Here is a link to my new white paper, hot off the presses: [link]

Abstract:

Many organizations are moving from Lotus Notes/Domino environments to Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint and Office. However, applications that are migrated from Notes to SharePoint may need to be rebuilt – typically an expensive and time consuming process.  Even then, the new applications may not function as well as the legacy ones. But with the release of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010, things have changed.  This paper discusses 10 ways that SharePoint 2010 will change the game for enterprises of all sizes who want SharePoint to replace or enhance their Notes environments.  You will learn about major platform and functionality improvements and discover how SharePoint 2010 simplifies rebuilding Notes applications after a migration.

Feel free to post comments here or send to me privately.

Our product supports SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 equally well, so we often do not know when our customers are migrating to which platform.  If you are actively migrating your Notes applications to SharePoint 2010 today, I would love to hear from you.

• Which edition of 2010?  (Foundations, Standard or Enterprise)
• What types of Notes applications are you migrating?
• What 2010 features are you leveraging?
• What tools are you using?
• Have your new apps gone into production (or when will they)?
• Are you and/or your users happy?

Please send your comments to me at steve.walch @ quest.com.  I won’t reveal any of your specific details without permission, of course, but I do promise to post the general trends I hear about here.  Thanks!

Migration tools are great (especially mine) but we don’t want to ever forget about the simple migration scenarios that you get for free from the Microsoft platform. 

Here is a cool video [link] from Microsoft’s Gary Devendorf showing you how to extract data from Notes using the good old ReadViewEntries Domino URL commands.  Gary uses Microsoft Access in this case to grab data from the Domino URL, massage it, and publish it to a SharePoint list.  Way cool!

You can do similar things using Excel and SharePoint Web Parts that read data from the same place.  Gary and I have co-presented on a few occasions and these types of demos are very popular.  And Notes developers are very happy to have a way to get started doing simple data migrations using these types of methods.

As Gary well be the first to tell you, these methods only take you so far.  You do not get rich text, attachments, created/modified metadata, security, and many other things.  That’s where tools such as Notes Migrator for SharePoint come in to save the day.

Many Notes applications were designed primarily to publish rich content to a wide audience.  These often included some type of approval process, management of draft content, version control, etc.  These are great examples of applications that may well to the “publishing” site templates available in SharePoint Server 2010 and MOSS 2007.  Here, for example, is a rich text Notes document (with embedded images, attachments and doc links) that has been migrated to a 2010 “Publishing Portal” using Notes Migrator for SharePoint.

If we put this page into edit mode, we can see that a great deal of out-of the-box functionality is available with no development required.

Notes Migrator for SharePoint supports migrating any Notes content to publishing pages.  This is a little more complex than doing other wiki pages or basic pages [link] and uses the tool’s unique capability to create pages using custom ASPX template code.  The remainder of this walkthrough will use screen shots from SharePoint 2007, but the process is nearly identical for SharePoint 2010.

If you do not already have a publishing site, create one using SharePoint Central Administration and specify one of the “Publishing” templates.

Next, we need to create a “template” for generating pages from your Notes documents.  Go to your new SharePoint publishing site site and create a sample page by selecting Create Page from the Site Actions menu.

Select the page layout you want for your new pages.  The list of layouts may vary depending on the site template you started with and may include custom layouts designed by your site owners.

Now populate the page with a little sample data and save it. 

Feel free to experiment with checking the page in and out, versioning it, scheduling it’s release or submitting it for approval.  These are all powerful features of the SharePoint publishing templates, but you actually do not need to use them for the task at hand.

For designing a migration job, we need to extract the page to a local file so we can example the ASPX layout.  Select View All Site Content from the Site Actions men and then go to the “Pages” document library.

In the Pages library locate the test page you just created and pick Send To –> Download a Copy from the drop down menu for that page.

Save the ASPX file to your computer and edit in any text editor.  I like Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer, because it gives me nice color coding and formatting, but Notepad also works just fine.  Keep this ASPX file handy, because will be using it later.

Digression:  ASPX developer’s may be interested in how this page is constructed.  It inherits from a class in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace, but does not actually specify any HTML markup.  Instead the code behind the pages uses the data in an XML data island to render the page.  Notice that the XML parts specify not only content properties such as PublishingPageContent but also the page layout in the PublishingPageLayout property.  

Now you have what you need to create your Notes Migrator for SharePoint migration job.  You can start from scratch or customize an existing job if you prefer, but you might prefer to start with an existing job that I created.  I suggest downloading one of the following jobs, depending on which version of SharePoint you are targeting:

[DocLibrary to Publishing Page 2007.pmjob]

[DocLibrary to Publishing Page 2010.pmjob]

If you are starting with the above jobs, should first change the source Notes database to refer to the your database and you may need to customize the source data definition to extract different Notes data items than the default ones specified (“Subject”, "Body”, etc.). 

You should also change and target SharePoint URL to point to your publishing site.  Both jobs are already configured to create new pages in the “Pages” library, place any embedded objects in the “Images” library, and place any attachments or embedded objects in the “Documents” library.  This is consistent with the way things work normally when a SharePoint user created content in a publishing site, so you probably do not need to change those parts. 

If you open the target data definition in the migration jobs, you will notice that there is a target field of type PageName and that the PageType property of this field is set to “Template”.  This PageType allows you to specify your own custom ASPX code in the PageTemplate field.   

Remember that ASPX code we looked at when we downloaded a sample ASPX page from the server?  That is the code we need to put into the PageTemplate field.  But we don’t want all of it, just the bits that describe the page structure.  We can leave out the content parts and, as you will see shortly, we will specify the content in a different way (mapping the data dynamically from Notes).  Your ASPX page may be different than the one I showed above, but generally you want the ASPX tags at the top (which start with “<%@”) and the <html> tag.  In my example, I am going to grab the first four lines and paste it into the little drop down editor for the PageTemplate.

Notice that the target data definition also specifies several fields that allow data to be mapped as content in the generated pages.  Some of these you may recognize as the properties that were specified in the XML data island (the green part) in the above example.  We included PublishingPageContent for mapping the Notes rich text and PublishingPageLayout for specifying the page layout.  Other page types may require additional properties but you will find that many of them can be omitted as the defaults are acceptable for migrations.  Title and ApprovalCode allow setting of metadata on the page.  ExternalImages and ExternalAttachments allow mapping of additional files to the appropriate SharePoint libraries.

Press OK to save the target data definition.  Next go to the Mapping tab to review how various fields are set from the dynamic Notes data.  Most of these mappings will make sense to an experienced Notes Migrator for SharePoint user, but two deserve special attention.

The PublishingPageLayout is set to a constant value, which is the URL of the appropriate layout page.  It is critical that you replace this value with the the address of a layout page on your SharePoint server.  Recall that when I created a test page in the example above, I selected the page layout “Article page with body only”.  In the resulting ASPX file, this translated to the PublishingPageLayout property in the XML data island (the green bit) set to “http://quest-e52a78ada/sites/publishing/_catalogs/masterpage/PageFromDocLayout.aspx”  This is the URL that you need to use here.  If you do not get this part right, your pages will not open.

The jobs are also designed to set any migrated content to the “Approved” state.  This is accomplished by mapping a constant value to the ApprovalCode field.  Of course you can change this to a different constant value or even make it dynamic depending on the state of your Notes document.

Depending on the page layout you selected, you may need to map other properties as well.  When you are ready, press the Run Job button and start migrating! 

Upcoming releases of Notes Migrator for SharePoint will add a few things to make the above process a bit easier, but there is really no need to wait.  You can generate great looking publishing pages now.

A new article by yours truly has come out on CTO Edge:

http://www.ctoedge.com/content/migrating-lotus-notes-applications-microsoft-sharepoint

Also, a very nice podcast by Joel Oleson on What’s New For Administrators in SharePoint 2010 here:

http://www.themossshow.com/2010/08/episode-25-whats-new-for-administrators-in-sharepoint-2010-with-joel-oleson/

Enjoy!

When people think of complex custom Notes applications they think of workflow.  Workflow is an especially important consideration when migrating Notes applications because migration tools, which can do a great job migrating schema, content, security and forms, have a hard time translating Notes workflows to SharePoint workflows.

Notes workflows are almost always implemented as code attached to various buttons, form events, and agents.  By contrast, the Microsoft platform encourages you to use declarative workflows where you express your workflow as a set of rules that can be entered, modified, and (best of all) understood by a non-programmer.  You can write code if you need to, but this code is usually confined to “activities”, the units of action that you wire together in your declarative workflow.

Declarative workflow capabilities have improved significantly in SharePoint 2010.  First of all, you get a much richer set of out-of-the-box workflows that you can use in your applications.  This list depends on what edition of SharePoint you install and which SharePoint template you are using, but at a minimum it should include an Approval Process, a Collect Feedback review process, a Collect Signatures review process, and a Disposition Approval workflow for managing content lifecycles.  You can now customize the out-of-the-box workflows if needed or design your own from scratch.

If you do need to design your own workflows, you can benefit from the new capabilities in SharePoint Designer.  This was a somewhat limited option in SharePoint 2007, forcing many companies to use Visual Studio instead, but those days are gone.  Now SharePoint Designer workflows can address the need of the majority of the workflows found in Notes applications without have to write code.

Users have a much bigger vocabulary of workflow “conditions” and “actions” to choose from, including Notes-like things such as changing the permissions on a document after it is submitted for approval, sending mail notifications, looking up a person’s manager, and moving content to another location.  A particularly powerful feature is to impersonate other users during a workflow so it can perform certain actions using the workflow author’s credentials.  You can even use InfoPath to design nicer forms for collecting information from end users.

You can now design workflows that operate at the site level or the list level and you can reuse workflows across an entire site collection and even export them to use on a completely different SharePoint farm.  Workflows can be visualized as a set of human readable steps and even exported to Visio for graphical display.

The takeaway here is twofold.  First you can replace most of your Notes workflows without writing code.  Save your expensive developers for the hard stuff.  Second, do not attempt to translate all the code that your Notes developers wrote into code on the Microsoft platform.  Instead, devote your energies toward understanding what your old workflows did and make sure you have a deep understanding of how to accomplish these same things in a declarative workflow world.

Here’s a great step-by-step “walk trough” that Notes migration presales guru Tim Fountain did recently regarding InfoPath migrations.

Download here: [Using an InfoPath form with Quest Notes Migrator for SharePoint.docx]

Any time you run a migration job in the Notes Migrator for SharePoint Designer or Command Line clients you have a chance to export the data to an intermediate XML data file. 

The original intention of this feature was to allow importing the data into SharePoint at a separate time by a separate person.  We have seen customers implement a variety of solutions using this feature:

• Offshore team exports the data and on-site team imports it.
• Unattended process automatically imports all jobs placed in a particular location.
• Import a data set into staging now and import the exact same data into production later.
• Write routines to examine and/or transform the data before loading it into SharePoint

But of course, you can also send this data to some other target, such as SQL Server.  Because the data is all XML, it is fairly simple to write a .NET or Java routine to load in the data and then write it out wherever you want to. 

Officially, this XML format is not documented and our support desk is not going to be able to help you with using it in non-standard ways.  But the format is not too complicated and a number of customers and partners have made good use of it with little or no help.  There are sections at the beginning for the database ACL information and the data record schema.  After that it is just lots of data records.  All rich text is in HTML format, including some “~parts” references for images and attachments that need to get fixed up later depending on how you choose to store images and attachments. 

You can download an example of our extracted XML format here: [Sample.xml].  Note that in this example, I selected the “Save attachments in a separate folder” option in the dialog shown above.  If I had selected “Save attachments in intermediate data file” instead, all binary data would have been base64-encoded in the XML and the file would have been a lot bigger.

NOTE:  We do have a more formal Migrate-direct-to-SQL-Server feature coming up with Notes Migrator for SharePoint 6.0, but I wanted to make it clear that companies are already doing this with the shipping tool.

People love MessageStats.  In the three years since joining Quest, I have met many customers and partners who think of MessageStats as the Quest product, compared to which migration tools are a necessary evil to get a short-term project done.

What many people do not know is that MessageStats, which reports from a wide variety of email systems, includes a great new Lotus Notes Report Pack [link].  To steal a few lines from their data sheet:

The MessageStats Report Pack for Lotus Notes extends MessageStats by gathering Domino server configuration details and Notes mailbox content information from a Lotus Notes environment. This report pack can be used as an assessment tool when planning a Notes migration to Exchange or Exchange Online (BPOS), and as an analysis tool for a mixed Exchange and Lotus Notes environment. MessageStats provides detailed reporting on mailbox sizes, security, and delegates, as well as reports about mailbox content.

NOTE:  Don’t confuse this with the Message Stats add-on that used to come with Notes Migrator for Exchange.  That tool simply reported off of the data collected by the migration tool.  This is a completely new tool, written completely from scratch, that reads information directly from your Notes/Domino environment.  It is so new in fact that it is not mentioned on many of the Message Stats overview page yet, but you can find the complete data sheet in the Message Stats library [link].

Meanwhile, these screen shots give you the idea of the types of things the product can help you with:

Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.3 contains the ability to do “best fit” design matching to help identify which applications are based on similar designs, regardless of whether or not they are currently inheriting from the same application template.  This supports the “design consolidation” process which is crucial to reducing the cost/risk of large migration process.  To start using this feature, you need to associate specific Notes templates to specific Technical Classes. 

We already had the ability to assign a “Reference database” to a Technical Class, which was useful for detecting the deltas of each member of a Technical Class (the first checkbox).  This feature assumed that we had already assigned Technical Classes to the databases – either automatically (by Rule) or manually.  The most common kind of Class Rule used the database’s assigned Template name to assign classes.

In contrast to this, the new feature helps you use design comparisons to help figure out what Technical Class a given database might be, even if it does not have a Template assigned.  By enabling “Include in Best Fit testing for all databases” (the second checkbox) you can now compare every database you scan with this Reference database.

You can set up as many Technical Classes as you want this way.  Think of this as setting up a many-to-many comparison.  Each database you encounter will be compared with the Reference databases of multiple Technical Classes.  The actual comparison occurs when you do the Design Analysis.  Simply check the Compare with class templates for best fit option when you do the analysis.

The design of each database is then compared with the designs of the templates you want to compare to (see below).  This is similar to the existing feature for comparing the designs of applications and their assigned templates, but this is many-to-many instead of one-to-one. 

Note that this is also be available in the new “Recompute” function.  If you have already done the design scan for the database and the templates, you can adjust the list of Technical Classes to test for and re-run the Best Fit comparison without accessing the databases again.

The “best fit” for each database is displayed in two new view columns as well as on the Design Analysis tab.  A details dialog shows all the partial matches over a certain threshold.

In the above example, notice that the even though the database appeared to be a normal document library, it was only a 90% match to the standard Document Library template.  But it was a 100% match with the custom “Acme Enhanced Document Library”!  If you decide that you want to make that the official Technical Class for this library, just select it and press the “Set as Technical Class for Database” button.

BONUS!  To make this all easier to set up, we added a simple Create Technical Class action.  You can use this to select a Notes database or template and quickly create a Technical Class that uses it as the Reference Database and is otherwise preconfigured for Best Fit testing.  If it is a template, we also set up a class rule for recognizing it that way.