What kind of low-life application would create a document with an embedded form, anyway? 

Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.1 has a new feature to help find out!

As part of our Design Analysis, we now detect which Notes databases have forms with the “Store Form In Document” property checked.  The fact that a form has the “Store Form In Document” property checked (see below) means the if any data documents are created with that form, the form will become embedded in the document.  Strictly speaking, this does not mean that the application necessarily sends mail.  But this is probably what the application developer had in mind in most cases, so testing for this flag is a pretty darn good indication that the application could send “active mail”.  (Active Mail is mail with design elements in it.  People care about this in partially-migrated environments because a Notes application that send such mail may not work well if the recipient is now in Outlook.  I will discuss this in much more detail in a subsequent post.)

The custom Notes Migrator for SharePoint view below shows that out of 183 local databases on my laptop, I found that 10 databases have at least one form with the "Store Form in Document" attribute checked.  I could also drill down into exactly which forms we were talking about:

Out of the 10 local databases that have this feature enabled, I noticed some glaring false positives.  For example, 3 of the 10 were standard address books.  Do address books really send "active mail"?  I dug in and found out that there was indeed one form (out 90 forms in the database) that was intended to be a mail notification.  This was a notice that Domino administrators could send out to get people to upgrade their Notes client.  (See the first screen shot, above.)  So this is not a case that will really impact partially-migrated environments, and it would be wrong to claim that this was a serious coexistence problem, but it is actually a good example of why embedded forms were used in the Notes world.

Finally it should be pointed out that this new Design Analysis feature is distinct from the existing Data Analysis feature which counts up the number of actual data documents with embedded forms.  The later feature is useful for seeing how prevalent embedded forms are in practice.  For example, you could sample a few users and scan their mail files to see how widespread active mail is in that organization.