Real World Computing

Lotus Notes is old software and I should know, I've been using it for 30 years. It's so old that it pre-dates the internet and it's considered to be one of the first popular "email" platforms. It's still widely in use today but many users simply don't want to talk about it. A Quick Apology I want to begin with a quick apology for the inflammatory title and the use of the word "Lotus". After all, we don't call PowerPoint "Forethought Presenter" anymore do we? There's a very specific audience that I'm talking to with this post and if you're not calling it HCL Domino, then that's you.  Wormhole Image generated by Stable Diffusion AI Are you still on the platform? A lot of people who believe that they migrated off the Notes/Domino platform many years ago are still using the software. It's so capable that it's hard to replace. It's quite often still running major operations from dusty unloved servers in back r...

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 f...

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...

Recently we've been undertaking a task to move from IBM Domino to Office 365 with particular emphasis on the mail system. One of the first big tasks is to move all of our corporate contacts from the Domino NAB over to the Contacts area of office 365. Corporate Contacts Corporate contacts, in this sense are contacts which are shared by the entire organisation. I'm not talking about actual users  who will have an Office 365 licence with your company or about personal contacts, who would normally reside in the personal address book. In our case, we had about 6500 corporate contacts who needed to be migrated. There's a contacts screen in Office 365 which is accessible from the Admin portal. It's under users, then contacts. Exporting from Domino In IBM Notes, open your company's address book and press Ctrl+A on people. If you have your staff and non-staff in the same address book, you'll probably want to sort by company and deselect all the staff. Ne...

So, all the newcomers in your company want to use outlook? IBM have put a lot of work into making the Notes client look and feel like outlook and they've given us Verse which is an acquired taste but if you like Google's inbox, it's good.  Unfortunately, there's just just no pleasing some people.  If you don't have Notes and Domino apps, then there's nothing at all holding you back. Nobody without Notes/Domino applications (or perhaps a huge investment in IBM Connections) should be using IBM's mail offerings. On the other hand, if you do have apps for which there's no equivalent in the Microsoft world, here's another option that you might want to try... Give your users Outlook but point it to their Verse Mail. That way, you can concentrate on either migrating your apps to another environment or webifying them to the extent that there's no reason to use the notes client.  In this post, I want to discuss how to access Outlook mail - Not...