Coexistence Manager for Notes 3.8.4 - Quick Start Guide

About the CMN documentation suite

The documentation for Quest Coexistence Manager for Notes (CMN) includes:

All CMN documentation is intended for network administrators, consultants, analysts, and any other IT professionals who will install or use the product components, or who may help plan for their use in a coexistence scenario. All of these documents, including the online Help, are bundled and installed with the product, and all except the Help files are also available separately at Quest's Support Portal.

Where To Look in the CMN Documentation

This table shows where you can find particular types of information about particular CMN components:

The CMN application Help files contain the same information as the User Guide, but make the information available on-screen at a single keystroke (from the CMN Management Console).

All CMN documentation is intended for network administrators, consultants, analysts, and any other IT professionals who will install or use the product components, or who may help plan for their use in a coexistence scenario. All of these documents, including the online Help, are bundled and installed with the product, and all except the Help files are also available separately at Quest's Support Portal.

Product overview

Coexistence is the state of two or more independent servers when all are serving the same organization at the same time. For example, when a company using a particular brand of email and calendar applications acquires another company that uses a different brand, the new company may decide to let everyone continue using their familiar tools. The company then must find a way for people in both groups to be able to communicate and collaborate effectively, and uneventfully, with everyone else in the new company. They should be able to email one another without knowing or caring which server serves which users, and messages should be received on all servers with the same attributes and functionality and attachments they had when they left their senders. Moreover, people should be able to send meeting invitations that ping the invitees’ calendars and notify them of any conflicts, again without regard to which servers host which users’ free/busy data. And of course the company will want some way to coordinate the two independent directories of the two environments.

Coexistence also becomes useful—or necessary—when a single organization decides to migrate from one server brand to another, and must therefore endure a transition period when some users have already migrated to the new server, while others remain on the old server, awaiting migration. The coexistence period for a migration scenario like this may be only temporary, but it can last weeks or even months for larger organizations. In any case, a good coexistence strategy is critical for a smooth transition.

The challenges of a Notes–Exchange coexistence

The Notes/Domino and Outlook/Exchange environments offer most of the same email, calendar and directory capabilities, but the two different brands implement many of these features differently. As such, Outlook cannot make sense of certain message types that originate in Notes, and vice versa. Often the recipient application can display the pertinent information correctly, but cannot then perform the calendar updates that would have been automatic if the recipient and sender were using the same email client. Or sometimes the receiving client can perform automatic calendar updates, but introduces errors—missing dates, or extraneous meeting instances, etc.—and will not report or even detect the errors. Meanwhile, each environment is virtually blind to the free/busy status of the other side’s users.

An effective coexistence between the Notes and Exchange environments will address these three primary concerns: