Quest Offers Lotus Notes to Office 365 Migration

With the release of SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Online and the upcoming release of Office 365, for many companies the need to migrate content is going to be one of the big IT tasks this year. To make it easier -- at least to make it easier to migrate Lotus Notes to SharePoint --Quest (news, site) has extended the reach of its Note Migrator.

Given that, by some estimates, close to 40% of companies have some SharePoint 2010 deployments, and the interest that the release of Office 365 will create -- given that it is likely to be priced for both small businesses and large enterprises -- the timing of this release is pretty smart.

Depending on whom you listen to, Office 365 is due in June or July sometime, so companies that are looking at an early deployment will need to consider how they are going to move content soon enough.

Migrating Lotus Notes

With the new migratory tool Quest is taking care of the migration of Lotus Notes, Lotus QuickPlace/Quickr and Domino.Doc applications to SharePoint and SharePoint Online.

According to Quest, this new version will also look after any Office 365 migrations as well, and will maintain data quality and require fewer resources to do so.

Pre-migration analysis

As a result, the Notes tool enables users to:

• Gain access to new SharePoint features such as managed metadata and document sets
• Using native web services, connect to SharePoint 2010 sites
• Preserve the look and feel of Notes applications and cover Notes forms to Microsoft InfoPath list forms
• Move Notes data to SQL Server tables

While Quest is also emphatic that it will support SharePoint online in the Office 365 release, it hasn’t offered any of the details.

Migrator reports

Migrator Functionality

More specifically, from a functionality perspective, it offers users the ability to:

• Discover Notes databases, analyze how they are used and determine which applications are unused, as well as those applications that will need development
• Using a customizable rules-based engine, specify target locations and migration jobs, hundreds of which can be migrated 
• Inhabit lists, libraries, sites and subsites based on your existing Notes infrastructure
• Maintain data fidelity when migrating rich text and complex application data, as well as preservation of data including keyword fields
• Choice of document destinations beyond lists and libraries, including wiki pages, basic pages and content publishing pages
• For applications requiring custom form layouts, migrate your Notes documents to InfoPath XML documents 

There’s a lot more here, and a lot more information available on it. If you are interested in demo videos or a trial run, you can sign up now for a test run, as it already supports the beta of Office 365.