Migration of Lotus Notes to Office 365

8 FEB 2018

The Client

A reputed public transport company in Silicon Valley USA having about 16,000 employees’ around multiple time zones was using IBM Lotus Notes for its email communication.

The Need

As per the new Government policies, the customer was supposed to upgrade their email infrastructure to Office 365 to be compliant with the policies so the client was on the look for a Microsoft Partner who can help them implement IBM Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration. The requirements were as follows:

• The customer needs all mailboxes from the Domino environment to be moved to Office 365.
• All Shared mailboxes (Generic accounts) user permission differentials on the mailboxes must be migrated.
• Since we have proposed a staged migration approach, Migrated Users must be able to communicate to non-migrated Domino users seamlessly and vice versa.
• All calendaring, invites, free/busy, delegated bookings, rooms, resources, and calendar reviewing must co-exist between both environments.
• User experience must be documented and educated throughout the process of migration.
• Post-migration of the users, resources and shared mailboxes – multiple systems like HRMS, Salesforce, Internal Ticketing system, and RFC servers must be integrated to use Office 365 instead of legacy Domino environment.

The Solution

Migration from Lotus Notes to Office365 was not simple, however, Star Knowledge executed the Office 365 migration for this customer by using the Quest Migration manager to address the business-critical needs of the customer.  With the planned Quest Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration, we were able to provide:

• Seamless user experience through the transition of the email migration.
• Cross-domain and cross-platform Free/Busy lookups.
• Delegated calendaring and email management.
• Synchronization of calendar between Exchange Online and Domino Servers.
• Pre-synchronization of mailboxes way ahead of the cutover date.
• Synchronized Rooms and resource mailboxes for bookings.
• Complete end to end planning of users with batches was planned and developed mail merge macros for sending user notification regarding the email migration.
• Setup a support desk for the users to contact when there are issues with respect to migrations.
• Executed the complete migration as per the plan and all deliverables were met.
• 3rd part applications such as HRMS, GARP, and other employee management and wellness application were properly integrated to use office 365 instead of domino servers.

Results & benefits obtained

• Achieve the benefits of lower operational and maintenance costs by moving to Office 365.
• Office 365 offers simple, flexible, remote email access, improved collaboration via centrally stored data
• For those businesses using Microsoft Server, the integration of the Active Directory with MS Exchange mail and SharePoint allows for a single source for user account management
• The applications/services provided by Office 365 are updated and maintained in the cloud, so a user need not update the software on their own.
• Office 365 is easier to use in comparison to Lotus Notes as the former has a simplified and user-friendly GUI.
• Lotus Notes saves the data on the local drive and O365 saves it on the cloud.
• When the mailbox is huge, Lotus Notes clients may require additional RAM for the client machines to load the mailbox, but with Exchange online and Outlook – it only caches the required data to the user’s machine and everything else remains in the server.

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With over 10 years of experience in Office 365 consulting services, our team of consultants tailor migrations according to your business need. Contact us to discuss your project.