Migrations from non-Exchange systems
represent fewer and fewer migration projects nowadays. Exchange Server
has been an extremely successful product over the last decade, and the
majority of our work these days is migrating Exchange to Exchange. This
trend has led to a somewhat specialized community catering migrations
to Exchange from non-Exchange platforms. These foreign systems are best
classified as follows:
- Lotus Notes/Domino
- Novel GroupWise
- Other IMAP-based solutions
Let's discuss some of the options and challenges of migrating from each of these systems.
1. Lotus Notes
Lotus Notes has been around since 1989, and
despite changing the server software name in 1996 to Domino 4.5,
Powered by Notes, most IT teams still casually refer to it as Lotus
Notes. Notes is an interesting service to migrate to Exchange. Although
both Exchange and Notes provide an email service, Notes also provides a
rich application and database-programming platform while Exchange does
not. It is debatable, however, that for most organizations, Exchange
provides a better platform for email and collaboration. Migration of
email from Lotus Notes to Exchange is a relatively well-understood
process, and although there are no longer freely available native
migration tools, both Quest and Binary Tree offer specific migration
tools for the migration process to Exchange Server 2013. Both toolsets
deal with this process from end to end, including planning, scheduling,
coexistence, and data migration. However, there are still some common
issues when coexisting between Lotus Notes and Exchange:
Mail and Calendar Interoperability
Attachments in meeting requests frequently disappear, and recurring
meetings may not be migrated correctly. Also, obtaining reliable
availability data across the messaging platforms can be unpredictable.
Special Content Both the Notes and Outlook
clients can sometimes create content that the other cannot understand.
This can vary from unusual rendering of HTML messages in the Notes
client to Notes active content getting lost when viewed in Outlook.
Broken Links The Notes client can include
links to other Notes databases or documents. During the migration these
links sometimes cannot be converted, and so they do not work
post-migration.
End-User Experience This is one issue not
to be underestimated. End users who have been using the Lotus Notes
client over the last 15 years will often take a significant amount of time
to become accustomed to Outlook. Be sure to provide as much online
training, tips and tricks, and so on for the user community pre- and
post-migration.
Performance Migrations from Lotus Notes to
Exchange are often much slower than native Exchange-to-Exchange
migrations due to the demands of converting the data. It is possible to
migrate from Lotus Notes quickly, but it often requires a significant
investment in migration infrastructure.
Outlook Deployment Making sure that
Outlook is deployed prior to migration from Lotus Notes is vital.
Although this may be obvious, we have all seen cases where a user's
mail file has been migrated successfully from Lotus Notes to Exchange,
and the next morning when the end user logs on to their desktop, they
learn that they do not have Outlook installed or it's the wrong version
of the program, which of course diminishes the user experience. It is
easy to assume that Outlook is part of Microsoft Office, but many
organizations customize the deployment. Thus, you should verify not
only that all machines have Outlook installed, but that it is the right
version of Outlook for your needs. This means Outlook 2007 SP3 or
greater for Exchange Server 2013.
Having taken care of the email portion of
the migration, all that remains are the Lotus Notes applications. There
are many vendors that claim to have a solution for this and that offer
a tool that will analyze your Lotus Notes applications and determine
the correct migration approach. They can even tell you which are used
or unused.
This can be very useful and surely reduces
some of the migration burden. However, application migration can take
many years to complete, especially for heavily used and complex
applications. Some can be migrated easily or deleted. What remains,
however, is often very difficult to migrate. We advise that you
decouple your Lotus Notes email migration project from your Lotus Notes
application migration project. It is usually possible to migrate most
Lotus Notes mailboxes without migrating a single Lotus Notes
application. The end user will require access to both Outlook and the
Lotus Notes client until all Lotus Notes applications have been
migrated or replaced.
The bottom line for Lotus Notes migrations
is that email is relatively easy to migrate, assuming that you plan
correctly and use a robust migration toolset. Application migration,
however, is usually very complex, and unless you have a trivial set of
Lotus Notes applications, do not fall for the application migration
toolset hype—it's usually a long and slow process to get rid of those
Lotus Notes applications.
2. Novell GroupWise
Novell GroupWise has a similar migration and
coexistence story to Lotus Notes, and the same pitfalls and warnings
apply. Quest has the most comprehensive toolset available for GroupWise
migrations.
3. Other IMAP
Many alterative mail systems exist. Most of these
mail systems provide IMAP integration that can be used to migrate
mailbox data. However, these systems often pose additional problems
including the following:
- Password sync between IMAP mail host and Exchange—Once the
mail has been migrated, you need to ensure that the end user knows how
to access the new service, including knowing the right password. Some
migration teams will set a known password on the new account, while others may try to synchronize the password from the source platform to the target if they can find a way to do so.
- Directory synchronization—If the source platform has a rich
directory full of people's names, job functions, telephone numbers, and
so on, it is highly beneficial to try to synchronize that over to
Exchange. The format and attribute names, however, are almost certainly
going to be different and will require manual mapping of fields and
potentially some data cleaning to get a good result.
- End-user client reconfiguration—Once the mail content
has been moved, you then need to reconfigure the email client to
connect to the Exchange system rather than the legacy system. Most IMAP
clients require manual reconfiguration.
Unfortunately, there is no simple solution
for all of these systems since they vary widely. Some run on Windows
servers and integrate with Active Directory, but most are
Unix/Linux-based and have totally separate account and password
information.
Back with Exchange Server 2007,
Microsoft published the Microsoft Transporter Suite that would migrate
from IMAP to Exchange Server 2007. This suite was dropped for Exchange
Server 2010, however, and there is no expectation that Microsoft will
provide anything similar for Exchange Server 2013. This means that you
will need to engage with a third-party vendor to obtain migration tools
for this scenario. At the time of this writing, the only tool we are
comfortable recommending for this type of migration is Transend
Migrator.
