Book Image

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1

By : Barry Max Rosen, Bennie Gibson, Brad Schauf, David Byrd, Dick McCarrick, Joseph Anderson, Tim Speed
Book Image

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1

By: Barry Max Rosen, Bennie Gibson, Brad Schauf, David Byrd, Dick McCarrick, Joseph Anderson, Tim Speed

Overview of this book

<p>With Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1, IBM has once again provided business users with an intuitive, fully integrated platform to enhance each user's experience with business communications, while reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increasing Return on Investment (ROI). You can create and share information effectively to make quick business decisions and streamline the way they work. It is no longer just an email tool, but a means of extending business communications to a new level. In order to utilize all the powerful features of the new release, you need to upgrade your existing system to Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1.<br /><br />Written by senior architects and specialists of IBM Software Services for Lotus, this book will be your guide and enable you to quickly upgrade your existing system and leverage the full capabilities of Lotus Notes 8.5.1. The authors explore the enhanced productivity tools available with this release by integrating word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets into a seamless unit with your messaging and collaboration solution.<br /><br />The book starts with an overview of Lotus Notes and Domino, including all the exciting features in the new version. You will learn to utilize the efficient productivity tools that are shipped with Lotus Notes client, and discover the updates in Domino server. You will learn the specific steps needed to upgrade to Lotus Notes 8.5.1 with detailed explanations so that you can upgrade from any previous Lotus Notes and Domino release.<br /><br />Additional focus emphasizes the enhanced features available in 8.5.1 from a Domino perspective to reduce the overall costs of managing and deploying the Domino infrastructure. The Domino environment has been enhanced to leverage new technologies to increase performance, reduce storage costs, and provide a robust environment to surface information via the web browser or the rich client. Integration with other Lotus and IBM products &ndash; including Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, and Lotus Sametime &ndash; is covered later in the book. These products are all converging to become the next generation of people productivity solutions.<br /><br />This book shows you how to delve into the world of SOA, as the authors demonstrate how Lotus Notes can be part of a SOA strategy that can accelerate business integration and generate value. You will realize the value of your investment in Lotus Notes 8.5.1 when you learn to leverage the full capabilities of Lotus Notes 8.5.1 and quickly move from your existing technology base to this new feature-rich platform.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 The Upgrader's Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

CMT Inspector for Lotus Notes


Your Domino infrastructure gets more complex every day, and effectively managing through that complexity can save your firm time and money. Before making upgrades/additions/wholesale changes to your Domino environment, gain the knowledge you need regarding what legacy applications exist today, with granular information on critical metrics such as usage, access, and attachments. Easily identify opportunities for improved storage and security policies based on real-world results that point to changed business needs, falling usage/access, and so on. CMT Inspector provides the inspection and analysis you need to not only justify the legacy environment, but also effectively plan for future investment options. CMT Inspector provides the following functionalities:

  • Usage reports

  • Security reports

  • Server statistics

  • E-mail statistics

  • Code search and comparison

  • Content analysis

  • Application design analysis

  • User surveys

  • Application Template Matching

  • Notes Upgrade Validation

  • Extensive Code Validation Rules Engine

  • Code flowcharting

  • Export to access

  • Design and Sophistication Indexes

  • Express and advanced settings

  • Usage analysis

  • Redundant failover logic

Will your code break when you upgrade?

CMT Inspector contains an extensive Rules Filtering Engine with hundreds of rules that can be leveraged to find out if your applications will work when you upgrade. These rules can be modified and updated based on your environment. Furthermore, unlike simple searching that is performed by other products, CMT Inspector Rules can be tied to code snippets, which can be executed to give you an even better understanding of the code in your Notes environment. The following figure shows the Code Inspector at work:

Design search, user surveys, and flowcharting

All code can be flowcharted and exported to Visio for much better analysis.

Reports and export

CMT Inspector comes with an extensive collection of reports that can be automatically generated. Furthermore, all data can be exported to Microsoft Access for further reporting and querying. This means that almost any report can be generated on the fly.

CMT for Public Folders

You have business-critical information stored in Exchange Public Folders. You have to migrate to Lotus Notes, but, how do you migrate the data in the Public Folders?

Making your mail migrations from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Domino easier is a snap with Binary Tree's CMT for Public Folders. This solution provides a simple and user-friendly means of migrating a public folder hierarchy to a single database.

The data in a Microsoft Exchange Public Folder often has significant value that has been protected with permissions, based on the identity stores in Exchange's directory. CMT for Exchange Public folders was created to help companies recover the intellectual capital often found in Public Folders. CMT not only takes data from the Public Folders, but can also mimic the permissions that existed on the Exchange servers in brand new Domino databases. CMT migrates the standard Exchange document types, including mail messages, calendar events, journal items, tasks, and notes. If your Public Folders contain forms that have been modified to include additional fields and data types, the CMT tool can be customized to migrate this data, as well.

CMT for Notes

The Binary Tree Common Migration Tool (CMT) migrates data from one e-mail system to another. The tool can be used to migrate from numerous e-mail systems to Lotus Notes, and like the DUS tool, CMT has the ability to migrate both Server-based data and end user-based data.

Binary Tree's Common Migration Tool for Notes builds on 14 years of outstanding e-mail and calendar/schedule migration solutions from Binary Tree. To date, millions of users world-wide have been migrated to Lotus Notes with Binary Tree's CMT for Notes tool.

CMT for Notes offers several business benefits:

  • An enterprise migration solution that can manage large migrations (up to 50,000 users have been migrated at one time). There is no limit to the number of users that can be imported from a source directory.

  • Wizards set up specific functions, such as importing users, registration to the Domino directory, the end user migration, and the server-to-server migration.

  • The ablility to create mail files during the registration process.

  • Date filtering for migrating mail, calendar, and tasks during an Exchange server-to-server migration.

  • The process can be rolled out in two steps: user registration and user migration.

  • Customized data types for migration that also include mail, calendar, notes, journal, tasks, and contacts, depending on individual needs, space, and time.

  • It is possible to schedule users and/or groups to migrate at specific times, thereby limiting network load and support calls.

  • Migrations do not require end users. The Administrator can perform the migration, cutting down on your IT department's time and expense.

  • Detailed logs with extensive error reporting help administrators identify, interpret, and resolve issues.

CMT for Coexistence

By off-loading most of the traffic from the Microsoft Exchange Notes Connector, Binary Tree's CMT for Coexistence yields a more stable and reliable connection between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.

The most popular and highly functional connectivity solution between Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes environments is the Notes Connector for Microsoft Exchange. This solution addresses e-mail, calendar, scheduling and task data exchange, automated directory synchronization, and free/busy lookup between Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes environments.

To overcome issues reported by many customers using the Microsoft Notes Connector, Binary Tree's solution greatly enhances fidelity of mail exchange and improves connectivity reliability. This is accomplished by a series of configuration and programmatic changes in the environment.

iCal is supported with the advent of Exchange 2000 and Notes 6. iCal is the standard for the encoding of a calendar messages in SMTP format. This allows e-mail and calendaring to be sent via SMTP, which greatly decreases the stress on the Microsoft Connector, improving data fidelity.

What does CMT for Lotus/Exchange Coexistence do?

CMT for Coexistence offloads all mail traffic from the Microsoft Notes Connector using SMTP and MIME encoding, effectively bypassing the inefficient Rich Text conversion used by the Microsoft Exchange Notes Connector. MIME encoding is much more efficient, preserving 100% fidelity.

CMT for Coexistence offloads all calendar traffic by encoding the message in iCal format and passing it via SMTP, instead of through the Microsoft Notes Connector.

What does the Microsoft Notes Connector do when integrated with CMT for Lotus/Exchange Coexistence?

  • Directory synchronization

  • Free/Busy lookups

  • Never crashes and has the ability to scale to an unlimited amount of users

CMT for Domains

Your domain infrastructure is a vital asset, and one that should be protected. Your IT environment is unique, which means that you need something designed with adaptability in mind.

Enter Binary Tree's CMT for Domains, Users, Servers, and Desktops. It is a solution that expedites the conversion between platforms, while diminishing the impact on your IT resources. A user-friendly administrator tool requiring virtually no end user interaction, CMT for Domains, Servers, Users, and Desktops will enable you to automate the entire migration lifecycle in minutes.

Utilizing CMT for Domains, Servers, Users, and Desktops, the following processes can be accomplished with the click of a button:

  • Entire environment and user audit: Wholly automates the replacement of users' present naming structure to the new one.

  • All-encompassing jurisdiction of the migration process: Grants the Administrator a complete overview of the migration life-cycle, providing meticulous data with process information based on migration phases or users.

  • Instigates the rename of multiple users to the new hierarchical name/upgrade: The practice of migrating and/or consolidating Lotus Notes Domains is habitually escorted by altering end users' hierarchical naming structures. Commonly, a Lotus Notes Administrator performs the process of Lotus Notes Domain migration by using a multifaceted, lingering process provided by Lotus. CMT for Domains, Users, Servers, and Desktops condenses this process, accomplishing the task quickly and efficiently, but with the minimal amount of effort.

  • Notes desktop update: Programmed as an e-mail message containing a button for each user to click, users' desktop information (server names for databases, user accesses, mail file and personal address book, location documents, connection documents, and so on) are automatically updated to the new infrastructure information with one click.

  • Notes port: Runs on the Domino server and by design, replaces all reference to each migrated user's old infrastructure information with the new one in the users mail database. (This includes fields in mail messages, calendar, meetings, and to-dos.)

Additionally, you can:

  • Move users/applications to a different Notes Domain/Domino Server and amend the Domino Directory to reflect the move

  • Monitor the rename process

  • Monitor the move progress

  • Forget about digging through help files looking for answers

Never before has a consolidation of multiple Lotus Notes Domains been more straight-forward. CMT for Domains, Users, Servers, and Desktops consists of everything a Lotus Notes Administrator needs to move users from an existing domain to a new one. Furthermore, as a result of the migration using CMT, users will appear to have always lived on the new domain.