Welcome to Brendon Davis

Lotus Domino 5 to Exchange 2007

Autor brendon

I recently had to run a migration from a Lotus Domino 5 server to Exchange 2007 on SBS 2008. Microsoft has released a funky little tool to assist in the synchronisation of Domino & Exchange address lists and allow the graceful migration of mailboxes. MSExchange.org has a useful article on how to configure the free Microsoft connector ‘MS Transporter Suite‘

The mailbox migration had me stumped as the Domino 5 was not hosting several of the required roles PLUS Lotus notes version 6 to 7 must be installed on the server for the import to work.

As we were doing a single import of all users mailboxes and not planning on running the two systems in parallel, the toolbox gives the ability to import mail items directly from the domino NSF files. There are a few gotcha’s but read on for the steps I followed to import the user mailboxes:

Step 1. Download/ obtain the Lotus Notes v6 or v7 client. (Note that you will need to register for this)

Step 2. Install Lotus Notes on the SBS/ Exchange server.

Step 3. Install the Microsoft Transporter Suite – download.

Step 4. Create all user accounts & mailboxes with the necessary mailbox configuration.

Step 5. Grant the necessary Exchange permissions to the AD migration user account.
‘Get-ClientAccessServer | select name,distinguishedname | fl’ (Will give the CAS Server Distingued Name)
‘Add-ADPermission –Identity <CAS Server Distingued Name> -User <userDN> -ExtendedRights ms-Exch-EPI-Impersonation’

Step 6. Copy a current user <mailbox>.NSF from the Domino server to a temporary storage location.

Step 7. Open the ‘Microsoft Transporter Suite for Domino’ and navigate to ‘Toolbox’

Step 8. Run the Migrate Notes Mail Archive wizard.

Step 9. Select the NSF file and enter the mail domain. (eg. DOMINOSRV/CONTOSO/MAIL domain will be ‘MAIL’ domain which appears to be case sensitive.) Select the existing user account and mailbox for the import and click Next.

If  the process runs and errors on the import naming the Junk Email folder, simply log into this user mailbox and delete the duplicate Junk Mail folder that uses a standard folder icon.

Step 10. Have test import user compare the contents of the Outlook and Notes mailboxes.

The final import can be done using the same procedure and if necessary it is possible in the import wizard to select item dates for import.

In our experience we found:

• Not all future appointments were migrated correctly.
• Recurring appointments are imported with the wrong time zone and could not be modified.
• Recurring appointments have end dates specified to finish recurrence on date of migration.
• Contact databases have to be imported separately.
• Corrupt items skipped are shown in the wizard log and can be copied and pasted using Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V.

I will update this article if I find any other useful information post-migration.