Migrator for Notes to Exchange 4.16.3 - Quick Start Guide

Conceptual walkthrough

Migrator for Notes to Exchange supports a wide range of migration scenarios, but this high-level walkthrough is representative of a typical migration, showing the interplay of provisioning, mail routing, and data transfers over the course of a multi-batch migration.

Migration process overview

NOTE: This overview is not meant to substitute for the step-by-step process instructions in the Migrator for Notes to Exchange Scenarios Guide. The material here is intended to familiarize you with Migrator for Notes to Exchange and the contexts in which its components are typically used. See the Scenarios Guide for step-by-step process instructions.

This section describes a typical migration scenario using Migrator for Notes to Exchange to migrate to a local, proprietary Exchange target. Details and flow charts for this process appear in chapter 2 of the Migrator for Notes to Exchange Scenarios Guide. In this example, an administrator performs the migrations for a series of user groups with no user input or interaction so the Self-Service Desktop Migrator (SSDM) is not used.

This scenario assumes an Exchange 2010 or later target, using Quest Coexistence Manager for Notes (CMN) to facilitate directory updates, mail routing and mail remediation, and calendar and free/busy coexistence. (CMN is a separate Quest product.) MNE also supports migrations to Microsoft 365 as described in chapter 3 of the Scenarios Guide.

The approach described here is appropriate for many migrations, but the configuration, circumstances and institutional priorities of any given site will dictate variations to this process. Migrator for Notes to Exchange offers many operational options that permit much flexibility in devising and implementing a suitable migration strategy. See the MNE Scenarios Guide for detailed information about how Quest tools accommodate various migration scenarios. The Scenarios Guide flow charts are included here to summarize the process visually.

Necessary pre-migration preparations

The process begins with the existing user accounts and mailboxes on a Domino server. The destination Exchange server is set up on another computer and the migration process will require administrator accounts on both servers. Microsoft Outlook must be installed on user desktops and Migrator for Notes to Exchange is installed on the administrator migration computer.

You also install the Quest Coexistence Manager for Notes (CMN), and run its Directory Connector to perform a directory update between the source and target servers. This process creates mail-enabled accounts (contacts) in Active Directory for all Notes users. The CMN Directory Connector does not create mailboxes, but its directory update provisions new mail-enabled contacts in Active Directory, which associates the existing user Notes addresses with their corresponding new objects in AD. The new objects are said to be “mail-enabled” because Exchange can now accept mail addressed to these user Notes addresses and route it to the corresponding mailboxes on the Domino server.

Users in this scenario are migrated in a series of collections (user groups) over a period of weeks, so you will require an email coexistence strategy that permits mail-forwarding throughout the transition period—when some users have already been migrated to Exchange while others wait their turn back in Domino. If you choose the SMTP method of mail-routing and want a single-domain approach, you would configure a smart host for each environment. (All of the coexistence methods and their alternatives are summarized in the Migrator for Notes to Exchange Pre-Migration Planning Guide.) When the SMTP mail-routing is configured, you modify the MX (Mail eXchange) record to direct external (Internet) mail to the Exchange environment. Since no users are yet migrated but all users are provisioned and mail-enabled in Active Directory, for now all inbound Internet mail is routed back to the corresponding Notes mailboxes.

You run the MNE Notes Migration Manager to capture information about the Notes environment. From the Notes Migration Manager, you launch the NABs (Name & Address Book) Discovery Wizard to find the Notes NAB files that describe the Notes directory.

Next, you run the Internet Domains Discovery Wizard to assemble a list of all Notes and Internet domains in use in the Notes system. The Directory Export Wizard finds all the users, contacts, resources, and distribution lists (groups) in the Notes environment. The discovery and export wizards generate and save the data sets required by the MNE wizards that are used in the migration process.

MNE provisioning, migration, and other features are applied to collections of users and distribution groups. A collection is a defined subset of the users or groups that the Directory Export Wizard has found in the Notes/Domino environment. These collections are created and characterized using the Collection Wizard, so you now run the Collection Wizard to define user and group collections.

In this scenario, Active Directory already existed with user accounts before you ran the CMN Directory Connector, so the newly created Exchange contacts coexist with existing AD user accounts for the same users. Migrator for Notes to Exchange provides a Provisioning Wizard that can consolidate duplicates before any data is migrated. The merge process requires the data that was exported from the Notes directory, so you run the Provisioning Wizard to perform the merges for the exported Noted users.

User archives and PABs are stored on local user hard drives so, before migration, users copy them to centralized, accessible locations where the Data Migration Wizard can find them. MNE includes a PAB Replicator Wizard that automates this process for the end-user PABs. After the files are copied, you run the Locate Data Stores Wizard to identify all the Notes mail files, archives, and PABs before migration. An administrator can review and assess the volume of data to be migrated from the captured data within Notes Migration Manager.

Migration process (per user collection)

All the tasks and conditions described in the preceding section are prerequisites to the migration of the first user collection.

If the organization has experienced any staff additions or changes since the last run of the Directory Export Wizard, you perform two updating tasks before the next run of the Data Migration Wizard:

When the collection is ready, you run the Data Migration Wizard twice to perform several tasks for the users in the collection. (Many administrators report latency conflicts when trying to perform all tasks in a single program run.)

Migrator for Notes to Exchange copies data from Notes as Unicode and inserts it into Exchange as Unicode. Any data that contains a specific character set (MIME data) in the Notes source retains that character set after migration. The migration features do not convert MIME data into Unicode.

If the Data Migration Wizard migrates data to Outlook Personal Folder (.pst) files, when the migration is complete for this collection you must either:

This process, beginning with the re-run of the CMN Directory Connector (if necessary), is repeated for each collection of migrating users.