Last week was crazy balancing between my day job of building the next round of tools and a slew of customer/partner meetings.  It was abnormally busy but I wanted to pass on a couple of interesting discussions from the customer/partner meetings.

Coexistence:  It was really great to discuss coexistence with different partners and see them get the importance of coexistence in the overall PPCM model(here).  We drilled down on the case study by Accenture as a great example of a combination approach of using both a migration for messaging and a co-existence for their applications (case study here) The key that came up in the discussion is not migration vs coexistence but finding the right balance between these two for your environment.

Making the transition decision: I normally do not get involved at this level but it was an interesting discussion.  The way the justification model was discussed was simple: [ Business Value] + [ Savings in TCO ] – [ Migration Cost ] > 0 .  Regardless of if you go through an actual spreadsheet this simply says that the business needs/savings need to outweigh the cost of a migration.  Quick points (A) Different features/tools affect different parts of the model, and you need to consider the right mix of features/tools and how they affect each aspect of your model.   (B) TCO Savings (increased productivity, lower admin, better efficiency of resources, etc) and cost of migration are usually quantified with numeric costs.  On the other hand Business Value (Increased ability to compete, better access to information, better integration, company’s long-term strategy, etc.) is harder to assign a specific numeric value (although specific features can be identified).  This being the case however all areas need to be looked at when making the decision. (Capgemini case study here)

Customer Application Discussion: I had a short discussion with a large/medium customer about their application space. It was good to see the quadrant model in use and for them it made sense.  Just from the discussion many of their applications fell into Q1 and Q3 that they could do a straight migration.  We also found/discussed several Q4 applications that they considered an initial co-existence model with a possible transition later.

Looking forward to another interesting week...

Erik Ashby

Is there any way to boost the speed of migrating mail with Exchange Migration Wizard for Lotus Notes? You should expect to migrate approximately 1-1.5GB per hour with the current tool.

Hi Again! Its me, that annoying SWOT blogger. This blog is all about the ways you can interact with SWOT going forward.

Seems like a pretty dry topic – but muddle through and I will try to make it at least a little entertaining!

I want to talk SWOT shop, how can I do it? All you have to do is open a call with our Comphot team. The 4 ways that can be done are listed below (number 5 is a special case and doesn’t require to talk to the CompHot team).

1.      Interact with the various SWOT blogs on this site.

2.      If you are an MS Managed Partner contact your Partner Account Manager (PAM).

3.      If you are an MS Partner (non-managed) log into Partner Central.

4.      Convince an MS Executive you need one and they should open it for you J (Exec calls are opened directly and don’t require a comphot case number)

It’s not very hard – I promise.

Once you get the CompHot call opened they will assign a case number (and a case manager). The call will then be either handled by the case manager (based on guidance provided to them by the SWOT team) or it will be escalated to the Competitive Account Team (CATM). If CATM is overloaded or needs specialized technical help they will escalate the call to the SWOT team. Once we get the call we stay engaged until we are sure your issue has gone away.

Thanks for reading our “how to interact” with the SWOT blog.

Today I would like to talk about the technique we call dogfooding & how we used it to improve our latest Messaging & Directory Coexistence & Migration Products.

"Eating our own dogfood," or “dogfooding”, here at Microsoft is often referred to as using & relying on our products in our day-to-day jobs, pre-RTM, to validate they are production ready before we ask our customers to.  Although the idea is certainly not unique, it certainly is a crucial part of our Microsoft culture & hence part of our testing criteria.

Dogfooding:

·         Helps uncover “production” issues not uncovered in test environments

·         Presents us with the same issues, such as design flaws or deployment issues, our customers experience - thus guiding us to fix them before the final release.

·         Allows us to experience the solution directly in a real, rich and complex environment – in a huge infrastructure such as Microsoft.

·         Allows other Microsoft teams using our products routinely, to give feedback during the early development stages, aside from our development team (i.e. at MS, email is critical to our jobs for everyday work & hence dogfooding becomes an internal community effort)

·         Shows our customers we believe in our products

Our team uses every opportunity to Dogfood our products. We dogfooded the most recent release of the Notes mail Connector, Calendar Connector & Domino Mailbox Migration Wizard – both prior to Beta release and after. It was amazing to see directory synchronization of more than 75,000 objects replicate from Microsoft's Active Directory to Domino's Directory. Second, when mail flow & Free/Busy were established between the Domino and Exchange Servers (in Microsoft’s production IT environment) everyone on our team became a Notes mail database owner/operator, with some of us using Notes exclusively to live the life “of a customer” during a similar migration.
We are armed with several weapons of mass bug destruction, and I will describe them in my future blogs.

- Kahren

I saw this on the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services blog and thought it would be interesting for our readers as well.

WSS platform momentum and templates

Today, we released information about Windows SharePoint Services momentum in the marketplace, especially as a platform for SIs and ISVs. You can read all about it here:-

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/jan06/01-20SharePointServices.mspx

I'm a big believer in WSS as a platform, so its great to see recognition in the article for partners that are building successfully on WSS. I've seen some very interesting solutions built on WSS, but I'm always interested in more. Feel free to comment with a link to an interesting site/solution if you know about one.

Also, if you haven't tried the new templates, there are 30 to download and try out here:-

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/wssapps/default.mspx

Personally, I like the 'event coordination' template since my team spends quite a bit of time preparing for events and delivering content at them.

(Posted by Amy, but written by PJ Hough.)

Hello, my name is Lou Mandich. I joined Todd Wanke’s team on March 13, 2006 as a Program Manager. My focus is directory and mail coexistence and migration assistance. My primary responsibility is working with Scott Andersen and Karl Sand on the SWOT team.

My previous position for thirty four months was as a Rapid Response Engineer (RRE) for the Global Support Services Center at Microsoft. In the past year I was one of the worldwide leads for the proactive Exchange Risk Assessment and Health Check process helping our customers understand and follow the best practices for Exchange. The main goal of this process was to reduce the number of Exchange related critical situations. During my time as an RRE I visited over 120 customers and assisted them with Exchange and Active Directory issues or discussions. Prior to joining Microsoft I worked for a company as the senior messaging engineer, and previous to that I consulted for four years on different messaging platform migrations to Exchange. My life prior to IT, I was a Second Lieutenant in the US Army, Infantry and served with the 101^st Airborne Division (Air Assault). During my eighteen months in the Army I served as a Platoon Leader of an Air Assault Platoon and as a Assistant Brigade Logistics Officer. My career was cut short due to a lower back injury; I did receive an honorable discharge for my short time in the service.

Hello again, it’s Lou. I wanted to take the time to inform you of an update you should perform on your Exchange server(s) which host the Recipient Update Services.

This link, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913676/en-us , explains that the NTSPXGen.dll file, the Notes Proxy Address List Generator is not updated when Exchange 2003 Sp2 was installed. This has to be done manually. The process is easy and requires no downtime, and what’s more, it will prevent a known issue from occurring, which is located here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840668/ . This issue occurs in RTM Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2003 Sp1. There is a post Sp1 hotfix available listed on the page for 840668 if you are still at Sp1. If you are running Sp2 or later, you will want to check the version on the file Ntspxgen.dll (located in the \Exchsrvr\address\notes\i386 folder).  The Dll version you want is 6.5.7638.1, 8/25/2005.  If this is not the version of the Dll that is on your RUS server, you can find it in the \setup\i386\exchange\address\notes\i386 directory when you extract SP2. Simply copy the Ntspxgen.dll from the extracted Sp2 directory, and place it in the \Exchsrvr\address\notes\i386 folder and you’re good to go.

Using the latest version of the connector it looks like bullets and numbering will disappear while sending from Notes to Exchange using a Lotus Notes 6.x client.

Is this a known issue?

When transferring messages between Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 and Lotus Domino, Exchange Connector for Lotus Notes must convert messages into a format that the receiving system understands. Because of the differences between Exchange Server 2003 and Lotus Domino, during the conversion there may be some changes to message characteristics in each environment. All formatting is maintained when Exchange messages in HTML format (Exchange's default format) are transferred to Domino.

• When Exchange e-mail messages are formatted HTML (default setting), they remain in the HTML/MIME format when transferred to Domino.
• When Domino mail messages are formatted HTML, they remain in the HTML/MIME format when transferred to Exchange Server 2003.
• When Domino mail messages are formatted using the default setting, they are converted to Rich Text Format (RTF).

For more detailed information, see  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/guides/NotesDirAndMailMigrat/55343e81-7337-4dda-a2b8-41c3de20889a.mspx?mfr=true

We currently pull our primary Lotus Notes directory (names.nsf) into an LNCONTACTS container. Ideally we would like this additional address book to be imported to a different container (INTERNAMES, for example).

If you need to import multiple Nab's into different containers you will need to use two connectors, one for each import container.

Just taking some time out for a shameless plug for my upcoming webcast on Wednesday about the new tools we released last December for Exchange coexistence and Migration.

You can go here: (http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032290748&Culture=en-US ) to register for this webcast “Introduction to the Latest Suite of Exchange Migration Tools”

I have done several webcasts and like the format since they are interactive.  This one will be part presentation, part discussion.  I will present on the Exchange (messaging specific) tools that we released plus the strategy for where they fit into an overall transition plan.  Then will have a discussion (Q&A) about these tools and lessons learned from experiences with these tools over the past several months since their release.

If there are any specific topics/questions you would like me to cover about the messaging tools, please post a comment here and I will see about getting it into the presentation.

Looking forward to seeing you there.  I will blog after about how it went.

Erik

Every Friday, we're going to post some questions we receive from folks running our tools, along with our responses.  Enjoy!

- Amy

I have the following questions from a partner on migration from Notes to Exchange Server 2003.  I wonder if the migration tool from Lotus Notes 6.5 mail to Exchange also takes care of the folder structure within Notes mail so that it ends up looking the same in Exchange (or Outlook)?  The customer has lot of individual distribution lists in Notes and we wonder if they will be migrated automatically?

Notes mail folders are migrated to Outlook mailboxes, so yes, the folder structure will be displayed after migration.  

In Notes, the distribution lists are stored as Group documents in the user’s Personal Address Book, which is stored locally rather than on the Domino server.  Currently, our tool does not migrate information that is stored locally, but several third party tools do support this.

What could cause 41220 No Notes Session Open Error? 

You’re using the Exchange Connector for Lotus Notes which requires a Lotus Notes client to be installed on an Exchange 2003 Server.  You launch the Lotus Notes client and switch to a different Notes user ID to perform some task.  This user ID does not have the necessary rights required for the Connector to properly route mail and generates the 41220 error.  Recommendation is to not use the Notes client that’s installed on the Exchange 2003 Server for any other purpose.

Hi again!

In my first Blog I talked about the SWOT team that we’ve started in the IW/Exchange product groups here at Microsoft. IW, just to remove the acronym stands for Information Worker. SWOT which stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat represents a significant commitment by the product groups of Microsoft to helping our customers, partners and the Microsoft field successfully deliver migrations from Lotus Domino/Notes to Microsoft Collaboration Platform.

We started the SWOT team in August 2005 and are continuing to grow the team. I stated the team goal above, helping people make sense of a Lotus Notes/Domino Migration. Our mission is: Provide expertise, guidance, training & feedback to our field, customers, partners & product group(s) to improve MS solutions for easy adoption of the MS Collaboration platform.

•          Assist select customers, field & partners in strategic engagements.

•          Gain expertise thru interactions with customer's via the CompHot, CPR, exec escalations & Complex Bid Desk systems.

•          Provide Guidance\Training\Feedback to the field, customers, partners & product groups.

I suspect the next question is how do we engage the SWOT team?

Today we engage with our customer’s via Microsoft’s internal CompHot system. CompHot is a system designed to help competitive issues reach the top levels of the organization quickly. SWOT works with the Comphot system and is added as a Subject Matter Expert on the Comphot call.

The reason we decided to use the CompHot escalation system for the SWOT team was that it’s built for both the Microsoft Field and our partners to use. This allows us to have SWOT professionals engage with our partner and Microsoft Field teams as a resource.

We work with many customers (although as a small team our bandwidth is limited) striving to provide the best support possible for our customers migrating from Lotus Technologies. Of course there is always this Blog a great place to see what the SWOT team is thinking about and doing.

Next – a blog on how to open a SWOT call!

--Scott

Erik Ashby, Lead PM at Microsoft providing a short introduction about himself

OK, now that the initial welcome and an initial post, I felt introductions were in order.  As team members post they should also do similar and post a short introduction.

I am a PM lead at Microsoft in Redmond Wa.  Although I have been involved in some form or other with the Notes migrations (mainly on Exchange) for nearly 6-7 years, this past year I shifted my role to be 100% focused on helping customers who are moving to our platform.   What a ride this past year has been.  I started working with Todd Wanke last winter/spring putting together a good plan for our toolset, building a team, and development on our toolset.   We knew that our messaging tools were in desperate need for an overhaul, so I started with that work and last December, after 9 months, we released the messaging tools to the public ( here ).  ** Now for a shameless plug ** I wrote an article about that project, what we did and why we did it on Technet that was posted yesterday ( here ).  We have also been working on the application side and more will be posted on that.

I have a long history in messaging and Exchange with over 15 years of working in the industry.  In Exchange I have been working since 1997 on nearly every aspect of the product in some form or antoher.  This past year focusing on these tools and expanding my interest into the application side has been fun, but hey, to me nothing is better discussing over the dinner table with my kids the internals of MIME encoding in Notes body parts, or the difference in WSS XML tables.  They love it.

Erik Ashby

Lead PM, Microsoft, Redmond

Oh, the real release was Ashby V6 released October 18^th ( here )

Over the past seven+ years I have been directly involved with deployments and transitions for a variety of Microsoft technologies (Exchange, Active Directory, Windows 2000/2003, MIIS, and more).  During these years I have met with literally hundreds of customers to review their transition plans and from these reviews I saw four common transition phases emerge.  In these transitions (transition meaning the process of changing from some start state to a desired end state, usually through introduction of some new technology to enhance or replace existing functionality) the phases followed common deployment sense, so they were present regardless of if they were specifically called out in any project.   I wanted to blog at a high-level about these phases since they are so common and are universal to different technology transitions.   Also this sets the stage for more detailed blogs later as we get into our tools since the different tools and guidance that we have released (the messaging tools) and will release (like the Application Analyzer) all refer back to these phases.

PPCM – Plan, Prepare, Coexist and Migrate:  As I stated, these are really just common sense, but still it is important to understand and map out these phases to understand the overall flow of a transition to some desired end-state.

Plan Phase: This is the initial phase where the goal is to create the plan for the following phases.  This state usually includes some level of discovery of the current system through analysis, and of the target technology through research (such as training or documentation) and/or a proof-of-concept deployment.  The idea is to define (a) what the current state really is, (b) what is the desired end-state will be, (c) and what is the path that will get you there. 

Prepare Phase: This phase is all about getting the topology ready for a transition by laying a foundation for the target state and preparing the source system. For example for a transition to Exchange the foundation would include the deployment of Active Directory, deploying initial mail servers, setting up message flow, etc.  This phase would also include a pilot environment and training of administrators who will support the target system.  Also, any cleanup on the source (such as removing unused databases, old mailboxes, etc.) would be done here.  Again the idea is to get everything ready for running live.

Coexistence Phase: The Coexistence phase is when you are running live with the target system, but need to retain functionality from the current system.  Often this is because the transition could take place over a long period of time (very common for large mail transitions) or simply may be because different set of functionality is provided by the new system.  For example, you may have been using Domino for customer tracking and employee lists, but plan to centralize HR functionality to an off-the-shelf HR management system that tracks employees plus provides additional HR features.  The end-state then may be a combination of the Domino Server (for the legacy customer tracking solution) and the new HR system.  Because of the different needs for coexistence this phase may actually be the end-state.  I know of many companies that run and co-exist with legacy systems for years simply because there is not the business case to move some functionality from the legacy system, but more than enough business case to move forward with new technology in different areas.  Also on the other extreme co-existence can be short (or NONE) if a simple swap-out approach is taken.  Either way, the goal in this phase is to begin to gain the value (run live) from the target system, while retaining functionality needed from the current system regardless of if a migration is later planned.

Migration Phase: This is the actual phase of moving off one system to the target system.  The migration phase is often done in conjunction with the coexistence phase. For example you may be migrating mailboxes from Domino to Exchange, while still providing co-existence for mailboxes that have not yet migrated.  The migration phase will consist of two parts, a data migration (work to provide access to legacy data from the target system), and functionality migration (work to provide similar required functionality in the target system).  The approach taken for these varies greatly, from a rip-and-replace strategy where nothing is migrated, just the new system is now running, to a very detailed migration approach where all data is preserved and all functionality is replaced with a similar interface as before.  Bear in mind that in the cases when co-existence is the desired end-state, then the migration phase may not come into play, depending on what the new system provides.  In the end, this phase is about how data and functionality is to be moved to the target system to enable the desired functionality in the target.

I realize that this is all high-level and does not get into specific features, but given how often these come up in transition discussions I wanted to set the stage by a) calling out these common-sense phases so that they are at least defined and understood, and b) lay the foundation for more detailed blogs later on the tools and how they work within these phases. 

I wanted to introduce myself as the one of the Program Managers working on Todd Wanke’s team, focused on solutions for Lotus Notes customers.   While I may not have the most number of years at Microsoft (5+ years) compared to most of my colleagues, I do have experiences from other companies and markets that help me to analyze and address problems from a different perspective.   Prior to Microsoft, I was Program manger at Motorola, working on several Windows CE projects.  Before that, I was a product manager for a company developing embedded RF communication equipment.  Which brings me to my humble beginning and my first job out of college: at IBM as an engineer working on mainframe storage systems, and as a field SE, working on mid-range solutions (e.g. AS400, RISC based solutions).

Since my early days working on mainframes, I’ve observed how organizations adopt new IT technologies, for both good and bad reasons.  My new job is to make sure we continue to deliver the right set of solutions that customers are asking for, and to help them to implement and use the technology more easily.  I know that there are many organizations working on these problems -- ultimately the winner will be the customer.

I look forward to sharing many additional thoughts, topics, technical information & hearing from you on any feedback that you may have.

- Ed

The Visual Studio Express editions are free and can be accessed from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express.  They're free for one year, which should give you a chance to play and learn.  VS is very similar to LotusScript, so if you're comfortable writing in LS, you should find the transition very easy.  Check it out!

- Amy

Here is some background on our Methodology & Framework for how we think about coexistence & migration between Microsoft & Lotus.

Methodology:  As many of you know, one of the first things you do with any large project is insure you have a framework for which you begin executing against.  With Erik Ashby, Gary Devendorf, Scott Andersen, Ed Wu and others, we set out to build a framework a little over a year ago.  We went on a series of face-to-face customer & partner engagements, kicked off a series of Notes “focus groups” worldwide, recruited external Notes experts, met with analysts, held\hold many hours of brainstorming meetings & specs reviews, visited (many personally) customers\partners thru-out the world, and more.

Our goal:  To hear & learn what our customers, partners & analysts had to say & needed from us to be successful in their adoption of Microsoft's Collaboration Platform. 

From this we settled on a framework that aligns with our Plan\Prepare, Coexist & Migrate Steps - that Erik blogged about earlier.  In addition, we map these three distinct steps to our three technical foundations: Directory, Messaging & Applications.  That when layed out, gives us a nice 3 x 3 matrix we can begin mapping current & future solutions to.

With our framework in place, we engaged our partners to fully understand what we had collectively technically, what we needed to build & what we would work with them to provide.  We built a detailed component roadmap, development plan & continue to use these today to prioritize our work-items & development activities.

In the end, we have the following:

• technical framework for addressing the multiple challenges & setting development priorities
• product roadmap for identifying the strengths, weaknesses & areas of improvement of our current\future products
• strong partner community to assist with building addt’l solutions
• world-class technical team that know IBMs products inside & out
• fully staffed & dedicated product group of pm, test & dev resources to build, improve & prioritize the tools our customers need

We believe strongly this is a long-term commitment & are working to provide the tools necessary over these long engagements to enable our customers to be successful.  We have some exciting products in the pipeline now, are deliberate & methodical in our approach, & look forward to hearing your feedback on our progress, approach & products\tools we and our partners are providing.

-todd wanke

My name is Amy Blumenfield and I am a former (and current) Lotus Notes user/administrator/developer.  My first introduction to Lotus Notes was in May, 1991 (version 2.0) when I was handed a bunch of floppy disks (about 16 I think) and told to figure it out…  The company I was working for in Santa Monica, CA had been contracted by Lotus to write the courseware for the brand new Notes Certification Program.  I ended up writing the courseware and becoming one of the very first Certified Notes Instructors (I have my Notes 2 Instructor certificate hanging up in my office at Microsoft).  I went into business for myself in 1994 as the first independent Lotus Notes Instructor (my first client was Lotus) and quickly moved into consulting.  I had the great fortune to work on several global Notes implementations.  I was contracted by IBM to write and review the Notes/Domino, Sametime and QuickPlace certification exams for R5 and ND6.

I joined Microsoft in June, 2005 and am responsible for all of the guidance our team releases.  As someone who has never worked “on the inside” before, I know it’s really important to make sure that our customers and partners voices are being represented to the product team.  I’m working very closely with the field to make sure that their experiences are being reflected in the guidance I’m producing so that others can benefit from their experience.

Being a newcomer to working for a software manufacturer, to Microsoft’s products (I had never used Outlook prior to joining MS) and to the Pacific Northwest, it’s been a busy nine months.  I am really enjoying living here in sunny Seattle, after being stuck in dreary Los Angeles for fourteen years…  It actually is an amazing and beautiful place to live. 

In order to understand and make recommendations when considering integration and migration options for Lotus Domino applications, it is important to group together applications that share common criteria.  Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino performs a high level categorization, which is used for the initial analysis of Domino applications.  The following are the criteria for determining the category for Lotus Domino applications:

·         Is the application based on a template that ships with Domino?

·         Does the application implement workflow?

Based on these two conditions, four quadrants are identified:

·         Data centric, default template based (Quadrant 1)

·         Workflow, default template based (Quadrant 2)

·         Data centric, custom (Quadrant 3)

·         Workflow, custom (Quadrant 4)

All Lotus Domino applications fall into one of these four quadrants.  The analyzer tool quickly identifies the appropriate quadrant for each application included in the analysis.  Any application that falls into the quadrants one or two is listed with the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) template that provides similar functionality.

Applications that fall into quadrants three and four may require additional analysis as they may include functionality that affects the recommended target platform.  Quadrant three and quadrant four applications may require additional analysis for details such as connectivity to external sources, security, agents, etc. Further categorization is required for these conditions.  Details about this next phase of the analysis process will be covered in more detail in later blogs and in whitepapers available for download at the Microsoft Interoperability and Migration Center website.

Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino groups together applications that share a common design template (they were created from and inherit their design from the same template).  There may be 40 applications that share a design template – the design can be analyzed one time, a solution can be identified one time and a migration tool can be configured a single time, which saves a significant amount of time and energy. 

Placing applications into the appropriate quadrant is the first step in the overall application analysis process.  It provides broad guidelines for dealing with the applications and gives direction for the next steps in the analysis process.

- Amy

Hi!

My name is Scott Andersen with the Exchange Product Group, working for Todd Wanke. I joined the team in August 2005 after spending 9 years in Microsoft’s Consulting Services. For the past two years I was the senior infrastructure architect for the Central Region of the US, and part of the US Center of Excellence (COE) for messaging. I am also one of the first Microsoft Certified Architects focusing on Infrastructure.

I started my IT career at a Microsoft Partner as a helpdesk professional. Back then I was the Mac guy on the helpdesk. I helped the team that built the partner’s original MS Mail system and eventually became the Mail Admin for the company. As our company acquired (and was acquired) other organizations we ended up with four separate mail systems. I helped design, implement and manage a mail hub solution, using the then Lotus Software SoftSwitch™ box. I was connecting an AS/400, Lotus Notes (using Comm Manager), CCMail, MSMail, Exchange and SMTP mail traffic through SoftSwitch™ box.

I joined Microsoft as an MCS person in the Great Lakes District (part of the US Central Region) in August 1996. Since that time I have had many roles, and have worked with many customers for the most part focusing on Microsoft Exchange and related technologies. I was part of the beta group of MCS professionals who were trained on the old Mesa Notes Application Analyzer after Microsoft purchased Mesa. I was also in the first beta class for the various messaging connectors after Microsoft purchased Linkage Corporation. Last but not least I was in one of the first beta classes for the old Zoomit Via product after Microsoft purchased that product. In 1999 I switched districts (and we switched cities) moving from Cincinnati Ohio where we had been for the previous 9 years, to Indianapolis Indiana.

I have three hobbies, writing, golfing and boating. Before I was at Microsoft I used to publish articles in the old NASPA journal as well as publishing my own journal many years ago.  Recently I have been working on some architecture white papers, one of which is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/InArchCap.asp as well as a book for power users of Windows XP here: http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/authors/auth6559.asp.  A very long time ago I used to publish poetry under the name “Sandler Boggs.”

Today my focus is on the SWOT Team. SWOT is straight from the solutions sales process (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat). We help customers with problems they experience in migrations from Lotus Notes, but more about that later.

Finally something nobody knows about me. I used to be a public school teacher in Bloomington Indiana. During that time I actually founded a teaching society known as the Society of Dead Teachers (DTS). That group is still out on the internet (DTS-L is the Listserv) and continues to thrive.

There has been a great deal of interest on how to conduct an application analysis, with the goals of considering either a migration or enabling an application coexistence model.   Generally, we can think of four main phases of an application analysis.

Phase I - Discovery

• Discover Unused Applications - identify those applications which are no longer in use
• Identify Applications to be Archived - Select applications that are not candidates for migration or coexistence for various business reasons
• Discover Domino Template Based Applications– there are data migration tools available for the applications based upon Standard Domino templates
• Administration Templates
• Discover Customer Template Based Applications - these represent templates that the customer has developed or purchased, and used within their organization for many applications – there could be hundreds or even thousands of applications that inherited their design from a set of these templates.  By understanding and developing a strategy for these templates, one can apply the same approach to the applications based upon the templates, thus greatly reducing the number of “custom” analyses.
• Discover Mail Databases – these applications are migrated using Exchange Migration Wizard for Lotus Notes and should be handled during the mail migration process.

After Phase I, the number of applications that are candidates for migration and that need additional analysis should be greatly reduced (e.g. 50% or less).

Phase II - In Depth Review of remaining applications, with the following goals:

·         Understanding the Data Structures: how is data stored in the applications today?

·         Understanding the Process Workflow: Investigate those applications which include actions, events and mail enabled processes 

·         Understanding the Presentation Layer: Research all business requirements for the specialized collaboration services

After an in depth review is conducted, applications can be further categorized

• Leave in Place - Applications that should be left in place, such as applications that don't fit in the new environment today or whose data will expire (or is no longer needed) in a short period of time, and older applications that require a reworking anyway.
• Buy versus Build Decision - does the customer already own the functionality in an existing application or is there a 3rd party application that meets the business needs filled by the application?
• Logical Business and Functionality Grouping -are there applications today that do the same things within the organization and are there applications that could be combined?

Phase III – Target Solution Mapping

• Existing Customer Solutions: Identify if an existing platform available to support the solution (i.e. SAP, Siebel).
• Buy Off-the-Shelf Products: Investigate available "out of the box" solutions 
• Build New Solution: Choose best platform to rebuild improved version of the solution
• Leave In Place on Domino: Web enable or build new front-end application with .NET

After Phase II and III, an even smaller percentage of the total applications will be migration candidates.

Phase IV – Transition to New Solution

• Enable New Solution: Finalize and deploy new target solution
• Train IT, Developers and End Users:  Provide necessary training to the organization
• Migrate Necessary Data: Move all, or subset, of Notes data
• End of Life-Cycle: Disable access and archive old application

On a future post, I will go into more details of each phase and the resources that can be used in them.

- Scott

I’ve been testing the scenarios for applications migration and one of the testing areas was application data mapping.  Today I’d like to talk about alternative migration of Notes Document Library databases.

The default target for Notes Document Library is a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Document Library list. However this is not the only way to go and our new Transporter tool allows us to migrate Notes Document Library to SharePoint Discussion Boards list.  This will be useful when preserving the hierarchy of the Notes Document Library is important, since the hierarchy from the Notes document library will be preserved after migrating it to a Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 Discussion Board.

To do this type of alternative migration from GUI the customer will have to select Target Mapping “Discussion Board” when migrating Notes Document Library database. In the command line it would look like this:

Move-DominoApplication –SourceIdentity DocLib.nsf –TargetMapping DiscussionBoard –TargetSharePointList “My SharePoint Discussions”

-Ruslan Babadzhanov

Have you been waiting with bated breath for fantastic end to end guidance around the Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino?  Well my good reader, your wait is over!  We’ve been working hard with support and with the field to make sure that the information in here is solid.   This is a release where even support is excited about the quality.  It covers planning and executing on your directory and mail transition, including groups, archives, and PABs!  It can be downloaded here.

We already know that there are some topics that we didn’t get a chance to cover, so stay tuned for future updates on this doc.  If there are particular topics you are interested in, please feel free to leave them in the comments.  In the meantime, go forth and be guided!

Microsoft Transporter Suite End to End Guidance

This is a living document to describe the features between multiple different messaging migration tools used for Domino to Exchange.

It is only meant to be an aid, not a definitive solution. It will help you narrow your choices when comparing toolsets.

Please send me a list of features you would like added, or other products. I'm not perfect, I make mistakes too, so if you need me to fix the

sheet, please let me know.

Earlier this week we released a major update to the Microsoft Transporter Suite (A set of tools that help customers migrate content into Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory). The Microsoft Transporter Suite is now available for download (here)

What’s New?

This release focused on adding the ability to migrate mailboxes from Generic POP/IMAP servers and improving the overall quality of the previously released Domino migration tools.

New Features/Fixes in this release

o   NEW: Transporter Suite for Internet Mailboxes (A whole new console and tools for migrating POP/IMAP Mailboxes)

§  Migration of mailbox content from generic servers through POP or IMAP to Exchange 2007

§  Preserves all messages and folder structures

§  Preserves rich content including formatting, message flags and even calendaring through iCAL

§  Exposed through GUI and a rich set of PowerShell tasks

o   Updated: Domino migration tools

§   Improved support in the Console for large organizations

§  Enhanced troubleshooting through tracing, improved logging, and capturing of items that do not migrate

§  Improved application migration by preserving created/modified identities

§  Enhanced security of the Free/Busy connector

Screen Shots Of Internet Mailbox Migrations

Initial Screen

List of Mailboxes

(Notice the migration status feature to track mailboxes that have been migrated)

Mailbox Migration Wizard