Moving from IBM Notes to Microsoft Exchange or Office 365 provides a significant number of benefits for the organization, but the migration project itself looks daunting and it is not entirely clear where to start the migration. Exchange itself does not include native tools to fully migrate or coexist Notes and Exchange. In fact, some migration and coexistence tasks are impossible without third-party products. In this article, we will outline seven key steps that need to be followed according to best practices and our experience with successful migrations.



A successful migration includes the following steps:

1. Preliminary estimates of migration.
2. Establishing the coexistence of Notes and Exchange.
3. Planning for optimal migration accuracy.
4. Maximizing migration efficiency.
5. Running a trial migration.
6. Planning the timing of migration to minimize the impact on the organization.
7. Start migration and track its progress.

In this article, we'll walk you through how to prepare and complete your migration using two solutions from Quest - Coexistence Manager for Notes and Migrator for Notes to Exchange . Some details under the cut.

Step 1: Preliminary Migration Assessment

Taking an inventory of the current environment

Once you've decided Exchange is the right platform for your organization, all that's left is to move there. First, you need to collect information about the current environment, collect inventory information on the data you intend to migrate, determine what can be removed to reduce disk utilization, calculate the available bandwidth between environments, and so on. The preliminary assessment should include the following questions :

• How many Notes domains and Domino servers are there?
• How many mailboxes do you have? How many are not used?
• How much disk space do Primary Mail files take up? How many are in the archives? How many are there in local replicas?
• Where are the archives?
• How many users are using encryption? Do you need to transfer encrypted content?
• How many personal folders are there in the environment?
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You need to carefully plan your project to minimize downtime and minimize lost productivity.



For example, it is important to consider delegation between users - if a user migrates but his or her delegate remains on the original platform, how will this affect their day-to-day work? More broadly, you need to consider how the migration project can affect all important business and work processes in the company.



It is also important to consider the critical interaction points within Notes. For example, when working with messages, it is important to analyze the applications and consider the interaction between mail routing and applications to avoid disruption to business processes during and after migration. Be sure to ask the following questions:

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Before starting a migration, you need to define criteria for measuring success. In particular, you need to understand that it is unreasonable to expect 100% data migration. Not every type of Notes item has an Exchange equivalent (Active Mail is the most egregious example). Therefore, the reality is that not all items in Notes will exist in Exchange after migration. Achievable and measurable goal - 95% of items migrated for 95% of mailboxes. Measuring and documenting results is critical to ensuring the success of the migration, and real results are only possible if success criteria were defined early in the email migration project.

Step 2: making Notes and Exchange coexist

For most organizations, migration is a process, not an event. Therefore, mailbox migrations and application migrations must follow a schedule that is better suited to business and operations and not based on technical requirements.

Developing a coexistence strategy

To add value from migration, a complete coexistence plan must be developed and implemented early in the migration process. The definition of “coexistence” may vary from organization to organization. Some organizations actively use Free / Busy data, others do not use this functionality at all. Some focus on migrating calendar data, while others focus on carefully designing the migration of a complete user directory. It is important to work with each stakeholder to get a clear picture of what really matters and to help everyone understand the importance of an effective coexistence strategy.



Moving from Notes to Exchange and Office 365 requires planning for mailbox and application migration at the same time. The current functionality of Notes applications must be maintained for all users, regardless of their current mail platform. As users who have migrated to Exchange and Office 365, they must be able to access and use Notes applications within their existing workflows. This capability should continue until Notes applications are migrated to SharePoint or another platform.



In addition to coexistence of applications, interaction between users on different platforms must be implemented before initiating migration. This includes automatic directory routing and updating, Free / Busy statuses and calendars for all users regardless of their current platform.



Finally, you need to consider the collaboration not only of the email service, but also of calendars and shared resources such as conference rooms. Users should be able to upload information on meeting schedules. This includes both one-time and recurring appointments. Whether appointments were scheduled prior to migration or created during migration, calendar data accuracy must be maintained throughout the project. You need to ensure that users can, for example, change the chat room for an upcoming meeting from recurring appointments or cancel one meeting without causing conflicts and confusion in subsequent meetings.

Step 3: Planning for Optimal Migration Accuracy

Planning to migrate from Notes to Exchange or Office 365 requires understanding a number of specific differences between platforms.

Email addresses

Notes data usually contains proprietary addresses that appear in several places: in message headers, embedded in archives, personal contacts, and distributed lists. As part of the migration process, these proprietary addresses must be updated to SMTP addresses for full functionality in an Exchange environment. Many organizations also choose to update their SMTP domain or addressing standard during migration. When it comes to your organization, it is important to understand that some migration solutions automatically update instances of the historical SMTP address for each user.

Folder structure

In many organizations, users use their mailboxes and archives, so it is important to preserve this data. The ability for users to view their complete folder structure also affects the user experience as a result of the migration. It is important to select solutions and transients that maintain the integrity of the folder and data structures.

Local replicas and archives

In order to control storage costs and better manage data growth, many organizations set mailbox quotas. The unintended consequence of this policy is often an increase in the number and size of archives. These additional data sources should be assessed and their migration is worth considering when planning a migration. You can provide users with a self-service component that will allow them to migrate only important data. To optimize Exchange storage, we recommend using another Quest product - Archive Manager for Exchange , which has, in particular, useful functionality for deduplication of attached files, analogous to DAOS in Notes.

ACL and delegation

Allowed Access Control Lists (ACLs) and delegation are key elements in the operating room in Notes, and are also critical to protecting integrity. As a result, it is important to accurately convert associated rights and access rights to equivalent rights in Exchange Server and Office 365. Ideally, this is done automatically, which will speed up the process and eliminate human error. To maintain the effectiveness of protecting your organization's information assets, the ACL and delegation transformation must be performed concurrently with the mail data. Some organizations try to assign equivalent rights manually or using scripts after the data migration is complete. However, this approach can negatively impact performance and add security gaps to the organization's data.

Own Notes content

The same Active Mail. Another common problem when migrating from IBM Notes encounters a lot of rich text. Exchange and Office 365 do not support integrated tabbed tables, buttons, saved forms, and other proprietary content in Notes. As a result, you will either need to prepare for the loss of this functionality or invest in a migration solution that can convert these elements into a portable format. Let's say right away that the solutions from Quest do not convert this in any way and can only transfer such letters as attachments so that the user can then open them through the Notes client.

Groups and personal address books

Many organizations make extensive use of public mailing lists for internal and

external communication. In addition, Notes users often find it important to maintain business contacts in their personal address books. These data sources are critical to business operations and must be effectively transformed during the transition to the Microsoft platform. As a result, it is important to automatically prepare groups for migration to Active Directory and efficiently convert all personal addresses, even those stored at the user's workstations.

Interacting with Notes Applications

Integration points between applications and the mail service, such as reconciliation processes, are important when planning and scheduling migrations. IBM Notes has tighter integration between email and applications than other platforms. These integrations can include everything from simple doclinks to business processes.

Resources and mail databases

Many organizations use resource reservation databases, mail databases, and other common databases in Notes. As a result, these databases play an important role in the operation of the organization. To ensure business continuity and employee productivity, it is very important to consider the approach and delivery timeline for:

• Create resource mailboxes in the target environment;
• Transferring data from the backup database to Exchange;
• Ensuring that users of both systems can collaborate and use resources in Notes and Exchange.

Step 4: maximize migration efficiency

In addition to ensuring the accuracy of the data, it is also important to ensure that migration is as efficient as possible given the requirements of the organization. The efficiency of migration directly depends not only on direct costs, but also on the degree of impact on the business.

Migration solution architecture

One of the most important factors influencing efficiency is the architecture of the migration solution. It is very important to choose a solution with a multithreaded architecture that allows one migration server to carry multiple users at the same time. The multi-threaded architecture reduces hardware requirements for migration and increases migration speed, dramatically reducing the overall project cost. Don't be fooled by migration solutions that claim to be multithreaded but actually only migrate one user at a time and require adding workstations to migrate more users at a time. Depending on configuration and environment, true multithreaded solutions are 30 to 5,000 percent more efficient when migrating data to Exchange and Office 365.

Migration process

Migration involves many steps, and processes must occur at the right time to ensure a smooth transition. To minimize business disruption and maximize the benefits of the migration, all processes must be integrated and controlled by one application that can complete each step of the migration in a timely manner.

Flexibility and self-service

Some users and departments will need to deviate from the standard migration process. For example, the legal department might have different storage requirements, or executives might need to migrate the entire mailbox and all archives. Therefore, it is important to choose a flexible migration solution that allows the migration team to easily adapt to these requirements. One of the most effective ways to achieve this flexibility is to use self-service for a subset of users. For example, some users may be allowed to migrate additional data from their main mail files or local data to be converted into a personal archive on the server.

Step 5: run a trial migration

Once the pre-migration assessment has been completed, the coexistence strategy has been finalized, and optimization plans have been identified, it is very important to obtain validation of the strategy through one or more pilot migrations.



The purpose of the pilot migration is to validate the developed procedures and identify problems that may arise after the start of a full migration, making it possible to solve them before starting a combat migration. As a result, one should expect and even welcome problems during pilot migration.

Determination of the volume of pilot migration

The pilot migration should be large enough to collect a representative sample of data and answer relevant questions that may be encountered during combat migration. If you are migrating several thousand mailboxes, the sample should be sufficient. For very large migrations, the percentage may be lower.

Choice of data and systems

It is important to use combat data and combat systems during the pilot migration process. This is very important for several reasons:

• You need to understand how the combat environment will behave. The synthetically generated environment will not be representative of the combat environment.
• You can get more insight into encrypted messages, the frequency of message types not found in Exchange, and storage requirements based on sample data.

Setting expectations

The pilot migration process also provides an excellent opportunity to test the success criteria outlined for the project and calibrate expectations for the remaining migration. If adjustments are required, they must be documented and taken into account during the combat migration.

Step 6: planning the timing of migration to minimize the impact on the organization

User grouping

To minimize the impact on users and the organization as a whole, you must simultaneously migrate users who work together. The main factors to consider when creating these groups include delegation. Look for a solution that can recommend collections for migration based on the user relationship information in the source environment.

Timeline for migration

After completing the group migration, be sure to include in your schedule the times at which the

impact on these users is minimal. This can mean scheduling a migration window at specific times of the day to avoid migrations during business hours, at the end of the month of the year, or during maintenance windows. For example, sales teams probably shouldn't migrate towards the end of the quarter, and accounting and legal departments are likely to have time limits for their migration.

Step 7: start the migration and track its progress

With pilot-validated approaches to data migration, combat migrations should become routine events. There will likely be minor adjustments throughout the process to accommodate the needs of specific groups. Careful monitoring will continue to be necessary to ensure that all contingencies are taken into account during the planning and pilot phase. However, the process should become more and more automated. It is important to document and report the progress of the entire organization to meet the combat migration schedule to ensure that expectations are being met. Monitoring and feedback remain key aspects of a successful migration throughout the entire process.

Conclusion

We've covered the things to consider when migrating your email service. If you are now in the process of choosing a migration solution or are just thinking about it, it is important to consider all this. We work with Quest migration solutions and are ready to recommend them as the most effective for reducing the number of manual steps and increasing the amount of data transferred as a result of migration.



If you want to learn more about effective approaches to migration, leave a request in the feedback form on our website or just call, and you can also study additional materials at the links below:



Habr article: Migration of IBM Lotus Notes / Domino to Microsoft Exchange



Quest Migrator for Notes to Exchange at the Gals



Quest Coexistence Manager for Notes at the Gals site



Quest Migrator for Notes to Exchange Quest



Quest Coexistence Manager for Notes Quest