Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365 Migration

Businesses migrate their Lotus Notes based Mail, Applications and Workflows to Exchange,

SharePoint / Office 365 to transform an organization to become more agile, productive and

cost-effective. Organizations are focused on making the most of their technology

investment. Consolidating to a single vendor solution platform for email, collaboration,

employee engagement within the organization has become a priority for most

organizations that used Lotus Notes. Increasingly organizations have started seeing Lotus

Notes as an unnecessary expense that does not fit into their larger business strategy. Cost

reduction through a single platform and readily available support for the platform from

Microsoft are the drivers for organizations to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. This

helps them avail improved functionality, attracting and retaining talented employees and

becoming more nimble and connected.

At a high-level an organization gets the following business benefits through

migration from Lotus Notes to SharePoint or Office 365:

Cost Reduction through reducing user training and improving user productivity

Capability enhancement through SharePoint FAST search, Tight integration with

Office 365 and Microsoft Office apps and SharePoint Workflow templates that

provide faster workflows than Lotus Notes.

Consistent and Easier Workflows - Enhanced Workflow Platform as Microsoft has a

Workflow foundation that works the same way across a range of products.

Long term business strategy – facilitating business goals such as innovation, agility,

mobility, attracting and retaining talent, mergers and acquisitions. Microsoft

products clearly score over Lotus Notes in fast tracking these business goals.

iLink has helped organizations migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365.

iLink has successfully used migration tools like the Dell OnDemand Migration tool, Quest,

AvePoint, MetaLogix Migration Manager and Microsoft’s Online Notes Inspector (MONTI).

iLink’s Migration methodology typically comprises of the following:

Pre-migration analysis

Migration strategy focusing on key facets such as

o Gaining access to SharePoint features such as managed metadata and

document sets

o Using native web services, connect to SharePoint / Office 365 sites

o Preserving the look and feel of Notes applications and cover Notes forms to

Microsoft InfoPath list forms

o Moving Notes data to SQL Server tables

o Discovering Notes databases, analyzing how they are used and determine

which applications are unused, as well as those applications that will need

development

o Using a customizable rules-based engine, specify target locations and

migration jobs, hundreds of which can be migrated

o Inhabit lists, libraries, sites and subsites based on existing Notes

infrastructure

o Maintain data fidelity when migrating rich text and complex application data,

as well as preservation of data including keyword fields

o Choice of document destinations beyond lists and libraries, including wiki

pages, basic pages, and content publishing pages

o For applications requiring custom form layouts, migrate Notes documents to

InfoPath XML documents

iLink has migrated Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using

Quest for a Global Chemical Distributor and a Healthcare Insurance Provider. iLink has

migrated complex Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using

MetaLogix Migration Manager for a global online retail platform.

iLink has created some standard pre-migration analysis and migration templates apart

from a comparison matrix of using various migration tools. Through these templates and a

standardized migration methodology iLink provides a faster turnaround as well as

qualitative migration and support to various customers who migrate from Lotus Notes to

SharePoint and Office 365.