Fujitsu Legacy Modernisation offering for Migration from Lotus Notes™ to Microsoft Exchange™

You've made the decision to move your Lotus Notes™ messaging platform to Microsoft Exchange™ and appreciate the challenge is huge, with many questions to be answered and hurdles to overcome.

Your company’s messaging system is mission critical and holds many years worth of business history and knowledge and you want to migrate the system to a more scalable and robust platform with minimal risk of disruption to day-to-day business operations.

Fujitsu and our Legacy Modernisation partners Unify™ and AXS-One™ offer to the market a highly efficient, reliable and low risk service to migrate your existing Lotus Notes / IBM Domino™ messaging and application systems to Microsoft Exchange and Office SharePoint Server.

What are the Challenges?

• Messaging is mission critical and downtime must be minimised
• Resources for managing and maintain Lotus Notes applications are becoming scarce
• Infrastructure stress
• No time or budget for end-user retraining
• Need to keep historical messages
• Regulatory and legal pressures
• No easy upgrade path between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange

Migration of Lotus Notes/Domino to the Microsoft platform can be a daunting and complex process. In particular, migration raises a number of immediate challenges:

• How to minimize the impact on end users and ensure they continue to have access to their Notes email once they have migrated to Exchange?
• How can you ensure messages converted from Notes to Exchange retain their fidelity and evidential integrity?
• How to ensure the migration of all messages to the new platform does not overwhelm the new infrastructure?
• How to migrate existing Lotus Notes applications with minimal input from the business and without a large requirement for end user retraining?

By partnering with Unify and AXS-One, Fujitsu is able to solve all the above challenges.

What is Fujitsu's Solution to the Issue?

The Fujitsu Legacy Modernisation team combined with our partners offer customers access to messages generated in their Lotus Notes environment without having to convert and re-ingest them into their new Microsoft Exchange environment. This eliminates the costly process of converting legacy data and moving it to the new environment. Original records remain unchanged, and can continue to be accessed and utilized by end users.

Lotus Notes applications are converted like-for-like, to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and ASP.Net applications using automated tools to achieve most of the conversion. The remaining conversion work is completed by the team to achieve the desired outcome.

This service has been proven to shorten migration project timelines substantially, resulting in significant cost savings on project cost, whilst reducing the risks.

What is Fujitsu's Approach?

The first step is an "Application Value Assessment" workshop to learn about your environment, your business processes and desired outcomes. Fujitsu continues to work closely with the business to determine the scale of the messaging migration and the number of Lotus Notes applications suited for migration. From this, we present accurate estimates of the cost, timeframe and resource requirements for undertaking the entire migration project form start to finish.

Secondly, our tool suite is used to configure an integrated solution for messaging migration and to automate the migration of Lotus Notes applications.

Using the AXS-One Dynamic Data Migrator™, we provide a complete, integrated migration solution for all your:-

• Email messages and folders
• Calendars
• Contacts

The Unify Composer is used to automate the Lotus Notes applications migration process to its farthest point. Any remaining conversion is completed by the Legacy Modernisation team and to reduce risk, no functional changes are made during the migration. This also facilitates industrialised testing on the migrated application to ensure that the old and new applications function identically.

What are the Benefits?

Messaging Migration

Traditional messaging conversion methods involve converting all messages and data in each user’s mailbox into the format suitable for Microsoft Exchange. This data conversion accounts for at least 1/3 of the total cost of conversion project giving a significant impact on the timeline and project costs. The AXS-One method eliminates this impact.

The AXS-One method provides the following benefits:-

• Reduce migration project timelines and costs
  
  • Reduce project costs by approximately 30% with zero data conversion
  • Optimize project timelines while reducing requirements for systems to co-exist
  • Provide user access to original Notes messages without the costs and risks associated with bulk migration conversion
• Ensure full fidelity of data
  
  • Retain original Notes e-mail with full fidelity and give end users immediate secure access via their Outlook client
  • Fully convert messages dynamically from Notes to Exchange, as required
  • Manage historical Exchange and Notes e-mail via a single data repository with fully integrated retention, disposition and preservation
• Minimize infrastructure for new environment
  
  • Minimize the volume of legacy data required in the new Exchange environment
  • Establish e-mail retention policies for Exchange mail on day one
  • Reduce migration conversion e-mail storage overheads by up to 80%

Application Migration

Lotus Notes applications are transitioned feature for feature, including the user interface, business logic, workflow, and security, to SharePoint, InfoPath, or ASP.Net Web Part applications using the Unify Composer™ tool. All Lotus Notes applications (template, custom and custom complex) are moved to SharePoint, whose common user interface enables all the applications to function, behave and look the same.

Unify Composer not only provides a like-for-like migration to the Microsoft platform, but it automates most of the conversion process. Thus, little to no additional coding is required, delivering results rapidly, and reducing the requirements placed on IT resources. As a result, most migration projects take significantly less time at substantially less risk that a re-write effort.

• Minimal Disruption
  
  • Like-for-like application migration that represents little to no changes for end users
  • Minimized retraining and immediate end user adoption
• Rapid Platform Adoption
  
  • Enables the business to quickly migrate core applications onto the Microsoft platform, expediting return on investment
• Completeness
  
  • The Lotus Notes application to Microsoft platform migration includes conversion of:-
    
    • Lotus Notes applications to ASP.Net and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
    • All workflow and business logic
    • All documents including rich text and attachments
    • User interface
    • Security

What are the Outcomes?

1. The migration path between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange is easier with the Fujitsu Legacy Modernisation Service.
2. Access to historical messages without overwhelming new infrastructure.
3. The migration minimises disruption to end users, the application user interfaces are replicated like-for-like whilst all messaging is facilitated via the Outlook application.
4. Improved integration with other Microsoft enterprise applications.
5. Ability for the organization to enhance operations using ASP.Net and SharePoint web parts.
6. Share information more easily across the enterprise.
7. Leveraging benefits of new technology

Our Capabilities

Fujitsu's Legacy Modernisation service for migration of Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange is based on the Composer and Dynamic Data Migrator toolsets, created by our partners, Unify and AXS-One.

The delivery team is entirely based in Australia/New Zealand and supported by our partners.

The Fujitsu resources that undertake this work are part of our .Net competency group and project management practice. They are based in each of our Australian regions and New Zealand. The team are able to undertake the Legacy Modernisation both at specific client sites or in our offices depending on the needs of the client.

The team is responsible for:

• Project management
• Application migration
• Toolset usage
• Industrialised testing
• Total solution architecture

Examples and case studies for this offering are available on request.

Interested in Finding Out More?

If you answer "Yes" to any of the following questions, please contact Fujitsu for a more in-depth discussion of our Legacy Modernisation options for Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.

Why Fujitsu?

WE ARE A LEADING SERVICE PROVIDER of information technology and communications solutions. Throughout Australia and New Zealand we partner with our customers to consult, design, build, operate and support business solutions. From strategic consulting to application and infrastructure solutions and services Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand have earned a reputation as the single supplier of choice for leading corporate and government organisations Fujitsu Australia Limited and Fujitsu New Zealand Limited are wholly owned subsidiaries of Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702).

WE HAVE A STRONG LOCAL PRESENCE in all mainland Australian capital cities and have been bringing together development and support environments for a wide range of technologies, as well as professional expertise covering a broad array of technical competencies for over 20 years.

WE ARE COLLABORATIVE TEAM PLAYERS who are flexible and adaptable and can readily fit into any client environment. We work with you, leveraging partnerships with strategic alliances to help tackle your complex business challenges to deliver real business results.

WE FOCUS ON YOUR OUTCOMES and develop an optimal service delivery model and framework of pre-agreed service levels based on your organisations business and budgetary priorities.

WE HAVE A STRONG TRACK-RECORD IN TACKLING CHALLENGES and realisation of tangible and intangible benefits. Many different clients throughout the world have benefited from our techniques to ensure that the desired results are achieved in practice.

Legacy Modernisation Alliance Partner

Fujitsu and TransMigration are trademarks of Fujitsu
IBM, Lotus Notes and Domino are trademarks of IBM,
Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, ASP.Net and Office SharePoint Server are trademarks of Microsoft
AXS-One and Dynamic Data Migrator are trademarks of AXS-One
Unify and Unify Composer are trademarks of Unify