How to Efficiently Migrate from Lotus Notes to Office 365

Lotus Notes has been one of the conspicuous decision of clients because of its development and productive email administration. It offers the clients to utilize email highlights alongside contact administration, arrangements, undertaking, logbook and so forth. Countless depend on its administration to complete electronic correspondence. It keeps up the mail box in its exclusive organization, NSF documents. IBM Notes works in relationship with Domino Server, which is capable behind its maintenance. In any case, certain issues have been watched that hamper client’s assignment while utilizing Lotus Notes application. Thus, numerous clients relocate from Lotus Notes to more productive and solid customer application. According to observation, Office 365 has become the choice of most of the users for email client migration.

In this blog, we will find out what makes them inclined more towards Office 365 and how to move files from Lotus Notes to Office 365 without any data loss. A third party tool, Lotus Notes to Office 365 Converter is also discussed to carry out migration effortlessly.

Reasons to Migrate from Lotus Notes

A number of reasons that follow from convert NSF to Office 365 migration have been noticed, which makes the user to carry out the migration between email clients. Some of the major reasons to switch from Lotus Notes include:

1. Large storage – Lotus Notes require a large amount of RAM to store the mailboxes. The user find it expensive to install heavy RAM and then search for an alternate email clients like Office 365, which requires limited and affordable RAM. So need to Switch from NSF to Office 365.
2. Synchronization Issue – IBM Notes suffers much due to poor synchronization with its Domino server. It causes inconsistency in the email service and diminishes its performance. This issue is generally to held one to export Lotus Notes to office 365.
3. Formatting Issues – Lotus Notes is not able to render every HTML/CSS script efficiently. It leads to the formatting issue in emails as well as the associated attachments. It becomes difficult to maintain data consistency using this faulty rendering.
4. Client Migration – Lotus Notes has its propitiatory file format i.e., NSF format, which has very narrow use among applications. It may be possible that the user many need to some other email client that offers file format, which is widely used by other applications also.

Benefits to migrate from NSF to Office 365

Office 365 offers a number of additional benefits, which makes Lotus Notes users realize that switching to Office 365 would be a better choice in every terms. Some of the advantages experienced by the users after migration include:

1. Migrating the email client of Office 365 allows the user to easily access the Lotus Notes mailbox without any loss of emails or other data items.
2. The users can access the on-premise emails of Lotus Notes from anywhere using Office 365 I.,e. Wider accessibility is offered by Office 365.
3. Office 365 also offers various useful services such as VOIP calls over Skype, OneDrive storage facility etc.

Approach to Switch from Lotus Notes to Office 365

The Lotus Notes users can easily migrate NSF to Office 365 and access all the mail items without any difficulty. The migration can be carried out in the following two ways:

A. Manual Conversion

The user can manually choose to move the mailbox to Office 365 using IMAP connection. The following steps when followed carefully leads to an efficient data migration of Lotus Notes NSF to Office 365:

1. Create a backup of the NSF files, which need to be migrated to Office 365
2. For every user profile, create a new mailbox.
3. Now, enable the IMAP settings in following way:

   i. In Lotus Notes, Browse Domino Administrator > Configuration tab

   ii. Open Server file, which runs on IMAP

   iii. Click Ports > Internet Ports > Mail tab

   iv. Change TCP/IP Port Value Status to Enabled

   v. Click Save to apply the changes made

4. Connect to IMAP connector for synchronizing Lotus Notes mailbox

This manual stepwise procedure when performed carefully allows to migrate the mailbox from Lotus Notes to Office 365.However, this approach is followed by certain limitations such as:

Limitations of Manual Approach

1. The Lotus Notes calendar entities cannot be migrated by the manual steps. They need to be migrated manually, which is much time consuming.
2. IMAP migration is limited to the file size i.e., maximum 1 GB data of mailbox can be transferred NSF emails to Office 365 using this approach.
3. Exporting the data by IMAP Connector migrates only the online data. Various important offline IBM Notes files are left out by the tool due to lack of offline connectivity.
4. In case of Lotus Notes client disability or connection issues, the manual approach cannot be used to migrate data.
5. Sometimes, the data can also be lost while carrying out migration from Lotus Notes to Office 365 using IMAP connector approach.
6. Each step is associated with some technicality, so the procedure requires a technical expert to perform migration from NSF file to Office 365 safely and efficiently.

B. Automated Conversion

To overcome various limitations and risks associated with the manual method, various third party tools for Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration are available in the industry. The users can simply migrate all the data items of NSF files such as emails, contacts, calendar, appointments etc to Office 365. No data loss or data corruption is encountered using efficient third party tools. One such reliable tool is Lotus Notes to Office 365 Migration Tool, which assures to migrate batch NSF files to office 365 within few simple steps.

Conclusion

Due to the latest cloud offered services, many users prefer to migrate to the cloud based Office 365. Users who have been using various email clients for a long time are now migrating to Office 365 ti experience wider accessibility, web-based face and several advance features. To maintain the access to older mailbox, a constant search for efficient migration is carried out by them. In this blog, we have aimed to answer various migration related queries such as need of migration, Office 365 advantages over Lotus Notes. Both manual and automated methods to carry out Lotus Notes to Office 365 conversion have been explained.