guarantee zero data loss, no downtimes, or interruptions in your business operations. We are a certified Microsoft Gold Partner and a Tier 1 Cloud Solution Provider for Office 365 and Azure.

If you are looking to move your Lotus Notes database content to SharePoint, feel free to have a discussion with us right away. Click on the chat option in the bottom right of your screen.