Notes SharePoint Blog

Steve Walch's blog about his favorite migration tool and other things related to Lotus Notes migration projects

Tag Archives: migrate

What data lives in “social software” systems?

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 28, 2013

When writing a world-class social data migration tool, we think a lot about what kind of data lives in these systems.  In particular, what data can reasonably be normalized and migrated between different systems. 

Here is our working list:

  • User Profiles
  • Blogs, Micro-blogs, Ideation Blogs, Wikis
  • Documents, Files, Folders, Libraries
  • Activities, Task Lists, Calendars
  • Discussion Forums
  • Bookmarks, Tags, Recommendations, “Likes”
  • Content ratings, # Visits, Badges earned
  • Social network (friends and coworkers)
  • Newsfeeds, Activity streams
  • Communities

That’s not to say that mapping data between disparate systems is easy!  Each of these content types have a lot of detail behind them, including different properties, categorization metadata, authoring metadata, cross-referencing systems, and rules for how rich text and attachments are structured.  Sometimes there is a huge mismatch between the fundamental models.  (For example, the file library model is quite different between SharePoint and IBM/Lotus connections.)  But that’s what makes migration tools fun!

IBM Connections, SharePoint 2010, Social, Social Migrator for SharePoint , , ,

New tool for migrating IBM/Lotus Connections to SharePoint

2 Comments Posted by on January 23, 2013

So why has this blog been so silent these past few months?  Well in addition to general busyness, some extended vacation time, and, oh yeah, being acquired by Dell, much of my energy and attention has been going into a top secret new product.  And now, at last, I can talk about it…

Introducing Social Migrator for SharePoint!

Social Migrator for SharePoint migrates “social” content from IBM Connections (formerly known as Lotus Connections) to Microsoft SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, and Office 365.  This includes content such as Profiles, Blogs, Wikis, Activities, Forums, File Folders, Bookmarks and Communities.  All content will be mapped to the logical SharePoint targets with an emphasis on automation and extreme ease of use.

For a preview of what we are doing in this space, please check out our recorded webcast here. 

We have been piloting this new tool with a global insurance company migrating 40,000 Connections users.  We plan to ship this quarter, but if you can’t wait, please do contact us to learn more and get a pilot project going in your environment.

Subsequent versions will target other “social” data source and target platforms.  So if you have built up significant business assets in Jive, Yammer, etc., please pass your requirements along to me.

IBM Connections, Social, Social Migrator for SharePoint , , , , , , ,

Why is this space so hot right now?

Leave a Comment Posted by on December 23, 2010

Someone inside Quest recently asked me why the Notes application market is so white hot right now.  Thought I would share my answers here…

1. This is prime time for Notes migrations.  SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online have opened the floodgates of a migration wave that was already peeking.  Office 365 in particular delivers many of the improvements that Notes customers were eagerly waiting for.  Hundreds of the world’s largest organizations are committed to migration off of Notes over the next few years.  Similarly, many of the world’s largest system integrators have geared up to help them.

2. SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online create many new opportunities – and new challenges – for migrating complex Notes applications.  New capabilities such as document sets, managed metadata, search and scalability improvements, wiki pages, office integration are all seen as game changers for Notes shops looking to migrate.  InfoPath list forms, new built-in workflow and data validation features, and the ability to integrate external SQL Server databases as “external lists” dramatically reduce the cost of rebuilding complex applications.  Quest was the first Notes application migration tool to support SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online and (with Notes Migrator for SharePoint version 6.0) is rapidly innovating further ways to allow Notes migration customers to leverage these new platform capabilities. 

3. This is not a job for lightweight migration tools.  Because Notes was the platform of choice for building secure, collaborative applications for a so many years, organizations may have tens of thousands of old Notes applications.  Some are still business critical and many others contain valuable and often highly sensitive data that needs to be preserved with full fidelity.  Migrating all these applications correctly can be a very expensive undertaking for an IT department or an outside consultant.  Quest continues to invest heavily in this problem space because we realize that every incremental improvement we make can literally mean millions of dollars in ROI for our customer base.  It is paying off as the deeper people go into complex migrations, the better we look.

Notes Migration Projects, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Online , , , , ,

Recap of Domino.Doc migration features

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 22, 2010

We have had pretty darn good Domino.Doc migration features since the beginning, but until recently I have not blogged about it very much.  Now that we about to release support for migrating to SharePoint Document Sets in Notes Migrator for SharePoint 6.0, I thought it was time for a quick Domino.Doc feature roundup:

  • Notes Migrator for SharePoint gives you default data definitions for migrating the defaults
    • If you really use Domino.Doc to store attachments with some metadata, than SharePoint “document libraries” are a great choice
    • If you store rich text or multiple attachments in one “document” you might prefer to send it to a SharePoint list instead
  • In the cases where users have build custom “Document Types” we give you full power to migrate the custom fields, etc.
  • We allow you to map Document Types to SharePoint Content Types (but you have to design the target Content Types yourself in advance in the current version)
  • We allow you to map Binders to SharePoint Folders
  • We map access control rules at the Cabinet level and Document level
  • You can migrate complete version histories [link]
  • You can migrate unpublished documents
  • Our analysis tools discover the hierarchy of Libraries -> Cabinets -> Binders -> Documents (similar to what we do with QuickPlace)
    • Using the automation features, you can automatically provision sites/subsites for every Domino.Doc library/cabinet
    • You can also automatically generate a new SharePoint list/library on the same site for each Domino.Doc library/cabinet
  • Our analysis tools help you zero in on which Cabinets have been customized and what customization have occurred (new Doc Types, changed subforms)
  • Using Notes Migrator for SharePoint 6.0, you will be able to migrate to SharePoint 2010 Document Sets.  Either…
    • Map each Domino.Doc Binder to a Document Set and out all the documents inside it
    • Map each Domino.Doc Document to a Document Set and out all the attachments inside it

Putting all this together, we do a good job at automating the discovery, target assignment, site/library provisioning, and content migration.

Document Sets, Domino.Doc, Notes Migration Projects, SharePoint 2010, Version 6.0 , , , ,

Migrating Domino.Doc version histories (and unpublished documents) to SharePoint

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 22, 2010

Here is a screen shot of the new Domino.Doc selection options in Notes Migrator for SharePoint with the “versioning” parts highlighted in red:

image

For backward compatibility, the defaults are “Latest Major Versions” and “Published Documents” only, which migrate just one copy of each document.  However, you now have the ability to request prior versions and unpublished versions of each document as well.  This, of course, can result in multiple copies of each document.

image  image

In Notes Migrator for SharePoint terminology, these extra versions of the same document are treated as duplicates of the same document and thus our duplicate document handling options are triggered.  Our “If duplicate found” options were actually first implemented to handle incremental migrations (migrate the same database over and over and pick up any changes since the last time) but they turn out to be pretty darn useful for migrating version histories.

image

If you wanted to make each version appear as a different document in SharePoint, select “Write New Item”.  A more interesting choice, however, is to select “Create New Version”.  This will cause each version of your Domino.Doc document to become a new version of the same document in SharePoint. 

image

Note that you need to make sure that Versioning is enabled in your target SharePoint list or library:

image

One caveat here…   Notice that I did not migrate unpublished versions (for example, version 2.1 in the above document).  Unfortunately the current version of SharePoint does not allow us to explicitly set version numbers as we migrate.  So if I attempted to migrate versions 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0 it would have ended up as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0.  Similarly, if my Domino.Doc library had pruned old versions and we now had only 3.0 and 4.0, that would have become 1.0 and 2.0 in SharePoint.  We are trying to convince the SharePoint product team to address this limitation for SharePoint 14, but for now keep in mind that this feature works best if you select all published versions in your query.  A workaround when you can’t do that is to explicitly migrate the “{VersionNumber}” field to an additional SharePoint meta-data field so you will always have that as a reference.

Domino.Doc, Notes Migrator for SharePoint, Tech Notes , , , , ,

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