Migrating from Notes to Exchange (or, for that matter, from any vendor’s messaging system to any other) is not an easy task. It typically requires substantial amounts of effort on the part of IT staff, lots of work for e-mail admins on weekends, the potential for data loss and substantial disruption to end users.

To overcome these difficulties, Essential Computing has developed TransVault, a migration tool based on ZANTAZ’s EAS archiving solution. Essential, based in England, is ZANTAZ’s largest partner in Europe and has deployed EAS in more than 300 implementations across Europe, including deployments at major companies like UBS, Maersk and the European Commission.

TransVault works by first archiving Notes data into EAS. After archiving the data, TransVault, which uses the EAS API, then translates the archived Notes data into a format that is compatible with Exchange. TransVault re-writes e-mail addresses so that they are compatible with new addressing conventions or domains, as in the case of a Notes-enabled organization being acquired by an Exchange-enabled one. Folder structures and access rights are also migrated to the Exchange environment. Additional TransVault modules are also available that will migrate encrypted e-mails with minimal user intervention and another that will migrate local Notes address books into Outlook.

The fundamental advantages of TransVault over conventional Notes-to-Exchange migration methods are significantly reduced impacts on IT efforts required to complete the migration; the ability for end users to continue working during the migration with virtually no downtime or loss of messaging functionality; and reduced storage requirements through data compression and de-duplication of data when Notes data is entered into the EAS archive.

For organizations that need to implement a Notes-to-Exchange migration as seamlessly as possible, TransVault is definitely worth a look.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.