Notes Migrator for SharePoint has a powerful facility for translating Notes user/group names to account names that can be used in SharePoint.  Some examples of where this is used:

• Setting the Created By and Modified By metadata on migrated documents
• Adding users to SharePoint site collections
• Setting permissions on migrated documents
• Setting permissions on provisioned sites, lists or libraries
• Provisioning SharePoint Groups based on the Roles in a Notes ACL)
• Mapping a Notes name to a "user" data column (such as the Assigned To column in a Task item)

In all these cases, we have to convert Notes names (which usually reference Domino Directory accounts) to accounts in the directory that SharePoint is configured to use (usually Active Directory).  Notes Migrator for SharePoint gives you several options for mapping your user/group names.

If connecting directly to a SharePoint server on the local machine, you can specify your mapping options by going to the User Mapping and Group Mapping tabs of the Options dialog in the Designer and Console clients. 

If you are connecting to remote SharePoint servers, then user and group mappings are specified on the server side and may be configured separately for each target Site Collection.

In rare cases, translating user names is a simple matter of reformatting the name from the Notes format to something that SharePoint can use.  For example, if you use a convention like "CN=Steve Walch/O=Quest" for your Notes names and "QUEST\Steve Walch" in your new directory, you can tell the tool to simply format the new names as a Windows name and use that as the SharePoint login name. 

Anyone who has seen a real-world directory migration can tell you that this approach is hopelessly optimistic.  It seems to be very rare that there is a one-to-one mapping of user/group names that works.  More commonly, there are directory reorganizations, new naming conventions, elimination of duplicates, new schemes for disambiguation, and plain old name changes that prevent such a simplistic mapping methodology. 

A better approach then is to give Notes Migrator for SharePoint a way to look up the appropriate mapping from an external data source.  In fact, the tool gives you several ways to do this:

• Look up name mappings from an text file (XML or comma delimited)
• Look up name mappings from Active Directory (or other LDAP source)
• Look up name mappings from Domino Directory (or other Notes database)

The next few posts will discuss these options in more detail.