Skip to main content

Migrating Mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Outlook on Office 365 - Part 1


It was always just a matter of time. Eventually we were going to have to make the jump from IBM to Microsoft. It's not that IBMs software isn't good. It's very good. It's simply that IBM is the Beta to Microsoft's VHS. Technically the IBM product line is far superior but on the surface, IBMs poor UI will never match the incredible pull of Microsoft's polished Office 365 offerings.

We're just finishing a mail migration from IBM Notes/Verse to Microsoft Outlook, which we did entirely in-house and I thought it would be worthwhile going over the method we used.

The Before Status

Prior to the migration, all of our users had the IBM Notes client on their desktops. We had three production servers and two test/dev servers. All of our user mailboxes were on the IBM Cloud and we had a split with some users on Verse and some on Notes.

We were also running an extensive extranet with a myriad of centrally controlled expansive security options. Our address books contain in excess of 22,000 groups.

Licensing 

Since we'd decided to use Office 365 for word, excel and powerpoint, the migration was technically already underway with the purchase of Office 365 licensing. It should have been a simple matter of extending the licensing but as we already had a number of 365 licenses, we had to establish the right options.

This meant finding a Microsoft business partner and buying new licenses since there was no upgrade path from Office 365 Pro Plus, which doesn't include outlook to 365 E3 which does. 

We later decided that E5 would have been a better choice but funding wasn't available until later and again, there was no easy upgrade option. That's an upgrade we’ll probably do on the one year anniversary instead.



Active Directory 

Our original plans were to migrate to Microsoft’s fully cloud based active directory service and retire our three AD servers. We might still do this but in the meantime, a decision was made to retain our on-prem AD.

This change had a significant impact as connecting the AD to Azure resulted in duplicate users which took some time to resolve. The solution ended up being to delete all our existing AD users and let them get recreated by the sync process.

Unfortunately deleting them required powershell, a tool we ended up getting a bit too familiar with. It also meant that their OneDrive data and yammer posts and profiles got trashed.



SPF

The next step was to get our users familiar with outlook. To do that, we needed to set up routing.

In setting up our office 365 environment, we had to claim our domain. You do this in the Office 365 admin  portal which is surprisingly full featured.You have to verify your DNS via txt record and you're encouraged to put in a mx record that includes a spf flag.

We hadn't been using SPF prior to this but as soon as the SPF record took hold, it didn't matter that we had dual routing (with mail primarily going to our IBM accounts and a secondary MX record pointing to Office 365).

Our old connection immediately became “untrusted” and we had to quickly modify the SPF record to include our existing servers.


Stay tuned... in part 2, I'll cover how we managed routing, mailbox migration, and groups.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Gavin, thanks for posting it. We are in the middle of the same move (except for the Verse/Cloud part) and I do have a few questions on how you overcame some issues and questionable things. I guess I will have to wait for a bit for the "Part 2" of yours.
_
Paul

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher