Notes to Google Apps migration: Project overview

White paper: Lotus Notes to Google Apps migrationProject overview

Main topics:

● Project approach & planning

● Mail and application migration

● Coexistence

For: IT / Business persons who are considering a Lotus Notes migration toGoogle Apps

Author: Richard van Delft

Date:Our reference:

15 December 2012WP2012121510

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Notes to Google Apps migration: Project overview

Content

ContentDisclaimer

IntroductionLotus Lock-inWhy Google Apps?

Project ApproachBefore your start: known your NotesG-workplace vision on migrationProject teamPoC / Pilot environment

Migration planningMail migration

Mail, calendar and contacts migration with GAMLNMail, calendar and contacts migration with 3rd party solutionsBest Practices for mail migration

Application migrationApplication migration with Notes2Apps MigratorAutomated migration with CIMtrekRedesign with OrangeScape

Coexistence periodNext stepsQuestions / Feedback / Contact information

About the author

For the latest version of this white paper visit our website: www.g-workplace.com

Disclaimer

The information in this document is provided for informational purposes only. The informationcontained in this document is subject to change without notice. No part of this document, inwhole or in part, may be reproduced, stored, transmitted, or used without the prior writtenpermission of G-workplace BV.Copyright© 2012-2016 G-workplace BV, Notes2Apps is a registered trademarks of G-workplaceBV. All other brands and product names are trademarks of their registered owners.

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Notes to Google Apps migration: Project overview

Introduction

This white paper shows Business managers, IT managers and IT architects that Google Apps is aperfect follow up for the IBM/Lotus Notes platform (note: Lotus brand is dropped in 2013). Thiswhite paper is written for everyone who is working on (or planning for) a Lotus Notes to GoogleApps migration. The white paper gives insight in the planning, project approach, mail migration,application migration and coexistence.This white paper includes links to extra information and additional resources on the internet.

Lotus Lock-in

Lotus Notes has been used around the world in enterprises as one of the widelyused application landscapes for years. Moving away from Lotus Notes looksimpossible for some organisations as Notes applications support many differentbusiness processes. Replacing this platform looks impossible. This is know asthe ‘Lotus lock-in’ myth. Another G-workplace white paper “Mapping IBM Notes features toGoogle Apps” shows that even the most complex Lotus Notes environments can be migratedtowards Google Apps, which demystifies the Lotus lock-in myth from a technical point of view.This white paper focus on a successful roadmap to escape from Notes, get happy users and get afast Return On Investment (ROI)

Why Google Apps?

If you have Notes, you have a communication and collaboration platform,why move at all? Let’s state 3 populair reasons to move to Google Apps: Innovative, Costs andEasiness of use.

● Innovative; Lotus Notes was the most innovative mail & collaboration platform in thenineties. Many enterprises have used Lotus Notes as their strategic (world-wide)communication and collaboration platform. However with the start of internet and morespecific cloud technology, IBM Notes has lost their innovative attractiveness. GoogleApps is nowadays the most innovative platform. Google Apps offers a new approach toICT and the technical back-end is different than any other organisation is offering. Thisenables organisations to rethink their communication & collaboration services for theirenterprise users.

● Costs; All features are available for 40 euro or 50 US dollar per user per year. This isamazing when you compare this to the IBM licence fees (Notes, Sametime, LEI, Traveler,anti-spam, OS ...) and the complementary hardware and IT maintenance costs. This pricedifference between traditional IT solutions and Google is so large that every organisationshould re-consider why they are paying more for common IT features.

● Easiness of use; Google Apps is easy to use by end-users and IT. The IT departmentdoesn’t have to worry about technical implementation issues. Google is doing that foryou. The 100% web vision of Google brings all the communication and collaborationpower to the fingertips of any employee. Google Apps offers many powerful securityoptions, like secure mobile device management and 2-factor authentication. As GoogleApps is easy to use it will prevent employees to use free consumer alternatives (likedropbox, twitter, facebook, etc.) which are not controlled by the organisation. GoogleApps enables employees to work any time (24x7 SLA), anywhere (online and offline) andany device (mobile and desktop) with the tools many already know from their personallife.

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Notes to Google Apps migration: Project overview

Project Approach

Before your start: known your Notes

Before you start a project, you have to know the ins and outs of your current Lotus Notesenvironment. I have seen organisation who introduced a new mail & collaboration platform andhoped that Lotus Notes would vanish. Well that is not happening. If you want to replace a mailand collaboration platform you have to know what you need to replace. This simple question isnot that easy to answer for organisations. The Lotus Notes usage varies enormously byorganisation. Organisation may have used Lotus Notes just for basic mail and document sharingoptions. Other organisation may

● use advanced email features like archiving, roaming features and mail rules,● have many custom Notes applications running their primary business processes,● have integration towards ERP systems and● run different kind of Lotus add-ons like Sametime, Quickr and Traveler.

Whatever your situation is, you have to know it in detail to plan your migration project and planaccordingly the decommissioning of Lotus Notes environment. G-workplace has developed theNotes2Apps Scan for this specific purpose.

The Notes2Apps Scan examines every Notes database in the Lotus Notes / Domino Domain ondatabase information, database design, content, Access Control List (ACL) and user activity ofevery database. The Notes2Apps Scan results in a detailed report of the domain. It showsinformation of:

● all the Notes features used in the domain,● the mail usage in the domain and● the applications in the domain.

It provides insight in the:● migration effort, migration budget and ROI,● migration planning and● decommissioning planning for the Lotus Notes environment.

The Notes2Apps Scan is special designed to answer the hard-to-crack migration questions thatNotes admin, Notes developers, IT managers and business managers have.

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Notes to Google Apps migration: Project overview

G-workplace vision on migration

We believe that a migration should be simple, be focused towards the new landscape and has to

include a decommission strategy for the old landscape.

This vision is based on four principles:1. minimize the mail and calendar coexistence as maintenance for two platform is costly

and coexistence easily lead to complex & costly support calls. It also prevent

decommissioning of the legacy platform.

2. 80% of the data is easily migrated to Google, start with the easy part and do an adequate

planning for the more complex part.

3. make intensive use of migration tooling to achieve maximize migration productivity what

result in early benefits from the new collaboration platform and enables

decommissioning options.

4. maximize user adoption by supporting users to buy-in to the new world of collaboration

and sharing.

Project team

The best practice for a Google deployment team is … to have two teams. One team for theTechnical Deployment track and one team for the Change Management track. ChangeManagement is the most important track for a successful Google Apps deployment. Technicalyou won’t have any big issue as Google Apps will work (as it does for million of other users).

The project success is in the Management of Change, typically you have a Businessrepresentative, a Communication Manager and a Training Coordinator. For the technical trackyou will need an Infrastructure Specialist (Mail flow), a ID management specialist (LDAP/AD), aTest Manager (Quality Assurance) and a Development Manager (for applications and mailconnectivity). This may all sounds more complex than it is in real life. Usually those roles areeasily assigned to existing people or departments in the current organisation. The project coreteam should include the roles for a Project Manager, Technical specialist, Tester and ChangeManager.

PoC / Pilot environment

Many organisations start with a Proof of Concept (PoC) or a pilot to evaluate Google Apps. Asyou want to get yourself acquainted with the Google Apps features before Going Live (or GoingGoogle as you will learn). In this stage it is important you have a Google certified partner whohas intense experience with Google Apps deployment and can support the PoC situation. Doing aPoC usually exist of the following activities:

1. define the goal of your PoC / Pilot setup, what are your measuring for success or failure.2. get your Google Apps domain via www.google.com/a3. activate your Google Apps domain, configure your Google Apps services. 4. create the PoC / pilot users in your Google Apps domain.5. apply the configuration you wish to pilot, like the GAL (Global Address List), mobile

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strategy, migration tooling (GAMLN, Notes2Apps), etcetera.6. create the generic instruction materials1 for Google Apps, which can be used later during

Go Live.7. create a specific Pilot instructions guide, as the pilot situation probably has some

limitations (due to pilot setup). You also need to point out the items that pilot users needto evaluate during the pilot.

8. forward mail of your pilot users from Notes to Gmail.9. gather feedback from your pilot users. You may want to use a Google form for this!

1) Note: Google provides many (free) communication materials, take a look for this atdeployment.googleapps.com.

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Notes to Google Apps migration: Project overview

Migration planning

The deployment and migration planning has different stages, after each stage you may be ableto decommission a part of your Lotus Notes environment. G-workplace uses the following stagesin a migration planning:

● scope: determine the deployment and migration scope (based on Notes2Apps Scan)● communication: Google Apps deployment and mail & calendar migration (with GAMLN)● collaboration: migrate (or archive) collaboration applications (with Notes2Apps Migrator)● business apps: migrate / redesign complex Notes applications● special cases: keep a stage in your plan to handle complex cases, like applications that

are almost EOL and migration does not apply.

The mail migration is the first plateau and the application migration are the subsequentplateau’s. Note that planning of mail migration is independent of the mail flow. You can use splitdelivery or dual delivery mail flow method to decide per mail address which mail goes to Googlemail and which mail goes to Notes mail.

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Mail migration

Mail, calendar and contacts migration with GAMLN

Google is offering a free migration tool for Lotus Notes organisations, called Google AppsMigration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN). This tool is a Lotus Notes application which performsthe upload from your Lotus Notes mail, calendar and contacts data into Google mail. You candownload the tool via Google or contact a business partner (like G-workplace) to utilize thissolution for you. The GAMLN solution is robust and is for a Lotus Notes specialist easy to use.However don't forget that it is a migration. Google is based on open standards, not all Notesmail functions are compatible with that. Some items to watch for are:

● attachment size in Gmail is limited to 25 MB, no exceptions● the allowed attachment list of Gmail may prohibited Notes mail attachment migration● migrating (repeating) calendar events isn’t perfect, this may result in complex helpdesk

calls● calendar attachments don't migrate into Google calendar, however there are options to

cope with this.

Mail, calendar and contacts migration with 3rd party solutions

In case you are not happy with the free migration tooling (GAMLN) of Google, you may look atcommercial alternatives in the marketplace. Examples are PCvita, SYStools and SALVAIR. Or youmay contact a Google Apps business partner, who provides the migration service for you. I.e.G-workplace provides this service to migrate a Lotus Notes mailbox to Google mail, calendar andcontact information, for a fixed fee per mail file.

Best Practices for mail migration

I am often asked for Best Practice or learned lessons. Based on project experience I have createdthe following Best Practice list for the management of mail migration projects:

1. projects have a high profile for every user; projects require near-flawless execution tominimize business disruption.

2. take care of specials like mailing lists, mail applications, mobile users, multi-functionals,etc.

3. use a mail migration project to update the mail security and internet use policy.4. co-existence is a challenge due to format translation and calendar interoperability issues;

consider a Big-bang approach.5. evaluate a no migration or user self-service migration approach.6. provide a mix of training & communication options for end-users.7. a migration team should at least include a project manager, technical lead, testing

manager and a change manager.

Application migration

Your Notes environment probably consist of more than mail and calendar. IBM / Lotus Notes hasbeen often used as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) within organisations. Notesapplications are often used for collaboration in projects, departments and across theorganisation. Google Apps is all about collaboration and sharing information and is typical agood replacement for your collaboration application in Notes. You even can add your custom

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functions to Google Apps by utilizing Apps Script. Google Apps Script is a JavaScript cloudscripting language that provides the ability to automate tasks across Google products and thirdparty services. However Apps Script may not meet your demands for more complex businessapplications within Lotus Notes. You can replace those applications:

● to a Commercial of-the Shelf (COTS) solution in the Google Apps marketplace● with CIMtrek for an automated migration● by using a redesign approach in OrangeScape and using their Lotus convertor● development on Google Apps Engine● to other enterprise wide platforms

The Notes2Apps Scan (see previous paragraph) provides an advise for migration. Notes2AppsScan results in a report with information for your migration planning and migration effort. Theapplication analysis split the applications in those categories:

1. Basic migration; migrates to default Google Sites / Google Drive features2. Apps Script migration; migrates to Google Apps, additional Apps Script development

needed3. Workflow / Business migration; look for one of the above mentioned alternatives for

complex migrations

Application migration with Notes2Apps Migrator

Notes2Apps Migrator focus on the content migration of your Notes databases to Google Apps.The valuable content in Notes applications are converted to Google Sites, to Google Drive or to acombination of those two.

● Conversion to Google Sites is done by migrating the Notes document to HTML andcreating a Sites page for it. Attachments in Notes are added to the page in Sites.

● Conversion to Google Drive is done by migrating the Notes document to PDF files or toGoogle Text Docs. Attachments in Notes are also placed in Google Drive.

Notes2Apps offers configuration options to meet the need for the most complex migrations.G-workplace delivers Notes2Apps Migrator as a tooling or as a service (fixed price migration perdatabase, independent of database size or complexity).

Automated migration with CIMtrek

CIMtrek automatically converts all Lotus Notes application logic (forms,views, agents, etc) to Java. The converted applications runs on a Javaplatform like Google App Engine or TomCat. The Lotus Notes proprietary data format is migratedto a relational database like MySQL. The resulting application mimics the same Lotus Notes userinterface that users already know. This eliminates re-training costs but also prevent to make useof the advantages of the new platform. Another item to think about is the applicationmaintenance, developers need to maintain Java libraries which are more complex thanmaintaining Notes applications.

Redesign with OrangeScape

OrangeScape delivers a visual web based development platform. OrangeScape delivers a visualPaaS (Platform as a Service) environment for the data model, business rules, forms / userinterface, workflow and integration. Applications can be deployed in the cloud to Google AppsEngine, Microsoft Azure or Amazon and locally deployed on TomCat, JBOSS or Glassfish.OrangeScape delivers a Lotus Notes conversion utility to import the current Lotus Notes data

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model into the OrangeScape development studio.OrangeScape development studio is a replacement for the Domino Designer. Notes developerscan easily tap into the OrangeScape visual designer to re-designing complex Notes (workflow)applications.

Coexistence period

A Big Bang deployment strategy prevents a coexistence period. I am anadvocate of doing Big Bang migrations as coexistence make projectsmore complex, costly and longer. Doing a Big Bang migration is verygood possible with Google Apps. There is no technical limit at Googleto handle a large number of users at once. As an example, the largest Go Live for me was a13.000 users Go Google moment, with a minimum of helpdesk calls and no business interruption.If a Big Bang migration to Google Apps isn’t applicable for you, then you have to think aboutcoexistence. In this paragraph the most common items to cover during a coexistence period:

● global address list - personsUsers on both platforms don't know who is on Google and who is on Notes. Users just want totype the name of the colleague for creating a mail or to book an appointment. So a GlobalAddress List (GAL) with both your Notes and Google users is needed. On Notes you alter thePerson document within your Domino address book to specify a forward address to your Googledomain (G-workplace provides a free Notes2Apps toolkit to support this). In Google Apps youcreate your Google users and utilize the shared contact list for the Notes user names. Thisconfiguration provides you with a complete directory of all your contacts on both platforms.

● global address list - groupsThe Global Address List also contains mail distribution lists. You have to decide how you want tomigrate those (if any). I often see directories which are polluted with groups which are outdatedand not in use. Also naming conventions didn’t stand the time, and multiple standards are usedover time. G-workplace provides a free utility and best practices for cleaning out those unusedgroups.

● calendar integration for free/busy lookupWhen you book an appointment you may want to lookup the free/busy information from thecolleagues you invite to your appointment. This function can be supported in both the Notescalendar and in the Google calendar. Google provides a free tool for the interchangeability,called the Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes (GCCLN). The GCCLN tool is a Lotus Notesapplication that can be installed on the IBM Domino server by a Lotus Notes administrator.

● mail flowYour company mail flow may be a complex diagram, in basic it is real simple. Internet maildelivery is based on MX-records (Mail eXchange). When you point your companies MX-Recordsto Google you need to make sure you have split delivery or dual delivery switched on. Splitdelivery makes sure that Notes mail is routed to your Domino mail servers and Google mail isrouted to the Gmail inbox. Dual delivery makes sure that mail is delivered to both the Gmailinbox and to the Domino mail server at the same time.

● online presence and chatThe IBM Sametime and Google Talk can exchange presence and chat services by using the LotusSametime Gateway server. Exchanging video or audio isn’t possible, however users will be ableto see who is online and who isn’t. The configuration is a bit complex, but can be done.G-workplace also advise to take a look at NextPlane for coexistence.

● Microsoft OfficeMost enterprise organisations are running MS-Office. A Google deployment usually don’t start

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with a replacement of MS-Office with Google Apps. This brings a coexistence situation. This isno problem, users who don’t have a need to collaborate on documents and are used to MS-Officewill continue to work with MS-Office. Employees with an innovative mind may start using GoogleApps for joined tasks lists to streamline the team/project tasks. Coexistence in this area isactually a great idea in general as employees see the greater benefit of the Google Appsdeployment. Next to easy to use communication tools (mail, calendar and voice/audio chat) theyalso get collaboration services like Google Drive and Google Sites to work together and to shareinformation. In due time you can think about migrating MS-Office to Google Drive, I already haveseen situations where users demanded to stop MS-Office usage and switched totally to GoogleDocs to benefit from collaboration, sharing and auto save options.

Next steps

The goal of this whitepaper is to inform you on Lotus Notes to Google Apps migrations. Thiswhite paper intends to give a (technical) roadmap of the Lotus Notes replacement with GoogleApps. The next steps is now to start doing. Start a pilot with a Google Apps business partner tohelp you out. You can find a Google Apps business partners in the Google Apps marketplace, oryou can contact us via mail (info@g-workplace.com) or via our website, www.g-workplace.com.

Questions / Feedback / Contact information

In case of any remarks or comments on this white paper contact the author, Richard van Delft onrichard.van.delft@g-workplace.com.

About the author

Richard van Delft has been working in different roles at several large Lotus Notes environmentsfrom of 1995 and supported Lotus Notes migrations from of 2003. In 2010 Richard van Delftsupported for the first time a large (55k+) Lotus Notes migration towards Google Apps. Thiswhite paper is based on all those experiences and gives practical, technical insight in the movefrom Lotus Notes to Google Apps. For questions or comments on this white paper, you cancontact Richard at richard.van.delft@g-workplace.com.

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