How To Proceed With Migration From Lotus Notes Archiving

This is a discussion that is a bit like stepping back in time first in order to continue forward because as an entity, Lotus no longer exists. Here’s the step back: IBM purchased Lotus outright in 1995, primarily due to development and continued maturation of Lotus Notes, which was first launched in 1989 as a client/server collaboration to provide business solutions for email, calendars, contacts, forums and other needs to help business communications run smoothly.

With the influx of investment from the purchase, Lotus, then becoming the Lotus Development division of IBM, was able to revolutionize the product to carry it successfully into the twenty-first century. However, since it was still a platform based on 90s-vintage technology, it was only a matter of time before industry recognized its antiquity and began migrating to other, newer, competitive platforms, leaving Lotus Notes archiving in the dust.

In November 2012, IBM officially announced the end of life of Lotus Notes (the client) and Domino (the server) as a collaborative, paired offering. Four months later, IBM announced the launch of IBM Notes 9 Special Edition as the complete replacement of Lotus Notes and Domino, designed from the ground up as a new technology of collaborative business communications management and archiving as a client/server cross-platform.

IBM Notes was designed to easily migrate from Lotus Notes so that all data from Lotus would integrate to the new platform without hindrance. However, it is also possible to migrate from Lotus Notes to other competitive platforms. There are a number of third-party providers of tools to migrate either their proprietary replacement email archiving solutions, or are universal to many different migration destination solutions, accommodating everything from an individual to an enterprise-wide migration.

Most of the available migration tools have detailed, step by step instructions to migrate either to an onsite archival client-server for medium to large enterprises with hundreds of mailboxes, or to a cloud-based solution for small to medium enterprises with no hardware or software requirements onsite.

The difference is primarily based on enterprise size, or more to the point, the number of mailboxes needed now and anticipated in the future. In either migration to onsite or cloud-based solutions, the migration choice ought to be made on the basis of current need and anticipated future requirements of scalability. Both mailbox numbers as well as volume of data expected to be handled for both emails and their attachment files need to be considered for this decision.

Security of data during the migration will not be a problem with either choice as long as the new archiving service provider has proven performance with security protocols.

While we can bid a fond farewell to Lotus Notes for its twenty-plus years of performance, which was really based upon ideas developed even before the personal computer appearance on the business stage, we can also look forward to the continued, solid support of email archiving needs from IBM. Lotus Notes archiving has left a legacy of which IBM can be proud. For more information, you can follow the link provided below: Lotus Notes Archive.