Migration from Lotus Notes to Exchange is not a task to take on lightly. One should adequately pack up their existing Lotus Notes Environment to get ready for the migration to Exchange. What have you researched in your existing environment? What tasks have you performed to get ready for the move? Will it be the “Big Bang” migration approach or do you want to use a “Staged Approach”?
Know the source Notes Domino environment you are migrating (Pre-Migration Planning):
Does the end user have local stored archives? Does the end user have a local stored Personal Address Book (PAB)? Which users have engaged in email encryption on the Lotus Notes side? Who has access to that executive’s mailbox? How much storage is going to be required to migrate all the mailboxes in this Exchange migration? Are quotas going to be used in the target Exchange environment? Are you using DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) in your source environment? Any Domino databases outside of email that need to be migrated as well? Are you using Lotus Traveler for mobile devices or Blackberry? Is Lotus Sametime being used in the environment? An easy way to verify the answers to all these questions and many more is a step towards a pre Lotus Notes migration step with Quest MessageStats application. Canned reports divulge all the secrets and information of your underlying Lotus Notes environment.
Tasks to ensure a successful move:
If DAOS is in use, it is worth considering whether to turn it off – mailboxes will become larger but migration time would be improved. The Quest branded lotus domino to exchange solutions will work with DAOS turned on or off. It is a good idea to perform both a domino FIXUP command and then followed by a COMPACT command on the domino databases to optimize databases for the notes to exchange migration phase.
Migration approach considerations:
You can decide to use a “Big Bang” approach for fast migrations or go with a gradual movement of users by department or location with a “Staged Approach” in your Lotus Notes Migration to Exchange.
“Big Bang” approach tries to get the Lotus Notes migration done in as little time as possible. Often these are performed over the weekend for small migrations. However, if users are trying to use the system during this time they are subject to outages during the migration process. On Demand Migration for Email (ODME) by Quest help customers perform this migration approach with ease of deployment using their Saas (Software as a Service) solution for migration to Exchange. A very easy to deploy option that allows a quick Lotus Notes to Exchange migration.
The “Staged Approach” with coexistence allows IT to migrate large numbers of users without any impact to end users during the move. Coexistence allows true Free/Busy checks between Lotus Notes and Exchange/O365. Users in Lotus Notes can freely work uninterrupted with their coworkers that have already been migrated to Microsoft Exchange and vice versa. Users love this approach as well as IT keeping interruption level at a minimum and allowing IT plenty of time to perform the migration of Lotus Notes to Exchange. Quest features their Migrator for Notes to Exchange and Coexistence Manager for Notes for this type of staged approach to email migration. Quest has performed very large migrations using this approach including some Fortune 500 companies wanting a smooth migration for Lotus Notes to Exchange.
Quest can also deal with those proprietary Lotus Notes databases and can leverage their Migrator for Notes to Sharepoint to tackle this challenge as well.
With the arsenal of tools that Quest has available – it makes the pre-migration discovery, migration phase and post migration steps in your Lotus Notes to Exchange migration complete.