Before diving into the new ways we have to manage your links in Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.2 (tomorrow's post), let's do a quick review of how Quest's Link Tracking Service works.

Notes documents can contain DocLinks, which are links to other Notes documents.  These links can be represented as "traditional" little yellow icons or "modern" text hotspots, as shown below:

If you were to migrate this document to SharePoint, you would want to make sure that your document links continued to work in all of the following cases:

1. The documents that your links point to are still in Notes - When a users clicks on a link, they should be connected to the document in the Notes client.
2. The documents that your links point to have been migrated to SharePoint - When users clicks on a link, they should be connected to the migrated document (which could be a SharePoint List Item, a SharePoint Page, an InfoPath document, etc. [link]).
3. The documents that your links point to are in Notes today, but they are due to be migrated to SharePoint next quarter - Whenever users clicks on a link, they should be connected to wherever the document is at that time.

This is exactly what Quest's patent-pending Link Tracking Service does.  The sound-bite for this (if you were to be trapped with a Quest sales rep on an elevator) is "your DocLinks keep working before, during or after your migration process".  Here is how it works:

As you migrate documents using Notes Migrator for SharePoint, it registers each document with the Link Tracking Service, which keeps track of each document you have ever migrated in a database.  The tool also converts any DocLinks on the migrated documents to "Dynamic Links", which are really URLs that point to a special Redirector Page.  The Redirector Page is responsible for redirecting users to the current best location of the target document.

Let's look at a specific example.  Imagine that that you are linking to the Notes document shown below.  Most people aren't aware of this, but each Notes document has a unique address that you can see if you are displaying the address bar in the Notes client.  The address of this Notes document is notes:///8525738700049E93/626E6035EADBB4CD85256499006B15A6/120AF211FF5A09CA852573870006C412. 

DIGRESSION:  You can actually use this address to connect to the Notes document from any web page.  If you type that notes://...  address into the Internet Explorer address bar, it will open the Notes client (if necessary) and redirect you to straight to that document!  Before you get too excited, however, I should point out that notes://...  links are not legal in SharePoint items.  The Link Tracking Service solves that problem too.

When you migrate a DocLink that points to the above document, it will become a "Dynamic Link" that looks something like this:

http://your-sharepoint-server.com/_layouts/QuestLinkTracking.aspx?noteslink=notes:///8525738700049e93/626e6035eadbb4cd85256499006b15a6/120af211ff5a09ca852573870006c412

The red part of the Dynamic Link is the web address of the Redirector Page described above.  The blue part is the address of the Notes document you want to link to.  As users click on Dynamic Links, they are automatically redirected to the current location of the referenced document.  The code on the redirector page will use the blue part to look up the migrated document in its database of known migrated documents.  If the document has not been migrated, the user will be redirected to the original Notes/Domino document.  Once the target document is migrated to SharePoint, users will then be redirected to the new version of the document, using its new SharePoint URL.

Pretty cool, eh?  There are a few more things worth mentioning here:

* If your users create content in QuickPlace or other Domino web applications, they don't use true Notes DocLinks.  Instead they tend to copy/paste http://... links that point to other web-enabled QuickPlace/Domino pages.  You can migrate them in their original form, of course, but they would all break as soon as you take down your Domino server.  Happily Notes Migrator for SharePoint detects this case are treats such links as DocLinks, exactly as described above.

* Notes DocLinks (and Domino URLs) often appear in Notes mail messages.  Happily Notes Migrator for Exchange has an option to integrate with the Link Tracking Service so migrated mail messages (in Exchange) can link to migrated application documents (in SharePoint) as described above.  This can be especially important if you have Notes workflow applications that send out notifications (for example, "please approve this request" messages) containing DocLinks.  

* If you do not want users to be automatically redirected, you can set a configuration option in Notes Migrator for SharePoint Services to show users an information page instead.  The information page gives the user a little more status information about the migrated (or un-migrated) document.

* Use of the Link Tracking Service is actually optional.  In each migration job you run, you can decide to migrate using direct links instead, but you will probably encounter some of the practical limitations cited above.