Notes SharePoint Blog

[Note: I am updating this old post to reflect the latest migration options in Notes Migrator for SharePoint 6.0.1.  Specifically, the "Lightweight Migration Service" is no longer needed.]

Connection options

Notes Migrator for SharePoint 6.0 now supports two very different ways to connect to SharePoint sites in order to migrate content to them. 

1. Quest Import Service.  The “classic” way is to install the Notes Migrator for SharePoint Import Service.  This is a stand-alone IIS web application that you run on one or more of your SharePoint front-end server boxes.  You have to directly access (or remote into) a SharePoint front-end server, run the NotesMigratorForSharePoint-Services-64bit-6.0.0.x.msi setup program, and select the “Import Service” option.  You need to be a farm administrator to install it and think about service accounts, permissions, etc. 

You also have to configure every new SharePoint site collection you create to use a particular Import Service instance.  To make this possible you also need to install the “Front End Services” solution included in the same NotesMigratorForSharePoint-Services-64bit-6.0.0.x.msi setup program.  Unless you are putting these components on different physical machines, you would simply install both components at once, which is the default. 

The Quest Import Service is definitely not trivial to install, but it is by far the most powerful and best performing option.  It should be noted, however, that there are three cases where the Quest Import Service cannot be used at all:

• You are migrating to Office 365 (SharePoint Online Standard or Dedicated)
• Your SharePoint site is using Claims Based Authentication
• Your administrator refuses to install third-party code on your SharePoint environment

2. SharePoint 2010 Web Services.  The new option, for 2010 customers only, is to migrate via Microsoft’s new out-of-the-box web service.  This is much simpler to deploy – in fact there is often no need to deploy anything on your servers at all (see below).  There are really only two disadvantages to using this approach.  First, it can be significantly slower than running migrations via the Import Service.  Second, there is a slight limitation to how our Link Tracking Service works.  As you will see below, everything works in the end, but the user experience suffers a little until you finalize your links.

Linking options

Related your choice of connection options is the choice of Link Tracking Service options.  The Quest Link Tracking Service is an optional feature that keeps track of all the Notes documents you have migrated and dynamically redirects users to the current location.  I won’t go into all the details of the service here, but I want to focus on how the Link Redirector page works. 

If you enable the Link Tracking Service, every Notes DocLink (or HTTP link to a web enabled Notes document) in every migrated document gets converted to an HTTP link to a Link Redirector page (QuestLinkTracking.aspx).  This redirector page typically performs a lookup in a centralized Link Tracking database and then dynamically redirects the user to another migrated document in SharePoint (if it has been migrated) or to the original Notes version (if it has not yet been migrated).  So the natural question here is: Where does this Link Redirector page live and how does it get installed?

There are actually now two different versions of the Link Redirector page that you can choose from.  First is the “classic” one that you get when you install the Front End Services solution described above.  This one is configured on a per site collection basis, alongside the Quest Import Service.

An alternative version is the Sandbox Link Redirector page.  This version is intended for cases where you do not have the ability to install custom solutions and/or you cannot establish SQL connections from your server to the a shared Link Tracking database.  The main case we were thinking of when we designed this solution is Microsoft’s Office 365 environment and other highly secured hosting environments, but there will be plenty of people who prefer this option even for on-premises environments.  This page is packaged as a simple SharePoint solution (Quest.SandboxLinkRedirector.wsp).  Because it is a sandbox safe solution, it can actually be installed by any site collection administrator, even on locked down environments such as Office 365, without involving your farm administrators at all.

Note that because Sandbox Safe Link Redirector page does not connect to an external Link Tracking database, it always offers to redirect user to Notes, even if the document had been migrated to SharePoint.  In this scenario, users will not actually get redirected to their new SharePoint documents until their links are Finalized.  The saving grace here is that you can Finalize your links as often as you want to.  In productions migrations, customers often choose to Finalize links on a daily basis.

Putting it all together

Wow that is a lot of options and choices here!  Let me try to simplify things with a nice table.

* NOTE: Strictly speaking, it is possible to install the Front End Services solution (with full dynamic link redirection using a Link Tracking database) even if you are not installing the Quest Import Service.  We believe, however, that most people will either want to install the full solution or keep things as light as possible and will not often mix and match.