Smooth Enterprise-Wide Email Migration using SysTools Export Notes December 31, 2009

SysTools Export Notes was used by an enterprise and it proved really helpful for them by making the Lotus Notes NSF to Microsoft Outlook PST migration process easier, which otherwise had been quite tough.

The Search for an Alternative Messaging Platform

An organization, that had been using Lotus Notes for its email and messaging needs for more than a decade,  decided to look for an alternative messaging platform for the following reasons:

• There was a need for better performance and security
• Cost of Lotus Notes licenses was quite high
• The high cost of maintenance of the existing Lotus Notes infrastructure was pushing up their operating costs

Some of the characteristics of their existing messaging platform were as follows:

• The existing enterprise messaging system was huge and had more than 700 mailboxes
• The average size of each mailbox was around 1.5GB
• The average volume of emails exchanged during a month was around 500K
• The total size of data to be migrated was over 1200 GB

The IT team decided to migrate to Microsoft Outlook that offered almost identical features at cheaper licenses and the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) was lower than that of Lotus Notes.

The Search for an Efficient Email Migration  Product

The IT team was then faced with daunting task of looking for product that can facilitate the migration of mailboxes from the existing platform to the new one. The IT team first explored the option of developing an email migration product in-house. But after conducting a feasibility study, it was decided that it would be better to opt for a third party product for the job.

Once the decision to use a third party product was taken, all the popular products available in the market were considered and evaluated. Given that there were a large number of mailboxes that had to be migrated, it was essential that the selected product is easy to deploy and simple to use. Apart from offering almost all features provided by other vendor, SysTools Export Notes is the only product that is easy to deploy and use with minimal technical support.

The aspect of  message fidelity in terms of  preserving the HTML format of email was one concern  as SysTools Export Notes doesn’t support this feature. The IT team then concluded that if the message fidelity in terms of HTML formatting of emails need to be  maintained then it will increase the overall time of migration which in turn increases the cost of the migration project. Thus it was decided to go ahead with SysTools Export Notes for NSF to Outlook migration. One of the reason was as these were old emails even if the HTML formatting are lost it will not be loss of data so message fidelity is still intact.

Successful Notes to PST Migration with SysTools Export Notes

SysTools Export Notes,  was deployed on the machines of each individual user.  They could then migrate their own mailboxes without assistance from the technical team. Each user had to follow the following simple steps to convert .nsf files to .pst files:

1. Install the Microsoft Outlook version to which they migrated without removing the Lotus Notes client.
2. Configured a POP3 account on Outlook
3. Ensure that Lotus Notes is not connected to the Domino server
4. Migrate mailboxes using Export Notes

The entire Lotus Notes to Outlook migration process was completed in just around 3 weeks. Minor hitches in special cases were swiftly resolved by the SysTools Support.