I recently had a discussion with Brad Orluk, the Technical Evangelist at Nintex. He has a background in information architecture, infrastructure operations, and IT sales. He agreed to share his insight on migrating Lotus Notes to SharePoint. Here’s our conversation.
Daniel: Why are companies starting to migrate Lotus Notes to SharePoint?
Brad: Companies are starting to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint to get away from the legacy costs of the Lotus Domino environment. Servers, licensing, maintenance costs, et cetera, associated with that infrastructure. That’s the primary reason.
Beyond that, the motivation is functionality. They would like to have better functionality than Lotus Notes. Obviously, moving to a platform that is more relevant and functional is really important.
Daniel: What should be your first step in this migration process?
Brad: The very first step is making the decision to stop developing in Notes. Draw a line in the sand and say no new apps will be built inside of Notes. Everything going forward will be built inside of SharePoint.
If it’s a smaller organization, usually, it will just happen naturally through attrition. People will just move over to the new platformbecause it’s easier to use. In a larger organization, it needs to be a corporate edict to change that kind of direction.
People get comfortable with the way they’re doing things and the way their processes have been built out and modeled. Having an “executive order” from the CIO makes change a little bit more manageable from whoever owns the platform and the migrations.
Daniel: What is the most important step in this migration process?
Brad: The most important step is sizing up what you have in Notes today. Really, building out the statement of work to ascertain what is in front of you and what type of project this will be.
Ask key questions like:
- Is this going to be a funded project?
- Are these efforts going to be a discreet project to upgrade the existing Notes databases into solutions that we’re going to be architecting inside of SharePoint?
- Is it going to be a baseline activity?
- Is it just going to be something that’s going to be incorporated into someone’s job duties?
Deciding how you’re going to approach migration efforts is critical. Then going through to determine what needs to be migrated and prioritizing what needs to be migrated first. You might find something that absolutely nobody uses anymore, so you don’t need to bring that over.
Daniel: How can you make your migration go faster?
Brad: Use 3rd party tools; there are ways to “forklift” your efforts rather than dumping to flat files and architecting or rebuilding from the ground up.
One example is Dell’s Lotus Notes migration tool. Beyond just migrating the content, the solution that Dell has built has the ability to transform the user interface. This reduces the effort involved with bringing that content over from Notes and replicating it inside of SharePoint.
One drawback is with the backend logic, this doesn’t address that. If there is a process involved, if there is custom code involved, there’s no way to migrate that. That would have to be replicated or rebuilt inside of SharePoint.
When you start talking about the hundreds or even thousands of databases that might need to migrate, it will save you a considerable amount of time. With this tool, you still have to finesse it a little bit, but you can cut down your efforts to bring databases over and it makes it much more appealing to perform the migration. And, when you save time for your developers, that translates to saving money in your budget.
Daniel: What is your number one tip?
Brad: Due diligence—what I mean by that is really just take a moment and assess the situation.
- Assess the capabilities that you can achieve with out-of-the-box and off-the-shelf offerings.
- Also, assess what it would cost for custom development of what you want to replicate inside the new environment.
- And finally, assess your last option: doing nothing. What’s it going to cost to do nothing in legacy maintenance, user dissatisfaction?
Determine what course of action you should take, and then execute that option.
Daniel: What are the parameters of a successful migration?
Brad: Like any good politician, I have to say that success varies from organization to organization. What doesn’t vary is that parameters for success should be established before the migration begins.
If the effort is just to move content from point A to point B? If that is the single goal of the project, then once you move the data from Notes to SharePoint, you’re done and you’ve won.
But, if you’re moving the content and re-architecting the whole process, success will be determined by different standards. Success may be just that the new process functions appropriately, or that customer satisfaction is improved or retained.
If you aren’t clear on your goals, it’s worth reaching out to a partner, like Portal Solutions, to help frame the situation before you begin.
Daniel: Thanks Brad for the plug, and also thank you for your time today.
