The Notes Migrator for SharePoint product team is finally getting into the business of migrating Notes application designs.  For the first three years of the product's life, we have focused on awesome content migration, schema migration, security migration, application analysis, site/list provisioning, automation and project management.  In other words, we have done everything but design migration.  Well that's about to change!

In Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.2 we will deliver that first of many planned design migration features: converting Notes forms to InfoPath form templates.  As discussed previously, our product is already great at migrating Notes data documents to InfoPath XML data documents, but developers still had to design their InfoPath form templates from scratch.  Now we are going to do a good deal of that development work for them. 

To start with a simple example, here is a "Document" form from the standard R7 Notes document library.  These screen shots show the form in Domino Designer, plus an example of filling out the form at runtime using the Notes client:

To migrate this form to InfoPath using the Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.2 beta, start the Migration Console, double click on your your favorite database (or design template) to open it's Database Property Sheet and go to the Design Analysis tab.  Press the Scan Database button (if you have not already done a design scan) and then press the Design Details button.  Next select the Form or Subform you want to migrate, right-click and select "Export to InfoPath form template".  Select the name and location for your new InfoPath form template (.XSN file) and press the OK button. 

Your new form template will be generated and (if you have InfoPath installed) you can either open it in design mode or preview the end-user experience of filling out the form.

Pretty easy, eh? 

Of course there a number of things we don't do...

• There are some things that InfoPath just does not support (for example, InfoPath does not support background images on table cells, so we lost that)
• There are some things that InfoPath does differently, so we tried to do the most reasonable thing we could think of (for example, InfoPath likes fixed sized controls so we had to pick a default size for the rich text box)
• There are some things that we do only if you tell us to (for example, in this pass we did not include the web-only fields or the fields that only display in in "read" mode)
• There are some things the we did not think were feasible, or at least not a good idea, to convert automatically (for example, the LotusScript code on your button events)
• There are some things we simply haven't gotten to get (after all, this is just beta 1)

At the end of the day, we are almost never going to do a 100% job here.  There will probably always be a need for an InfoPath developer to review the generated forms and finish the job.  In some cases, there will be a need to tweak the layout or change control types to factor in the InfoPath/SharePoint way of doing things.  In other cases, whole sections of business logic may need to be reimplemented.  As we will see later, the tool does a pretty good job at documenting the parts it doesn't do and tries to make it easy for the developer to find the spots where extra attention is required.  We are currently estimating that we have reduced the cost of rebuilding a typical Notes application in InfoPath by about 60% to 90%. 

For details on what we do and do not do, see our user manual.  This is definitely a moving target here and we will depend on the feedback we get from you when you try this on your custom Notes applications.

Finally, you may have noticed that I skipped over the Set Migration Form Options button in the above walk-through.  Here are the options I used for generating the above example.

As you can see, there is a a lot to talk about there, but that will have to wait for my next post.