Migration
liberation from notes
EscapeNotes' automated tools make easy work of moving your Lotus Notes databases to their right destination. It is not possible to load millions of records and their metadata in a matter of days, not months. Reliably and securely.
Once the records are in your cloud (such as Azure), your users will be able to use right away a familiar google-style search interface to find what they need.
But that’s just the starting point. The EscapeNotes approach decouples the process of preserving data and metadata from leveraging that data by building new apps. Decommissioning your Notes infrastructure no longer requires to boil the ocean.
Why not just use CSVs?
Exporting to CSV works if you only have a few thousand relatively simple docs. Otherwise your migration will be:
1. Inaccurate: data on the disk rarely the same as what you see in the Form. Plus it's hard to reconnect response documents.
2. Incomplete: no file attachments, rich text, images and special characters, and it's hard to do subsets of documents or fields.
3. Confusing: you'll have hundreds of fields without labels and no idea where they were in a table/section/position on the form.
4. Time intensive: given the speed of Notes and the health of your Domino server, it can take hours -- every time you try.
And that's if everything goes well. You'll run into "Notes-isms" where a few documents will simply not show up in your views or you will only retrieve a portion of the fields -- the larger the number of documents, the greater that chance. Plus you'll need resourced with Lotus Notes Designer skills. The answer is to license specialized tools, with a team of Lotus Notes experts behind them.
How hard can it be?
Lotus Notes is not relational. It doesn’t have records, it has “documents”. It matters because:
- No key is required: a Purchase Order labeled “Chrysler - Jeep” may refer to a vendor known as “Jeep USA”.
- There is no normalization
- Structure and data typing are loose
- Notes allows the association of an unrelated document to a “parent” through the equivalent of a link.
- Big blobs: documents contain file attachments, images and rich text. Gigabyte databases are common.
- Big data: Notes databases may contain 100,000's of documents, each with documents containing 100 or more fields.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that capturing such data in another database is hard. The issues include:
- Identifying which databases, documents and fields are worthwhile preserving
- Mapping hundreds of fields with potentially cryptic names
- Normalizing Notes data to match target relational entities
- Cleansing incorrect data types and required missing fields in the target entity
- Cleansing data that must be a key in the target entity (like company names)
- Handling millions of documents and gigabytes of data
All this at a speed matching the agility requirements of the project...
Why use EscapeNotes?
There are many reasons to use us:
We have decades of experience with Lotus Notes. Our CTO was there at the birth of Lotus Notes late 1989. The who’s who of computer journalists gathered in a small amphitheater in Cambridge. The OS/2 Notes server cord was wrapped around his ankle ready to unplug the computer at the first sign of a possible crash during the demo. Despite packing cutting edge features that wouldn’t be seen anywhere else for a decade, it did not.
We have automation tools which take much of the pain out of migrations. These tools ensure that all documents are migrated, safely, at more than ten times the speed than would be possible otherwise. We can also hope on the target platform side; for examples our tools help automate the process of creating custom fields in platforms like Salesforce.
We enable you to decouple the decommissioning of your Lotus Notes databases from the readiness of your target solutions by offering an easy-to-use warehousing facility where your data can reside temporarily or permanently. An intuitive google-style interface means a super easy transition for your users.
Most importantly, you'll find that the EscapeNotes team is made up of highly specialized, professional members who all go the extra mile to ensure that Lotus Notes migrations are as painless as they can be. After all, that’s all we do.