Migrating Notes/Domino Deployments to Office 365

Lotus Notes rapidly became the leading enterprise content/collaboration platform when it was introduced more than 25 years ago, but the Notes/Domino platform has since been relegated to a legacy role along with related IBM products including QuickPlace, Quickr, and Domino Document Manager. Although IBM has shifted its enterprise content/collaboration focus to more modern replacements including IBM Verse and IBM Connections Cloud, most enterprises seeking to modernize their legacy Notes/Domino deployments are instead focused on migrating to Microsoft Office 365 in order to leverage Office application synergy and new Office 365 content/collaboration capabilities such as Delve, Groups, and OneDrive for Business.

This post provides an overview of the transition from Notes/Domino to Office 365 and highlights some of the new opportunities and migration considerations.

Notes/Domino Deployment Patterns

Development on Lotus Notes started in 1984, during a period when operating systems and networking were primitive in comparison to current norms. A great deal of engineering went into providing consistent infrastructure services across a variety of operating systems, along with a replication model that made it possible to efficiently support occasionally-connected networking scenarios. The diagram below, from 1995, highlights the broad scope of the Notes/Domino platform (the client/server Lotus Notes brand was split into Notes/Domino during the mid-1990s).

Source: Groupware: Communication, Collaboration, and Coordination, Lotus Development Corp., 1995

Notes/Domino has been used to address a wide range of content/collaboration scenarios. In terms of common enterprise patterns, at a high level of abstraction, most legacy Notes/Domino deployments typically include a mix of:

• Document libraries supporting basic file-centric workflow along with a range of content management services

• Item lists used for a wide variety of document- and data-centric collaborative application needs

• Discussion databases used for team communication

• Team workspaces combining a variety of tools in order to support the content/collaboration needs of an organizational unit or a specific project

• Collaborative applications ranging from relatively simple instances of Notes/Domino templates to elaborate and highly customized enterprise applications

Here’s an example of a typical Notes/Domino team workspace:

This application example, based on the Notes/Domino TeamRoom template, combines tasks (categorized as action items), discussion, and reference documents, all in a single team workspace. Many enterprises have Notes/Domino deployments with thousands of such applications, as Notes/Domino makes it very straightforward for users to create new applications based on a collection of built-in templates.

Notes/Domino has also been used to create more elaborate collaborative applications, including workflow scenarios with heavily customized forms and views, along with extensive programming (using the built-in LotusScript programming features and/or a variety of APIs for other programming options). In many application scenarios, Notes/Domino has often been used even though it wasn’t a great form-follows-function fit, e.g., for data-centric rather than document-centric application scenarios, because it was the path of least resistance for application developers, and because the Notes client was already installed on many enterprise desktops (simplifying application distribution, before the shift to Web-centric apps).

Content and Collaboration in Office 365

Office 365 represents a new generation of content/collaboration platforms, influenced by popular consumer Internet tools/services, optimized for cloud deployment, and supporting a variety of client device and platform types.

Before Office 365 was introduced, many enterprises found it challenging to create a compelling business case for migrating Notes/Domino deployments to the traditional SharePoint platform, in part because traditional (and usually on-premises) SharePoint had less powerful and/or seamlessly integrated capabilities for some familiar Notes/Domino features (such as contextual discussions and relatively easy to create project workspaces). The content/collaboration capabilities in Office 365, however, go far beyond those provided in traditional SharePoint. Office 365 also offers a more modern and Web-centric user experience and supports the leading device platforms (including iOS and Android tablets and smartphones), making it possible to address modern workflow patterns.

The following table summarizes how legacy Notes/Domino features map to Office 365 tools.

Much of what has been managed in Notes/Domino document libraries and discussions can be more simply and effectively addressed using a combination of OneDrive Folders, Office 365 Groups, and Delve, without the need to create and manage distinct applications for each content/collaboration business domain. Revisiting the TeamRoom template-based application example, documents can be migrated to OneDrive, discussions migrated to a Group conversation, and tasks migrated to a shared calendar associated with the Group. Delve makes it much easier for users to discover and share content, offering a tool-transcendent search capability for which there is no counterpart in the Notes/Domino platform.

It’s also possible, when appropriate, to migrate Notes/Domino applications to Office 365 Sites, which offer most of the capabilities of traditional SharePoint sites. As an example, the Notes/Domino application previously described could be migrated to an Office 365 site such as the following graphic, with the action items, discussion, and documents disaggregated and recomposed in separate Site sections.

Optimizing Notes/Domino Migrations to Office 365

Migrating Notes/Domino deployments to Office 365 can seem like a daunting task, especially for enterprises with thousands (often tens of thousands) of applications deployed on more than one legacy platform (e.g., for enterprises that have deployments of Notes/Domino along with traditional SharePoint and one or more cloud content sharing services such as Box and Google Drive/Sites). In order to fully leverage the new Office 365 opportunities, enterprises need to be able to:

• Comprehensively, efficiently, and securely inventory and assess deployed content and collaborative applications:

  • For peak efficiency, the pre-migration assessment tool must support multiple source platform types including Lotus Notes/Domino, QuickPlace, Quickr, Domino Document Manager as well as traditional SharePoint, Exchange public folders, Google Drive/Sites, Box, and legacy enterprise content management systems. It should leverage automated tools to produce comprehensive inventories of deployed apps along with app-level complexity and traffic ratings along with target technology recommendations. It should also identify and consolidate apps based on common app templates, as doing so can significantly reduce the overall migration project scope.

• Build stakeholder consensus:

  • Different collaborative applications are often maintained by people who rarely if ever work together, so it’s critically important to get all stakeholders on the same page and to factor in qualitative assessment input before finalizing migration plan priorities. The ideal approach is to use a collaborative solution (a migration project-focused workspace), automatically populated by the results of a pre-migration assessment exercise, to efficiently foster stakeholder collaboration.

• Rapidly build migration momentum with a fixed-fee migration service:

  • Enterprise migration projects can be multi-phase endeavors, but building Office 365 momentum requires quickly establishing a foundation of content and collaborative applications in Office 365, in order to make the power of tools such as Delve immediately evident to new Office 365 users. To expedite this initial project step, the ideal migration solution should include a services-based option – a turn-key solution – with a fixed-fee guarantee to efficiently and cost-effectively migrate the highest-priority content and applications. The automated solution on which the service is based must also support multiple source system types and multiple target tools in Office 365, so that a separate tool isn’t required for each source/target pair, and must robustly scale to address enterprise-level volume and performance requirements. This service option makes it possible for enterprises to have predictable cost and schedule expectations without having to identify or train employees with the requisite skills for all source and target technologies.

• Disaggregate and recompose legacy collaborative apps:

  • Many of the tools and services bundled into legacy platforms are now redundant thanks to Office 365 and Azure infrastructure services, and Office 365 offers a compelling set of new tools for collaborative application developers. An application disaggregation and recomposition solution should combine highly automated assessment tools with domain expert consultants in order to provide a turn-key solution for complex collaborative application migration and optimization.

• Seamlessly support integration requirements:

  • Most enterprises with large legacy deployments use multi-phase migration projects, driven by stakeholder priorities and business needs. A migration solution supporting seamless integration between legacy and new collaborative applications minimizes disruption during the transition period.

  • It’s also advantageous to use a migration solution that makes it possible to more flexibly integrate collaborative applications with other enterprise resources, including SaaS applications and database management systems and services. Application recomposition, for example, can result in having a collaborative application disaggregated and recomposed with large tables migrated to database services rather than a collaborative application, and with integration services used to automate synchronization between the enterprise resources and collaborative applications. This approach makes it possible to fully optimize the use of enterprise content resources while also maximizing simplicity for collaborative application developers.

• Continuously monitor migrated content and applications:

  • In order to ensure migrated applications avoid the types of usage patterns that created constraints in legacy content/collaboration deployments, the same solution used for migration should also support periodic assessments of the new Office 365 deployment, in order to identity and address any potential inefficiencies that may be introduced as applications and work patterns evolve.

CASAHL’s DART product suite, developed over the course of more than twenty years of successful enterprise migration experience, addresses all of the above requirements. While planning a migration from Notes/Domino to Office 365 may initially appear daunting, and while some enterprises encountered challenges in previous attempts to build a return-on-investment case for migrating Notes/Domino deployments to the traditional SharePoint platform, CASAHL DART makes it easy and cost-effective to fully leverage enterprise resources from a Notes/Domino deployment by migrating them to the modern content/collaboration capabilities in Office 365.