The client’s IT department has always feared the Notes data migration, but in the end, this was the smoothest part of the Lotus Notes transition to SharePoint.
Partner
AD7 Consulting is a leading IT consultancy specializing in professional services and the delivery of core infrastructure, network solutions and cloud technologies. Their email and messaging practice have proven experience in managing and delivering even the most complex migration, integration and co-existence projects, and offer expert knowledge in Lotus Notes, Exchange and Office 365.
Challenge
AD7 Consulting was asked to help one of their clients (a leading software company) migrate various IBM Notes databases to Microsoft SharePoint. Over the years, the client had invested heavily within IBM Notes and Domino, and they relied on several complex, custom-developed Notes databases to manage various workflow processes.
“The ability to batch process and schedule document migrations, and the ability to export Notes fields to XML files proved very beneficial and helped automate the entire migration process.”
— Adam Tarver, Technical Director
Following the company’s decision to migrate to Office 365, SharePoint was adopted as the preferred document repository solution. The primary challenge was to find a way to convert all the Notes data into a format that retained the original form layouts and metadata so it could be uploaded into SharePoint.
Preserving the form layouts was crucial since exporting only the metadata without a wider data context wouldn’t be of much use to the business due to the way in which the applications and forms were built and integrated into workflows.
Transition
Early in the migration process, AD7 found that exporting the Notes data to a PDF format appeared to be the best, most logical way to preserve the form layouts. AD7 evaluated several PDF export tools and found that none offered the range of features and ease of configuration provided by SWING PDF Converter for Notes.
Adam Tarver, Technical Director at AD7, said, “The ability to batch process and schedule document migrations, and the ability to export Notes fields to XML files proved very beneficial and helped automate the entire migration process. Without PDF Converter for Notes, this work would have been labour intensive, and it would have required considerable monitoring and manual intervention. Instead, the conversion process was automated and reliable, and the data throughput was higher than expected.”
The client’s Operations Director agreed: “We always feared the Notes migration, but in the end, this was the smoothest part of our transition.”
Results
“In all, over 100,000 documents (20GB of data) were migrated over a series of weekends. All the files have now been migrated to SharePoint along with the extensive metadata, so for the first time ever, the client can actually search and find relevant information, which is great,” said Tarver.
With more than 15 years of experience in data migration and compliance archiving, we will gladly share with you some of the best practices.
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