Lotus Notes migration tools available from Microsoft

At IBM's annual Lotusphere conference Microsoft announced a series of tools to help Lotus Notes/Domino customers take advantage of the unified communication and collaboration innovations that are being delivered as part of the recently released Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 technologies. See the full story from eWeek reporter Darryl Taft.

Ironically, Lotus Notes was created by Ray Ozzie, now Chief Software Architect and CTO at Microsoft. Ray left IBM/Lotus back in 1997 to found Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in March of 2005. Lotus Notes has lagged since Ray left, undergoing many changes in architecture and direction.

Lotus Notes is known to many people as IBM's email system, but the underlying system is a distributed database system with a client server synchronization architecture that makes it an interesting platform for departmental applications.

Many Lotus Notes customers wanted to migrate to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint but lacked migration tools for all the legacy Notes applications. Microsoft has introduced three new migration tools to ease the process.

Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Notes enables users to move their messaging and directory services as well as their Notes infrastructure, and move data from template-based applications to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Role-based Templates for SharePoint My Sites enable users to create customized portals for employees to find information and tools. There are templates for financial analyst, staffing specialist, administrative assistant, customer services representative, IT engineer and marketing manager.

Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 Application Templates includes sample applications known as the Fantastic 40. I believe in the old days at Lotus they called these sample apps the "Nifty Fifty".

The new migration tools, currently in beta, will be available for download from Microsoft within the next 30 days. See this site for complete details, migration resources, and news.

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Comments

[Lloyd Budd]

What is the context of "Lotus Notes has lagged since Ray left"?

[Frank Black]

yawn... I see you missed the part of Lotusphere where they announced a 30% increase in Notes and Domino sales last year. I guess that these didn't include the "many Notes/Domino customers wanting to migrate to Exchange/Sharepoint". I guess that there was also some reason thhat all those customers didn't jump at the chance to use "Red Bull" to migrate - oh yeah, it didn't actually work!

[rajiv]

Hi all,

Till now there were tools from casahl ,quest software etc to migrate from lotus to sharepoint.Now that microsoft has come up with its first version of migration tools, i need to have feedback from people out here about relability and functionality provided by the trasported suite of microsoft.
If microsoft tool is really competitive,can somebody please provide me link for its documentation and how to proceed using it in migration from lotus to sharepoint

Cheers

[Ariel Di Stefano]

We have developed a new technology to provide MS Outlook the capabilities to connect to any DataBase o DataSource. Also our technology encapsulate MAPI objects in order to simplify the complexity of MAPI Programming.

Check it at http://www.kayxo.com

[Michelle Gamlin]

Hi Don,
We worked together at Bowstreet. I am working for Proposion Software (now Quest Software since it was acquired in Oct 2007). The migration tools you were speaking of were created by Proposion licensed to MS. Check out our lastest Migration tools available (http://www.quest.com/migration) and contact me with quesitons/feedback! [email protected]

[Lotus Notes To SharePoint Migration]

To select the Tool for Lotus To MOSS migration needs to evaluate the complexity of Notes applications. One early method describes a quadrant system with one axis indicating the level of customization and the other axis indicating the level of processing and logic.
Notes and Domino applications is segmented into five levels of complexity and identified best practices for addressing each category. These categories are designed to reflect practical matter of how much effort will be required to migrate the applications
1)Standard applications
2)Data-centric applications,
3)Configuration-required applications
4)Medium-development applications
5)Heavy-development applications