Connecting Exchange to Notes

[MmurphyDallas]

I presently manage a MS Exchange 2003 Enterprise environment. Recently we were purchased by a company who utilizes Lotus Notes. My currectly objective to is to create some sort of connection betweens Notes and Exchange. I have done a fair amount of reading on the Exchange Connector for Notes but most of the documentation looks to be written with migrating Notes to Exchange. I would need the connection to be a permanent solution. Is the Exchange to Notes connector a viable option or are there other options I should look at first. Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt Murphy

 

[lhuegele]

We were acquired in March of 2006 - same thing - we were on Exchange and they were on Notes. Here is what our experience was:

The Lotus Notes Connector is for Outlook, not Exchange! It allows those on Outlook to open Notes mail files on a domino server. It is CRAPOLA! No one could ever get it to function without one problem or another. Because of this, the decision was made to move all Outlook users over to Notes clients. We then planned for the eventual decommissioning of our Exchange server, which we just completed last week! Here's how we did the transition without too much hassle for the users (300+ users!) - The decision was also made to NOT migrate emails from Exchange to Notes because of the time consuming nature of such an undertaking. The new company has a 90day retention policy anyway so it wasn't that bad.

- The first thing we wanted to do was move all of our inbound email traffic that was coming to our Exchange server to start going to the Domino servers. This involved some redirection on the Domino teams part, and a change in our MX records. Domino simply forwarded any emails that came in for our domain to our exchange server.

- As we set-up each user, one at a time, with Notes, we worked closely with the Domino team who would then set each user, one at a time, to have incoming email delivered to notes instead of forwarding to our Exchange server. The users old email address was set-up as an alias internet address so that email to their old email address would still reach them on Notes.

It took us about 30 days to fully migrate all the users to Notes this way but it made sure that there was no interruption to the mail flow.

There is a lot more detail that would take too much time for me to write up, but this should give you the general idea.

Good luck.