On a Quest …

v6 has been migrating email accounts forever; and has used and seen most of the tools on the market for converting data; most of which are what our engineers call “point and shoot”; in that you point tool at a Notes mailfile, hit “run” and it spits out a Outlook Personal Folder file (referred to as a .pst file!) and this is what we had become used to.

However, our recent migration project with the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) we moved to use Quest Software’s Migrator for Lotus Notes.

It’s fair to say there was a little setting up required and the instance we installed is not that portable, but it was well worth the effort. The software essentially takes a snapshot of the Lotus Notes Address Book, squirts the various users, groups etc into an SQL database – we actually ran with an MSSQL Express instance as we did not require the scale of full MSSQL etc.

Once we have our “import” of the Notes environment, we were able to batch (called collections) our users by department, point the software at the data to be converted and hit “migrate” and then get on with other tasks. The batch converting was great!

We were a little nervous about heading into a client migration weekend with a new tool – we had used versions of it before – but we really has nothing to worry about. Support from Quest – what little we needed – was timely and quality – and the migration went without a hitch.

The most obvious benefits we saw with this product was being able to batch; a greater (faster) throughput; the migration of unread / read marks from Notes Email; and the intelligence in the tool to be able to differentiate from Address Books, Archives and mailfiles.

A happy customer makes for a happy v6; we will use Quest tools again.