You may be wondering to yourself, what’s new about directory migration in the Transporter Suite?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  There were a couple of things that we were trying to accomplish in the area of directory.  First of all, it occurred to us that you might want to do a directory migration *before* you do a mail migration rather than have it stapled onto the beginning of MigWiz.  Well, we’ve separated it out into its own task, called move-DominoUser.  Second of all, our previous directory migration required an act of God (or a Domain Admin) to get things done.  We designed the permissions in this new task to allow Account Operators/Recipient admins to do their job.  On top of that, when you execute the migration, we’ve enabled you to create the target accounts with mailboxes (if you’re ready for your mailbox migration) or without mailboxes (if you want your mail to keep being delivered to Domino).  Finally, we’ve exposed all of this functionality through PowerShell, which makes this whole process easy to automate.  Your boss will think you were up working all night, but just between us…

     $SecureString = ConvertTo-SecureString –String P@ssw0rd –AsPlainText -Force

Get-DominoUser | Move-DominoUser –TargetOU Users –InitialPassword $SecureString

…will migrate all of your users from Domino to Active directory, creating any new users as Exchange MailUsers in the Users OU with an initial password of P@ssw0rd.  If it finds an existing user, it’ll just merge the Domino directory information for that user into the existing account and upgrade it to a MailUser if necessary.  You’re done!  Time for you to go have dinner.  Bon appétit!

--Jenna

Where do the majority of apps fall that you see in your quadrant framework?  The question nearly every Enterprise customer asks me during my speaking engagements & executive briefings.

They say: "The tools look good, the framework is good, the process is good, now… tell us the typical breakdown of applications for the majority of your customers".

I answer the question the same each time as we have some good statistically relevant data on this topic from our worldwide focus groups, meetings with hundreds of customers, analysts, partners & by analyzing a TON of apps.

In the end, with high confidence we are able to say:

1. On average ~60% of all Notes applications are not used or inactive
2. On % of applications in each quadrant, we could derive no pattern or conclusive evidence. 

 As in focus groups, analyst briefings, partner mtgs & customers engagements we heard & saw the following:

1. “we have 100% Quadrant 1 apps”
2. “we have 100% Quadrant 4 apps”
3. “we have a 60\0\30\10 split”
4. etc.

A good example of this comes from an IBM slide on their environment shown @LotusSphere (Title: ID119, IBM Lotus Notes and Domino @ IBM).  It states “Out of 100,000 Notes\Dom Applications…” ~65k are custom Notes apps [Quad 3/4]; ~30k ‘TeamRooms’ [Q2]; ~10k other ‘standard’ templates [likely a Q1 or Q2]”.  That means IBM’s environment breaks down into 10% Quad 1, 30% Quad 2, and 65% Quads 3 & 4.

In the end, you likely will have a ton of Notes apps that are just not accessed or used anymore & a unique percentage of apps in each quadrant.  Using the Application Analyzer will begin the process of helping you to understand your unique environment and plan for your company’s future.

-todd

Often, companies are in a scenario where they need to concurrently support both Domino and Exchange servers (and Notes and Outlook clients).  The Exchange Connector for Lotus Notes tool that was released last December has been updated to improve the fidelity for mail routed over the connector between these two environments.  Outlook mail and iNotes (Domino Web Access) mail (now supported) both send messages in MIME format, which is fully supported.  This means that mail sent from either of these clients will look the same when viewed by Notes or Outlook recipients, including colors, fonts and tables.  Mail routing from the Outlook or iNotes clients to Lotus Notes maintains fidelity.

By default, Lotus Notes clients send mail in IBM’s proprietary CD-MIME format.  This means that some items sent by Lotus Notes clients look different when viewed by Outlook clients.  Lotus Notes clients can be configured (via a Location document) to send mail to internet recipients via MIME.  The Notes clients do not consider the Outlook clients to be internet recipients as the Exchange connector is configured as a Domino Foreign Domain.  

When messages are sent from Lotus Notes clients to Outlook clients via the Exchange Connector, text formatting is converted correctly, but some tables, such as tabbed tables are converted to standard tables.  Formatting within tables is lost.

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) allows a user to embed a file within a mail message and then click on the item to launch the associated application to modify the file.  OLE information sent from a Lotus Notes client properly routes through the Exchange Connector but Outlook 2003 disables OLE by default as a security measure; no executable files can be launched from within the mail client.

For a complete list of what does and does not translate from CD-MIME, see the Exchange Server 2003 Coexistence and Migration for Lotus Domino Mail document, which can be downloaded from the Resources for Moving to the Microsoft Collaboration Platform website.

- Amy

Ever since the announcement of the application tools mid January, there have been a number of articles and blogs in the different communities about these tools.  As someone who is working on these tools, this was expected, however what was unexpected was the confusion around the Application Analyzer beta.  I felt this confusion justified a quick blog.

On Tuesday, January 17 we announced a number of new and updated tools for helping customers move from Lotus Notes/Domino to the Microsoft Collaboration platform.  One of those tools we announced was the Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino.  We said this tool would be available in the first quarter of 2006.  The tool is currently in a private beta with a number of customers, and we are receiving good feedback on it.  On that day, we realized we had erroneously posted the link of this private beta on our public site.  We’ve removed the link for now.   We have several fixes that we are making to the beta and we are still on track to make this tool publicly available later this quarter. I will have more on that coming soon.

Erik Ashby

Lead Program Manager, Microsoft, Redmond