Migrating Mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Outlook on Office 365 - Part 2

Last time on Real World Computing, I talked about migrating mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Office 365. Now it's time for Part 2. 

Mail Routing

We did routing in two parts. Initially we had MX records for both IBM and Microsoft with Microsoft having the higher number (which means lower priority). After the cutover date we switched the priorities so that Microsoft Office 365 had the higher priority.

One of the cool things about Microsoft’s setup is that they give you two domains, one is your own and the other is an @mycompany.onmicrosoft.com one.

When we first saw this we thought it was a “bit wanky” but as it turned out, it was very useful indeed.we quickly discovered that we couldn't send mail to our internal colleagues on outlook from notes and that all of the agents in our Domino applications were only delivering internally.

Changing these to point to the onmicrosoft addresses fixed that problem. As far internal mail, we just added a mail rule to forward all new mail from our personal Domino and verse mailboxes to onmicrosoft.

Mail Migration

We tried a few things to get our old mail migrated. We had originally hoped that we could simply have a cutover date with a small amount of overlap but the reality is that other departments use mail quite differently from IT and they rely heavily on foldering and calendaring. They use search and archive very lightly - and it's not something that can be changed in the short term, regardless of how good the technology is.

We first tried putting their Verse mail into outlook and then copying and pasting mail between the mailboxes. This worked very well but we quickly discovered that there was a 90 day limit in terms of mail that Verse makes available to outlook.

The next phase involved taking an unencrypted ACL-free copy of users mail files and using conversion applications. We tried two and they both gave us a lot of trouble.

Stellar NSF to PST Converter

The first product we tried, Stellar NSF to PST Converter, had some very restrictive licensing. It was expensive and we could only run it on one PC. The trial version worked fairly well  but it was limited to only a very small amount of conversion.

The advertising claimed that it worked with Office 2016 but the reality was that we eventually had to run it with Office 2010.

Our initial attempts to get a NSF mail file converted to the 365 cloud took 24 hours for a single user with less than 3 months worth of mail. We complained about the software and after threatening to pursue the issue of a refund, the Stellar technical team worked with us on the problem for a couple of days.

Kernel Lotus Notes to Outlook Conversion

In the meantime, we bought another migration package; Kernel Lotus Notes to Outlook Conversion. This one had much better licensing and could be run on multiple machines at once. It worked out of the box and was able to do the same mail file in an hour.

We were ready to go with Kernel when suddenly the Stellar product started working. It processed our test file in 30 minutes. In the end, we used a mix of the products.

The conversion process produced a PST file which we were able to import into outlook. It was interesting to note that the folders and the calendar entries came over well and we had relatively few complaints from user about the conversion. Most of the complaints were actually outlook usability issues.

One thing that was a little problematic was that we had used an archiving and compliance solution, MailAbility. This software moved some of the older mail to external NSF archives and simply left links in the Notes mail client. Obviously those mails weren't “real” emails and couldn't be imported. We’ll convert the archives later and convert them to a “locked down” compliance-only shared mailbox.

Groups

The final big problem was groups. We currently need to retain the groups in both systems but duplicating them makes no sense. We've looked around for ways to easily synchronise the groups from Domino to Office 365 but apart from one-time migration or some really dangerous scripting, we've found nothing that will do the job.

The other important thing to realise is that Microsoft is redefining groups. There's a new group type called an "Office 365 Group" which everyone should probably be using.  Unfortunately, at the moment, it doesn't support people outside of the organisation...

...apparently that feature is coming "real soon" though.

In the meantime, groups are easily created via outlook or via the admin console or, as is apparently the preference (which doesn't currently support external parties), via Yammer.   As for getting contacts across, there's the solution I discussed back in January.