LOTUS NOTES TO SHARE POINT MIGRATION

Lotus Notes dominated the Workflow and Content Management market and the Emailing platform more than a decade.

There are a few reasons which contributed to the increase in migration projects from Lotus Notes to Share Point:-

1)       Increase in popularity of Share Point as a Collaborative platform with high OOB features as compared to Lotus Notes.

2)       Increase in Popularity of Exchange/Outlook as compared to Lotus Domino as the mailing platform.

3)       Inclination of the software community from the Client applications to the Web applications and from Single Tier Architecture to Multi Tier Architecture.

4)       Good marketing strategies of Microsoft as compared to IBM.

Strategy for Lotus Notes to Share Point migration

Usually in large organizations, the Lotus Notes to Share Point migration is accompanied with the Domino to Exchange migration as the mailing platform. This activity is performed by the Administrators so we will not discuss it in detail although it is a critical part of the migration.

Suppose an organization having around 500 lotus notes applications decides to migrate into Share Point, which is a managed environment. The following steps will be performed to chalk out a plan for the same:-

1)       Applications Portfolio Optimization: - This is one of the most important initiation phases where the applications are grouped in terms of their complexity (High, Medium and Low) and categorized based upon the business criticality. The applications are further grouped into different verticals (business lines) such as Expense and Travel Claim applications, HR applications, Learning Repositories and Forums, Finance and External applications. The primary objective of this phase is to minimize the number of applications, decommission the rarely used applications and club the applications of similar functionality. This is one of the most crucial phases of the migration which determines how cost effective the migration will be? Business Analysts are involved in this phase.

2)       Functional Requirements Documentation Creation: - This step involves the Lotus Notes SME’s utilizing their skills in the Reverse Engineering of the Lotus Notes applications and preparing the a functional document where the application functionality is enhanced keeping in mind the current drawbacks of the Lotus Notes platform. Also, the functionalities of similar types of applications are clubbed together.

Case 1) Let us consider a scenario for any organization using having thee claim applications, there are three notes applications one for Travel claims used in the APAC (notes client application), Travel and Expense Claim application used in US region (web based lotus notes application with the approval heads document stored in a different application) and one other Expense Claim System used in the UK regions (for all the types of claims with integration to Oracle database).

The basic idea should be to create a single global application utilizing the approvers to be kept in SharePoint Lists and the Share Point roles and security managing the other features of the applications.

 

3)       Technical Design Creation: - This step involves both Lotus Notes SME and Share Point architects. The Lotus Notes SME drills down to all the design elements of the Lotus Notes databases (.nsf) such as the Notes Forms, View, Agents, Script Libraries, Outlines, Security etc and assists the Share Point architects in mapping an alternate structure in SharePoint Site Layouts, Lists, Document Libraries, Site Collection and User Permissions. The technical design should also cover all the technical issues encountered in the Lotus Notes environment.

There is “N” number of aspects which needs to be taken care of although I have mentioned a few here:-

Case 1) I do remember a case where a Lotus Notes mass mailing Web application failed to send mails to a lot a people. The reason being that that a lot of mails were send in one go and the bandwidth of the Domino environment (used in that particular organization) didn’t allowed so much heavy traffic. Also, the names of the recipients was picked up from a notes field which sometimes was not able to accommodate a large size (>64 K) in turn causing an error. This type of errors can be easily dealt in Share Point based on the RDBMS.

Case 2) Mapping of the Lotus Notes Fields into a SharePoint List is also an important point. For this the Lotus Notes SME need to extract the relevant Lotus Notes field names and data types on every form to an xls or xml. These are then mapped into the corresponding SharePoint lists and column values.

Case 3) Managing the rich text fields, in this case the attachments or the embedded objects from the Lotus Notes documents are detached onto a folder in server. Further these are referenced from the SharePoint lists.

Case 4) There are numerous Lotus Notes agents which perform a scheduled operations or event based tasks. E.g. sending mails to your manager once you do content change in a repository. Code will be written and Timer Jobs will be configured to perform these functionalities in SharePoint.

Case 5) Creating customized code for the scheduler jobs (in Central Admin) for the scheduled agents (in Notes)

Case 6) Securing the Share Point applications to match the Notes security standards. Lotus Notes has seven layers of security ranging from Network Layer, Server Level, ACL, Form layer, Design level, View level, Authors/Readers field and field level.  Mapping the security in the SharePoint environment is of critical importance.

Case 7) Defining the replication in the Share Point environment (if exists).

Case 8) A concrete plan needs to be built for planning the co-existence of the Lotus Notes and the Share Point environment.

 

Lotus Domino and Microsoft coexistence and migration

4)       Test Case Preparation: - This should be a joint venture of the Lotus Notes SME, Tester and the Analyst who all have contributed to the Functional design document. Usually in case of large migrations the end users prefer the UI of the applications to be the same as that of the existing applications.

5)       Coding:- All of the Lotus Notes design elements are mapped to the corresponding SharePoint elements to implement the business logic, UI and data storage such as:-

Lotus Notes	Share Point
Forms	Infopath/ ASP.NET
Workflows	Windows Workflow Foundation
Domino Directory (User migration)	Active Directory
Pages	ASP.Net pages/Custom Web Parts using Microsoft SharePoint Designer
Views	ASP.Net pages/Custom Web Parts using Microsoft SharePoint Designer
Outlines	Quick Launch/ Navigation
Agents	Event Handlers/Workflow activities
Script Libraries	.NET Assemblies
Security (Roles)	Share Point Roles
Search Full Text Index	Enterprise Search
Documents	Lists/Document Sets/Libraries

6)       Testing: - This phase involves the execution of the test cases. In most of the cases it is required that the UI of the applications remain similar.

The security of the application is an important aspect such the rights given on the Document library and lists. Also, the email migration (from Domino to Exchange) is quite critical.

7)       Data Migration: - This is one of the core and critical aspect of migration. There are two ways to perform the data migration, either by writing the script in .NET or by using any tool.

There are various tools available in market to perform the document migration from Lotus Notes to Share Point, these are UCM, DocAve, Quest, PCVITA etc

The notes documents can be exported to MS Excel. The attachments are exported to a local drive with a unique name. Code can then be written to read the data from this excel in XML format and then put the values in the corresponding list items. Also the attachments are read from the local drive and then placed in the required list item. This is a one time job performed to import the data from a Lotus Notes application to a Share Point application.