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Migrating from Lotus Notes to SharePoint

As one of our customers has recently put it, “With your tool (MICA), one can really create Lotus Notes applications in SharePoint !”. If you add to that some specific migration tools we have built and our unique expertise in Notes applications, in workflow modeling and engines and in SharePoint development, companies that have decided to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint can save lots of money, effort and risks if they choose our tools and experience to support them in the project.

What is at stake ?

There you are sitting with dozens of Lotus Notes data bases that you have to migrate to SharePoint because of a strategic decision made some time ago by the top management. And users won’t accept something which is less good than before, and you know damn well that a number of Notes features are impossible to emulate in SharePoint. That’s tricky, isn’t ? And sure it will be costly !

Pilot experiment

Before you start the project (or in the course of it, when it is driving you mad because of the huge amount of work it requires), ask us for a pilot experiment :

• send us a copy of one of your Notes application data base (one of average complexity, i.e. with 2 to 4 forms and a workflow),
• we analyze it with our Lotus Notes DB’s Audit tool (see description hereunder),
• we together sit in a conference call to make sure we have understood the specs all right,
• within a few hours, thanks to the MICA form and workflow application tool, we develop a pilot application in SharePoint,
• another couple of hours, thanks to our content migration tool, we migrate (part of) the data and documents to SharePoint,
• we then set up another conference call to show you on the internet the application migrated to SharePoint, and to discuss further the project.

Defining the scope

In your company, as in many other ones, Notes data bases have been created for 15 years to solve business problems and enhance collaboration. They have been developed by enlightened users or IT people, but with very little documentation. Some are still intensively used, some from time to time and some have been abandoned, but often you do not know about it. And that’s the same if you look into the design of a data base : a large bunch of what you see is not used, whereas there may be parts of it you don’t see that are quite important. And last but not least, the same applies to the data it contains, i.e. the ‘documents’ : some are old, some are created but not used, etc.

To solve this problem we have developed an analysis tool called ‘Lotus Notes DB’s Audit tool’ which :

1. extracts macro information concerning each DB and its use,
2. performs a thorough analysis of its design,
3. produces a report with which it is possible to assess the complexity of the Notes data bases and discuss with users.

You then are in a much better position to define the scope of the migration project and estimate the workload.

Savings

We provide you with the necessary budget information : licenses and training for the tools (DB’s audit, SharePoint application development and content migration) as well as workload estimates based on the case you sent. You extrapolate the costs to your entire Notes to SharePoint migration project : we bet you save at least 50% of the cost compared to other solutions you might consider !

And guess what, users are later on much happier because they get equivalent, if not better, functionalities, in a quite user friendly environment !

Contact us for more information on our ‘Lotus Notes DB’s Audit tool’ or concerning a pilot experiment for a migration from Lotus Notes to SharePoint.

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