Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365 Migration

Businesses migrate their Lotus Notes based Mail, Applications and Workflows to Exchange, SharePoint / Office 365 to transform an organization to become more agile, productive and cost-effective. Organizations are focused on making the most of their technology investment. Consolidating to a single vendor solution platform for email, collaboration, employee engagement within the organization has become a priority for most organizations that used Lotus Notes.  Increasingly organizations have started seeing Lotus Notes as an unnecessary expense that does not fit into their larger business strategy. Cost reduction through a single platform and readily available support for the platform from Microsoft are the drivers for organizations to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. This helps them avail improved functionality, attracting and retaining talented employees and becoming more nimble and connected.

At a high-level an organization gets the following business benefits through migration from Lotus Notes to SharePoint or Office 365:

• Cost Reduction through reducing user training and improving user productivity
• Capability enhancement through SharePoint FAST search, Tight integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Office apps and SharePoint Workflow templates that provide faster workflows than Lotus Notes.
• Consistent and Easier Workflows – Enhanced Workflow Platform as Microsoft has a Workflow foundation that works the same way across a range of products.
• Long term business strategy – facilitating business goals such as innovation, agility, mobility, attracting and retaining talent, mergers and acquisitions. Microsoft products clearly score over Lotus Notes in fast tracking these business goals.

iLink has helped organizations migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365. iLink has successfully used migration tools like the Dell OnDemand Migration tool, Quest, AvePoint, MetaLogix Migration Manager and Microsoft’s Online Notes Inspector (MONTI).

iLink’s Migration methodology typically comprises of the following:

• Pre-migration analysis
• Migration strategy focusing on key facets such as
  • Gaining access to SharePoint features such as managed metadata and document sets
  • Using native web services, connect to SharePoint / Office 365 sites
  • Preserving the look and feel of Notes applications and cover Notes forms to Microsoft InfoPath list forms
  • Moving Notes data to SQL Server tables
  • Discovering Notes databases, analyzing how they are used and determine which applications are unused, as well as those applications that will need development
  • Using a customizable rules-based engine, specify target locations and migration jobs, hundreds of which can be migrated
  • Inhabit lists, libraries, sites and subsites based on existing Notes infrastructure
  • Maintain data fidelity when migrating rich text and complex application data, as well as preservation of data including keyword fields
  • Choice of document destinations beyond lists and libraries, including wiki pages, basic pages, and content publishing pages
  • For applications requiring custom form layouts, migrate Notes documents to InfoPath XML documents

iLink has migrated Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using Quest for a Global Chemical Distributor and a Healthcare Insurance Provider. iLink has migrated complex Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using MetaLogix Migration Manager for a global online retail platform.

iLink has created some standard pre-migration analysis and migration templates apart from a comparison matrix of using various migration tools. Through these templates and a standardized migration methodology iLink provides a faster turnaround as well as qualitative migration and support to various customers who migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365.