6 Approaches For A Successful Lotus Notes to SharePoint Migration

At the present time, there are lots of organizations that have already migrated from Lotus Notes to the new SharePoint environment and even more companies are trying to migrate to SharePoint. Because lots of them want a web-based collaboration platform and the recommended platform is SharePoint.
Let’s take a brief knowledge of Lotus Notes and SharePoint before jumping to the topic.

What is Lotus Notes?

In layman’s terms, Lotus Notes is an email client as a desktop application for sending and receiving emails, maintaining to-do lists, scheduling meetings, address books, databases, web servers, programming, and more. Works collaboratively as a client-server application sold by HCL.

While thinking deeply about the Lotus Notes features it can possibly perform the functionality of many separate products.  Lotus Notes in the combination with Domino Server can work as SQL Server, Outlook, Exchange Server, SharePoint, Web Server, Web Server and MS Access and HCL Notes alone work as an Exchange Server. With all these functionalities, it’s really hard to imagine what actually Notes can do. Some example is e-mail (clearly), forums discussion, document repositories, expense approval systems, web-based request systems and etc. But is not really user-friendly, which means the environment is complex to work on even for the users working in an organization.

Check the Different Between Lotus Notes and MS Outlook – Outlook vs Lotus Notes

What is SharePoint? 

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform, integrated with Microsoft. It consists of many multipurpose technologies and handy document management capabilities.

“SharePoint has 160 million users across 75,000 customer organizations”– said by Microsoft.

The usage of SharePoint mostly depends on the different organizations. Mean how an organization can use SharePoint and for what purpose. The most common usage includes:

• Featured for organizing and storing the organization documents.
• Allows retrieval, searching, tracking, managing electronic documents etc.
• Works as an intranet portal in a way to centralize access to enterprise information.
• Contains team collaboration groupware based on the concept of “Team Site”.
• Provides File hosting services that allow synchronization of individual Documents or Publicly shared documents.

Reasons Behind Lotus Notes to SharePoint Migration

There are lots of features available in SharePoint over Lotus Notes that people are choosing to shift or move from Notes to SharePoint. Although people are addicted towards the collaborative platform on the web. That truly has increased the expectation of people to see details on their Mobile, tablet or anywhere in the world, they go.

Here are some drawbacks of Lotus Notes when compared with SharePoint.

1. There are no new up-to-date updates coming from the Lotus Notes team. Lotus Notes is fully Idle now.
2. The licensed version of Lotus Notes is more costly. You need client software to use Lotus Notes. In SharePoint, you do not need a client license or software to work on it. You can use it through any web browser.
3. Lotus Notes cannot do Collaboration or Enterprise Search etc.
4. There is no Lifecycle management in the case of Lotus Notes. That means there can be many unused databases in the lotus notes server, but in SharePoint, it cannot, because you can get information about new sites through email and can take proper action.

By the above discussion, it must be clear that migrating Lotus Note to SharePoint is quite a challenging process to do. Because here we have to migrate Lotus Notes documents to SharePoint with proper synchronization of the application.

Let’s now discuss the approaches for having Lotus Notes to SharePoint migration.

6 Approaches to Migrate Lotus Notes Document to SharePoint

For a successful Lotus Notes to SharePoint migration, we have to pass by 3 type of migration – Directory integration, Domino Server Migration, and Lotus Notes application migration. Although moving from HCL Notes to SharePoint is not easy to process, to achieve the objective of migrating Notes document to SharePoint we have to follow the defined process. And for this, we have to fulfil these 6 approaches to migrate Lotus Note to SharePoint.

1. Environment Assessment

Before starting the process of migrating Notes Document/application to SharePoint, we have to assess the Lotus Notes Environment. This means we have to check whether any application is integrated with the external system.

2. Eliminate Fidelity Gaps

After assessing the environment, we then customize whether any such feature is not available in SharePoint. In other words, we’ll identify the features of Lotus Notes which is out of the box in SharePoint. A Feature in Lotus Notes is not supported in SharePoint(Fidelity Gaps) can cause a problem with migrating Notes to SharePoint.

3. Run a Pilot Project

Start with migrating small(pilot) and Easy projects that will scale up to migrate big and complex projects.

4. Test and deploy the project

After the successful completion of the small run, we’ll start migrating the pre-production environment. Taking care of the Quality Appearance of the project and performing User Acceptance tests while migrating HCL Notes d in the agile approach.

5. Clean up the Data

Then we will achieve the perfect SharePoint migration by cleaning up the data to decrease redundant, trivial, or data obsolete.

6. Communication Plan

 Getting the key to cooperation, you will experience a very new SharePoint environment different from Lotus Notes. Take the help User Manual, Training Sessions etc, to know how to use the new SharePoint Application.

Conclusion

Lotus Notes to SharePoint Migration is not just transitioning the content or applications to a new dynamic platform. But it is an opportunity to transform an organization into a more agile, cost-effective, and productive environment. If you are still an HCL Lotus user, you must be clear by reading this article why and how migration to Microsoft SharePoint can benefit you. 

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