We began a mail migration project from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook in May 2012. It was a bit of a mission as the company have had Lotus Notes for around 15 years, and Lotus Notes & Domino does have a habit of entangling itself into businesses due to the worklow and collaboration capabilities.
The planning phase took a few months and I ended up creating a bespoke discovery application that would facilitate a smooth transition from Domino to Exchange. I will blog more about this application in coming posts as I think the tasks it accomplished will be common to other Lotus Domino migration projects.
We have domino servers in Europe and APAC with multiple mail servers in all regions. Once we understood the number and size of mailboxes, it soon became clear that the migration process would be impossible with the migration tools that were installed on servers in the Exchange datacenter in the US. The WAN link between the migration tools and the domino servers in some cases just would not facilitate the load. To get us over this, we did two things:
- Implemented a strict 30 day archiving policy in order to reduce the file size of some of the mailboxes.
- Created replicas of the mailboxes to be migrated on a new domino server that we built alongside the exchange servers and migration suite.
The 30 day archiving was done using the built in policy based server archiving in Lotus Domino. It was pretty straight forward although I found a few ‘gotchas’ along the way, may well blog about these later too.
The creation of replicas wasn’t as easy as it sounded due to the sheer volume of data and the disk space available, although the saviour here was LZ1 Compression, DAOS and De-Duplication.
Until the next time…