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A few months ago I shared my excitement about the new Discussion web part from Quest [ link ]. To recap, customers switching from the Notes discussions (in the Discussion template, QuickPlaces, Team Rooms, or custom applications) to the SharePoint’s standard Discussion Board template have a few nasty problems: The user interface is quite different: No twistees, No threaded tree-view, like you had in Notes. Instead you view the parent documents in a flat view and then you open a page that shows the entire thread. Only the top-level documents have subject lines. If your Notes users entered unique subjects on the response documents (I know I always did – in many cases I typed my entire thought in the subject line and left the body blank), then you have data loss! Quest’s qDiscussion web part solves...

I remember the SharePoint Conference three years ago where SharePoint 2007 was announced. I was in the Proposion Software booth (we had not been acquired by Quest yet) and had a chance to talk to a lot of Notes customers who were adopting (or at least looking at) SharePoint. There was a great deal of excitement there as most people were seeing SharePoint 2007 for the first time and they were very happy with what they saw. At the time, the two biggest reasons that people felt they could not move their Notes applications to SharePoint were (1) the lack of document level security and (2) the inability to implement even simple workflow logic. That week, the consensus was that Microsoft nailed both of these in a big way with SharePoint 2007. Sure enough, the next few years saw a new wave of Notes...

Notes Migrator for SharePoint is great at provisioning lists, libraries or even entire SharePoint sites from your custom templates. This is incredibly useful when migrating lots of custom Notes applications that are based on the same Notes template (or at least share a common design). For example, I have one customer who has 10,000 team sites based on a completely customized Notes template and is migrating them to 10,000 SharePoint sites based on a highly customized site template. Now that’s code reuse! Quest’s Web Parts for SharePoint product is one great way to build those custom application templates. As described previously [ link ] this tool has been very popular for companies wanting to “replatform” their custom Notes applications because the web parts help to reproduce much of the functionality...

As described previously, when migrating Notes workflows to SharePoint workflows you are really switching from code-based workflows (logic encoded in button events, agents, etc.) to declarative workflows. And using Notes Migrator for SharePoint, you can migrate your workflow state so you can preserve in-progress workflows between the two systems. To achieve this, simply migrate the (status fields, next review, due date, whatever) as data columns in your list items, InfoPath documents, Word documents, etc. Depending on how you designed your workflow, you may be done at that point, or you may need to customize it. The relevant part is that when the workflow starts up for newly written list items, it should be designed to examine these columns and “advance” to the right state. For example, the...

Here is a new white paper by yours truly: http://www.quest.com/documents/landing.aspx?id=9746&prod=352 . In some ways, this paper is a direct challenge to the four-quadrant system and Design Element Index (DEI) algorithms that have been floating around recently for understanding the complexity of Notes applications. Even though Notes Migrator for SharePoint implements some of these methodologies, I have a strong belief that such complexity calculations do not adequately address the practical question of which applications are going to be easy to migrate and which ones are going to be difficult. What organizations really need is a way to rank applications according to how much effort will be required to migrate them to SharePoint and to recognize the rare cases where SharePoint may not be...

Before diving into the new ways we have to manage your links in Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.2 (tomorrow's post), let's do a quick review of how Quest's Link Tracking Service works. Notes documents can contain DocLinks, which are links to other Notes documents. These links can be represented as "traditional" little yellow icons or "modern" text hotspots, as shown below: If you were to migrate this document to SharePoint, you would want to make sure that your document links continued to work in all of the following cases: The documents that your links point to are still in Notes - When a users clicks on a link, they should be connected to the document in the Notes client. The documents that your links point to have been migrated to SharePoint - When users clicks...

Notes Migrator for SharePoint has always had a number of capabilities for migrating the security of your Notes applications to the equivalent security constructs in SharePoint. In particular we have had two distinct "group mapping" options: Map Domino Directory Groups in your application's ACL to Domain Groups (usually AD groups) Generate SharePoint Groups (with members) from Roles in your application's ACL In both of the above cases, the tool sets the permissions correctly for the site, list, or document you are provisioning. With Notes Migrator for SharePoint 5.2, we now support a third option: Generate SharePoint Groups (with members) from Domino Directory Groups in your application's ACL In other words, as indicated in the dotted line below, we are now crossing the...

Here is a new case study that features a high profile migration project that used Notes Migrator for SharePoint (my product) and Quest's Web Parts for SharePoint together [ link ]. It is a great example of how using a good data migration tool as well as a rapid application development tool for rebuilding the non-standard user interfaces can reduce the cost of the overall migration project. There is one other thing I really liked in this case study: The customer cited “the ability to replay the migration scenarios as many times as needed to ensure good results” as one of the primary criteria for selecting a migration tool. This is something that we designed the Notes Migrator for SharePoint migration console was designed for from the beginning, but the value of it is not always clear. Our...