Migrator for Notes to Exchange 4.17 - Pre-Migration Planning Guide

Understanding key differences between Notes/Domino and AD/Exchange

The architecture and functionality are different between Notes/Domino and Active Directory/Exchange. Migration planners should understand the significant differences between the two environments:

In any migration, some features or data elements in the source environment will not have comparable counterparts in the target environment, and Notes-to-Exchange migrations are no exception. Appendix A of this guide provides a list of these Appendix A: Known limitations of the migration process.

Configuration requirements and account permissions

IMPORTANT: Hardware and software requirements for Migrator for Notes to Exchange (MNE) are documented in the Release Notes that accompany every release. Ensure that your environment meets the requirements before you install the product. MNE also requires certain configuration and account permissions in addition to the requirements documented in the Release Notes.

All computers must have network access.

Ensure that your environment meets the configuration requirements before you install the product.

Domino server configuration

An account must be defined with administrative rights to the Domino server. You can use the administrative account created by Notes/Domino upon installation or create a new account and add it to the LocalDomainAdmins group.

Microsoft Exchange/AD environment configuration (on-premises Exchange)

This section applies only if you are migrating to a proprietary (on-premises) Exchange target. If you are migrating to hosted Exchange Online, skip to Account permissions for migration to Microsoft 365.

IMPORTANT: You must use different user accounts for the Exchange Account and the Active Directory Account. Do not use one account for both purposes. Using one account for both purposes results in conflicting mailbox permissions that prevents MNE from being able to access the Exchange mailboxes when migrating mailbox data.

For an on-premises target, an Active Directory administrative account that is a member of the Exchange Organization Management role group must be configured with remote PowerShell enabled.

In the MNE console, you can automatically grant the required permissions to the specified Active Directory account. If you use the Automatically grant permissions option, MNE delegates Full Control permissions to the root of the target OUs and the permissions are inherited by all OUs, even the OUs that are added after initial configuration.

For either an on-premises or Microsoft 365 target with using the Microsoft AD synchronization tool, the account must be a domain user account with full access to the target Organizational Unit (OU). If contacts are to be merged with existing Active Directory user objects, the account must have full control of the OUs/containers in which the AD user objects and contacts currently reside. This ensures that MNE has sufficient access to properly join to the merged user objects and prevents the creation of duplicate contacts.

Alternately, you could manually grant the permissions. To manually set AD container permissions in Exchange:

An Exchange account must be configured to provide Exchange credentials from MNE that correspond to the MNE Exchange Information screens and must have Receive-As rights for each mailbox store.

To automatically grant Receive-As rights, you can select the Automatically grant permissions check box in the Exchange Server configuration screen. MNE grants permissions on the database container and the permissions are inherited by all databases, even the databases that are added after initial configuration.

To manually set Receive-As rights in on-premises Exchange for all mail stores, use the following PowerShell command (in one continuous line):

get-mailboxdatabase | add-adpermission -user <username> -extendedrights receive-as

IMPORTANT: Ensure that the Exchange account is not added to any administrative groups that have been explicitly denied access to the mail stores. These groups include Enterprise Admins, Domain Admins, and the Organization Management role. If the Exchange account is added to any of these groups, MNE is prevented from connecting to the target mailboxes during the migration.