The new Extract Database Users tool in Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.3 allows you to select one or more databases in any database view in the Migration Console and then extract all the user names contained in those databases.  This tool is useful for simply gaining an understanding of the users involved in a group of Notes applications, but the primary purpose of the tool is ultimately to generate a user mapping file that NMSP can use at migration time.

Depending on how much analysis has been done for these selected databases, we may extract user names from the database ACLs, the Created By/Modified By metadata, the document level security, or the usage activity.  As explained below, users may also be added to the list by expanding Domino groups and by importing existing NMSP User Mapping XML files.  The sources of the user names are listed in the view columns shown below, and you can filter the sources shown to only list users that came from certain sources.

The type of user name (Person, Group, Unspecified) is also shown and you can filter based on them.  Note that Unspecified users may become specified as you perform certain operations such as group expansion or imports.  Finally, you can manually set the user type by using the combo boxes in the view. 

You can also filter by the Notes domain.  This is a simple text match against the last part of the abbreviated name, so either “Westford/IBM” or just “IBM” would select “John Smith/Westford/IBM”.  If is common to want to select all the users plus all the groups, which the “No domain” checkbox allows you to do.

If a group is listed in a database, it is sometimes useful to be able to find all the members of the group.  If you press the Expand Groups button, NMSP will contact the configured Group Resolution Server (from Advanced Configuration) and look up every Group and Unspecified entry (in case it really is a group).  Any new members will be added to the list and indicated as “ACL via Group”.

To remove users from the list, you can select one or more row using the selection column on the right (or press Control-A to select all of them) and press the Remove button.

The last column in the view is the SharePoint names column.  You can set these names automatically using the Import function, using the Set SharePoint Names function, or by typing them in manually. 

The Import process loads in users from existing XML User Mapping files and sets the Imported column.  Imported data is merged with existing data but if a SharePoint name is specified in the imported file, it will overwrite the existing name every time. 

The Set SharePoint Names function gives you several ways to automatically assign your SharePoint names. 

· Load users from Domino Directory – use any field in the user’s Person document on the Domino directory as the new SharePoint name

· Set Default using Format String – Generate a new SharePoint name by substituting the various parts of the Notes name.

· Set Default using the Notes common name  – Use the simple common name as the SharePoint name

Note that in all these cases, existing SharePoint names will be preserved unless the override SharePoint names flag is already checked.

Finally, you can press the Export button to generate a User Mapping file (either in an XML or comma delimited format).

Security mapping has always been one of the strongest parts of Notes Migrator for SharePoint and a great differentiator for us.  Someone who is familiar with our rich capabilities in this area will probably be surprised to see how many things we found to add to the list in this release. 

The good part is that while we nearly doubled the capabilities here, we think we actually improved the usability at the same time.  Most people should be able to get by with a few easy-to-understand checkboxes and only a few will need to go into the Advanced areas.  But for those that need it, they will have more power than ever! 

1. First some cosmetic changes. We organized our increasingly confusing array of security mapping checkboxes into dialog groups and have renamed them to be clearer. Hopefully this will make these options easier to understand:

2. One subtle but very useful new feature is the ability to do both “Map Notes Groups to Domain Groups” and “Expand Notes Groups to SharePoint Groups” (they were mutually exclusive before). If you do this, the tool will first try to find a mapping for the group name in the directory or mapping file. If it finds a mapping, it will map to the Domain group. If it doesn’t, it will provision a SharePoint group instead.

3. Similar changes for the security settings on the Database Record and Class Records:

The rest of the changes are in the Advance Security Settings dialog. This is now a tabbed interface and includes a number of new things…

4. For ACL Entry mapping, we introduce a new mode of mapping. “Set explicit SharePoint permissions” is the way we used to do things. “Add to existing SharePoint groups” is the new option.

MOTIVATION: SharePoint has a built in way of managing security via SharePoint groups. Standard site templates all have predefined Owners, Members, and Visitors groups. Even though this is not as fined-grained as Notes security, many customers have requested that we provision security by adding people to one of these built-in groups rather than setting permissions directly on site members.

When “Add to existing SharePoint groups” is selected we now have a full set of mappings (on the third tab) for various ACL levels to SharePoint Groups. The combo boxes will let you select from existing Site groups or the abstract {Owners} {Members} or {Visitors} groups. You can also just type in a new group name. New mappings are similar to the existing ACL Level to SharePoint permission mappings (now on the second tab).

Note that existing jobs will be set to “Set explicit SharePoint permissions” for backward compatibility.

5. If you choose Set explicit SharePoint permissions (the old method) the Permission Mapping tab still applies.

6. Related to (but actually distinct from) the above feature is a new set of options for allowing the renaming of SharePoint Groups we are explicitly provisioning. This works with the existing SharePoint Group Provisioning options (“Expand Notes Roles to SharePoint Groups” and “Expand Notes Groups to SharePoint Groups”) but now gives you a chance to change the group names along the way. Also you can still specify a prefix for the new group name.

In the Group Mapping Dialog, you can enter the specific group mappings you want. Note the use of wildcards in the Notes names.

By mapping a role or Notes group to an existing SharePoint Group, you are effectively saying “add the members to that group”. Otherwise we will create a new SharePoint Group with the desired name. If we are mapping to SharePoint group that is not in the mapping table, we will create a new SharePoint Group with the old Notes role or group name (as we did before).

The “Prevent creation of new SharePoint Groups” option at the bottom of this dialog allows you to limit the number of new groups that are created as a side effect of the user mapping process. If you check this option, only the groups listed in the above mapping table will be used.

7. When migrating document level security (reader/writer fields), you can now disable the automatic adding of users to the site collection that were not already present. In prior versions, the tool added such users with “Limited Access” permission to the site so it could give them access to teh appropriate documents, but now administrators can decide not to allow that.

FAQ: How do the group assignment (#4) and group mapping (#5) relate to the existing user/group mapping process? Not at all! The mapping files and directory lookup options are for Domain groups and are controlled by global options. SharePoint Group names are application/site specific groups and are controlled by the job settings described here.

The Experts Conference (TEC) 2010 is North America's only conference offering 400-level training on Microsoft’s Active Directory, Forefront Identity Manager, Exchange and SharePoint technologies.

You would not believe the amount of deep dive content here.  I personally will be presenting [link] an expanded (more technical) version of my “10 Ways SharePoint 2010 Will Impact Your Lotus Notes Migrations” talk.

TEC 2010 takes place April 25-28, 2010, at the brand new JW Marriott LA Live Hotel in the heart of Los Angeles. Register soon at www.theexpertsconference.com

We just launched the Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.3 beta [link], which is our first release that supports migrating to SharePoint 2010.  The tool works with both SharePoint Foundation (formerly known as WSS) and SharePoint Server 2010 (formerly known as MOSS). 

Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.3 has been tested with the SharePoint 2010 public betas and new release candidate.  All current functionality (the stuff you could do when migrating to SharePoint 2007) works in the beta today and we will be adding additional functionality to support new 2010 features in the coming months.

I should clarify my use of the word “support” above…  The Quest support organization does not support beta products.  So even when Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.3 ships, using the tool against SharePoint 2010 betas will not be officially supported.  We suggest that you continue to post any questions/issues regarding the use of SharePoint 2010 on the 5.3 beta site.

As with other Quest tools, official support for SharePoint 2010 will be announced shortly after SharePoint 2010 is released.  The following table is an attempt to clarify the 2010 “road map” for Notes Migrator for SharePoint:

So what’s next?  Now that we have caught up to same level of capabilities in SharePoint 2010 that we had for SharePoint 2007, we have a lot of great ideas about things we can add to the product to leverage the new capabilities offered by the SharePoint 2010 platform.  We welcome your ideas in this area as well, so please don’t hesitate to contact me with your feature requests.

First of all, I just updated the 5.3 feature list originally posted two months ago [link].  We ended up expanding this considerably and added several major additional pieces.  Not the least of which is full SharePoint 2010 beta support!

For details on how to access the beta code, please visit the beta landing page here: http://sharepointforall.com/content/NMSP53Beta.aspx.  This release is scheduled to ship in late February.

Joel Oleson and I are doing a very exciting web event on Tuesday hosted by Redmond Magazine and moderated by Peter Varhol. 

Webcast Overview: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 won’t arrive till next year, but now is the time to get ready for your migration from Lotus Notes. SharePoint 2010 has many improvements that will be of particular interest to organizations transitioning from Notes. Attend a webcast with Quest SharePoint Evangelist Joel Oleson and Lotus Notes expert Steve Walch and learn about the new platform’s capabilities, improvements that reduce the cost of redeveloping complex Notes applications, migration issues, and more.

Date: 12/01/2009

Time: 11:00 am PT

FOLLOWUP:  This was an awesome event with a great audience.  View the recording here:  [10 Ways SharePoint 2010 Will Impact Your Lotus Notes Migration]

This is not about my product, rather it is a deep dive into how to use Notes people can (and do) use Quest Web Parts for SharePoint to dramatically reduce the cost of rebuilding the custom functionality you had in Notes but don’t get out-of-the-box in SharePoint.

Please note that the demonstration -- "Five Ways to Rebuild Your Notes Applications" -- previously scheduled for 2:00 p.m. EST on Wednesday, November 18 has been rescheduled for 11:00 a.m. EST on Wednesday, November 18.

Remember, in this demonstration you will see five examples of how Quest Web Parts for SharePoint creates Notes-like, multi-threaded discussions in SharePoint, aggregates information from multiple calendars into a single view, and much more!

If you were already registered for this demonstration, click here to update your calendar.

If you were not previously registered and would like to sign up, please click here.

I have been working on some cool demos for most of the day today.  Why do I always leave it for the last minute?  Anyway, I think you will be impressed with what we can do to a Word document these days.

You can view the recordings at http://www.quest.com/notesdemos for this and other web events.  Here is the agenda:

Easily Migrate Notes Documents to Word Documents and Custom Word Templates,   Thursday, November 12 at 11:00am EST

Quest Notes Migrator for SharePoint can generate Microsoft Word 2007 (DOCX) documents from Lotus Notes Rich Text documents. Notes documents can be formatted as generic Word documents or documents based on custom Word templates.

A few months ago I shared my excitement about the new Discussion web part from Quest [link].  To recap, customers switching from the Notes discussions (in the Discussion template, QuickPlaces, Team Rooms, or custom applications) to the SharePoint’s standard Discussion Board template have a few nasty problems:

• The user interface is quite different:  No twistees, No threaded tree-view, like you had in Notes.  Instead you view the parent documents in a flat view and then you open a page that shows the entire thread.
• Only the top-level documents have subject lines.  If your Notes users entered unique subjects on the response documents (I know I always did – in many cases I typed my entire thought in the subject line and left the body blank), then you have data loss!

Quest’s qDiscussion web part solves these problems in a big way.  As shown below, it is easy to use our web part to display a SharePoint Discussion List in a more Notes-like way: expandable tree view, individual subject lines, a customizable action bar, and even a preview pane.

This web part is available in two ways:

• You can get it as FREE DOWNLOAD from SharePointForAll.com [link].  Yup, I said free.  
• It is part of Quest Web Parts for SharePoint product [link], which includes 18 other cool web parts that will be invaluable for rebuilding your more complex Notes applications.  

The qDiscussion web part works very nicely with Notes Migrator for SharePoint, which of course migrates all your threaded discussion content.  In a recent post [link] explained, one of the new features of Quest Web Parts for SharePoint version 5.1 made it a lot easier for Notes Migrator for SharePoint to provision new lists and sites already preconfigured with the qDiscussion web part.

That means some one else (say a well-intentioned product manager) can create a template for you that is already preconfigured to use the web parts.  I will be polishing up my “Enhanced Discussion List” templates within the week for you to download, plug in, and go.