MS Transporter Suite for Lotus Notes

[Thinkpad21]

Hi,

Has anyone worked with the MS Transporter Suite for Notes and if they have
any advise or other stuff to look for...

We are in the beginning of a project to migration Lotus Notes to Exchange
for about 30 K users...

We are looking at either using Quest Tools or MS Transporter Suite, and have
to look at the benefits/disadvantages of both and also costing... but before
we even get there, we are looking for past prior experience and how it
went...

Thanks for any comments...

--

[ZVR]

I have used it to migrate about 300 mailboxes from a Linux server. Access to
those was via IMAP. Can't comment on the Lotus-specific operations but these
are general comments that I imagine would apply anyways.

1. Almost non-existent documentation, aside from the official guide which
covers the basics. Pretty good guide at that. But, we hit a couple of
snafu's, and I spent hours and hours and hours researching the issues. God
bless the various Exchange blogs out there... but in terms of official
articles (MS KB, that kind of thing), zero, nada.

2. It uses Powershell and EWS (Exchange Web Services) to "pump" data into
target mailboxes. Basically every message/attachment/etc is "posted" to the
target mailbox, much like OWA does. As such, performance-wise the migration
is very slow. To migrate thousands of mailboxes like that, you will probably
need to split the user list and use several admin workstations at once if
you want to have the least chance of completing the project in a reasonable
time. IMO a MAPI-based tool would have been much more efficient.

3. It only migrates one mailbox at a time! I mean, Microsoft, if you hear
this, this is 2008! I realize this is a free tool, but still, one mailbox at
a time??!?

4. Very resource-intensive! on the admin workstation(s) used for migration.
I suspect this is again because of the Powershell/EWS design. In any case,
it kept crashing on one workstation I was using, until I realized it needed
more RAM (I had 1 gig). Upgraded to 2 GB of RAM on that workstation, then it
was better. Also creates huge logs! that you need to delete periodically or
you will run out of space pretty quickly.

5. Since the logs are in plain text format, it is very hard to comb through
them if something goes wrong. I would have appreciated a "migration history"
type of database associated with this tool, searchable/filterable by
mailbox/account etc. You get the idea.

Bottom line, for the size of your environment, you need something better
than this. 30K+ mailboxes, you should be able to obtain a budget for a
migration suite. Quest is probably the best, but here's a list:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/partners/2007/migrationsolutions.mspx

Good luck!

"Thinkpad21" <think...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:%23jU3TKt...@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...

[mtcr...@gmail.com]

> "Thinkpad21" <thinkpa...@yahoo.com> wrote in message

>
> news:%23jU3TKt...@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...> Hi,
>
> > Has anyone worked with the MS Transporter Suite for Notes and if they have
> > any advise or other stuff to look for...
>
> > We are in the beginning of a project to migration Lotus Notes to Exchange
> > for about 30 K users...
>
> > We are looking at either using Quest Tools or MS Transporter Suite, and
> > have to look at the benefits/disadvantages of both and also costing... but
> > before we even get there, we are looking for past prior experience and how
> > it went...
>
> > Thanks for any comments...
>
> > --

Should we stand up a 2003 box so we can use the previous version of
the migration tools? I'm getting about 5 megs a minute!!! at this
speed this tool is no good for any real projects.
also see this: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2988017&SiteID=17
-Mike Crowley