I've known for awhile that I'd be migrating us off of Lotus Notes and into Gmail, or more specifically, Google Apps education edition, which is free for non-profits with 7 GBs of space per user. Why pay for Lotus and a Blackberry Enterprise Server and deal with all of the headaches associated with both, when Gmail more than meets our needs for free? I know there are some die-hard Lotus defenders out there, and if any happen to come across this blog, I'm really not interested in any pro-Lotus rants. All the security you've convinced yourself is there because of the mind-numbingly complex interface, it ain't there. If you've built some complex application using it, more power to you, but for anyone looking for just basic email functionality, Lotus is a poor choice.
But I didn't write this just to pick on Lotus, I thought I'd share a bit about the migration. If you talk to anyone at Google, they'll assure you that it's easy to migrate from Lotus to Gmail, that the users can do it themselves. But you know nothing's easy with Lotus. It took a lot of trial and error, but I eventually figured out how to transfer emails. What I did was to create an Email Account in Outlook that pulls from the Domino server using IMAP (don't use POP, or you'll only get emails marked as new). Connecting to Domino using IMAP didn't become available until some version of Release 6, so you're mail files will all need to be that version or later. The password to connect to IMAP is the Internet Password. Once you've created the account in Outlook, right-click on the root of the IMAP mail folder and subscribe to all of the folders. I had to create a new folder in Lotus called Sent Mail and copy everything from their Sent mail there to get it via the IMAP connection. It ends up in Sent Mail in Google. Then you can use the Google Email Uploader to transfer everything from Lotus via Outlook into Gmail.
Google Apps does provide a function to import using IMAP, but I could not get it functioning with Lotus. I kept getting an unknown error message in Google, which didn't give me much to go on, and I tried tweaking every variable that I thought might affect it. If you can get that to work, definitely go that route instead. The Outlook route works and for our organization, with only ~90 users, it was feasible to go around one by one and transfer that way, but any org with more users will probably not want to go this route. One thing we did which eased the transition was to set up users Google accounts to pull their new email from Lotus using pop3, which for some reason did work from Google to Lotus, and then transfer their historical mail with the Outlook trick. That way we were able to start moving people into Google even before our email was actually re-directed there. By the time we officially switched our MX records, a lot of people were already migrated and I was feeling pretty confident about the change.
Well that's my overview of the transition process. Not everyone will even have Outlook to use like this, and if so, you might want to try Thunderbird instead, which I believe is freeware. If anyone is considering or in the process of moving to Google and looking for more details, feel free to contact me and I'll help if I can.
