Migrator for Notes to Exchange 4.16.1 - Pre-Migration Planning Guide

Migrating from older versions of Notes/Domino

The Data Migration Wizard (for batch migrations) supports Notes version 6.0 and later, and Domino server version 6.0 and later. If your users are running an earlier version Notes client, the wizard can still migrate user batches to Exchange as long as Notes client version 6.0 or later is installed on the migration server.

Accommodating known limitations and other special circumstances

Review the Appendix A: Known limitations of the migration process in this guide, and determine how to accommodate the limitations that apply to your organization. Many might be insignificant while others may require more elaborate strategies or work-arounds to mitigate their effects.

Identify any aspects of the configuration that require variations or extensions to the Typical Migration Process as described in the Migrator for Notes to Exchange Scenarios Guide. Quest applications offer many options that permit flexibility in devising and implementing a suitable migration strategy when circumstances require a non-standard approach. For information and help with non-standard scenarios, contact your Quest sales representative.

End-user education and communications

End-user communications is a critical but often neglected element of a smooth migration. A user communications plan should be a central component of your migration planning to facilitate early and continuous communications with end users. The end users need to know:

If your end users will be using the Self-Service Desktop Migrator (SSDM) application, they also need to know the location of the program file, how to prepare their desktops, and how to run the program.

Your Migration Plan should therefore explain how and when you will deliver this information to your users. Many admins compose a notification email to send to users prior to the migration. Some administrators also like to send another email to the new accounts as soon as they are migrated to the Exchange environment. The Data Migration Wizard contains features that can generate personalized (mail-merge) emails to your end users for this purpose. You can tell the wizard to generate and send these messages at any time before, during or after migration. Typically an admin sends at least two messages to each collection users immediately upon completion of that collection migration:

NOTE:   • End users should be advised to check and resolve (accept or decline) any pending meeting invitations, changes to existing meetings, and other calendar items—i.e., items that have been received but not yet accepted or declined. If these sorts of items are migrated before they are resolved, they may not generate the desired results in the migrated content. • Alarm settings for repeating appointments do not migrate if the first appointment in the series pre-dates the migration. The appointments do migrate, but users should be reminded to reset their alarms. • Outlook applies its own junkmail filters to migrated mail, which can cause some non-junk items to be routed to the Outlook Junk Email folder. Users should review their post-migration Junk email folders, and retrieve any items that Outlook may have mistakenly sent there. • If migrating to Exchange 2010 or later with Outlook 2010 clients: The migration of users within contact lists can trigger false Invalid Address warnings to end users due to a change in the way Outlook 2010 stores its nickname cache (compared to earlier versions). The messages are delivered, but Outlook warns recipients that it cannot verify the user addresses. This issue can generate user calls to the Help desk, although an administrator could preempt user concerns by sending this information with the article link to all users, either as a separate email, or as part of the Welcome to Exchange email that the MNE Data Migration Wizard can send.

For more information, see “How Do I Send Pre- or Post-Migration Notification Emails to End Users?” in Appendix A of the Migrator for Notes to Exchange Administration Guide, and the notes for the Configure Mail-Merge Messages to Migrating Users screen in chapter 10 of the Administration Guide.

Appendix A: Known limitations of the migration process

Most of the limitations of any migration process are due to inconsistencies between the source and target environments. Features that are available in the Notes/Domino environment cannot be migrated to a target environment that does not offer the same or comparable features. Other limitations are due to feature incompatibilities where similar features are available in both the source and target environments, but their implementations are so different that the migration is impractical.

Known limitations of the Migrator for Notes to Exchange migration process are listed in the following sections.