Connectors for Lotus Notes and Exchange 1

[shelleylu]

Does anyone know of specific 3rd party connectors for connecting Lotus Notes and Exchange?
We currently are running Domino 4.5 and would like to upgrade to 6. However we depend heavily on the Microsoft Exchange 5.5. SP4 connector for Exchange. Microsoft has indicated that they do not officially support Domino 6 with this connector ( i believe there is support for Exchange 2000).
My managers and our business partner do not feel comfortable running on unsupported software. In an Earlier post user llhomme responded to a post about connector problems that there are other 3rd party products out there. I haven't been able to find anything. LLHOMME if you are out there, can you reply to this post,.. or if anyone else can direct me to some 3rd party tools, it would be very much appreciated.

 

[Guy987]

I don't check in every day, so hopefully this will get to you in time to help.

If you already have the Exchange Connector for Lotus Notes 5.5 in place, you can upgrade the client on the Exchange server to any R5 client > 5.08a and if will work fine with the ND6 server. You will still have the same limitations of the current Exchange Connector, but it will work. In our organization we are using an R5.0.11 client on Exchange 5.5 with the connector and with no problems. Our Domino servers are ND 6.0.1. Domino can accept and deliver to an R5 client with no problem.

Migrating from the Exchange Connector for Lotus Notes for 5.5 to 2000 can be a bit painful. In our organization, we do not use the default SMTP address generated by the connector and had to spend some time with MicroSoft to get the 2000 connector to work in a test environment. After testing a migration, we found scenarios that we had not tested that we are still in process on, so the verdict as to how easily this will be completed when we actually cut over is still out.

http://www.tfstech.com/

has a third party connector. We did not go with it as we ultimately were trying to keep from adding another issue to the mix.

Some things that you can do to make the connector work better:

Let Domino send it's own SMTP mail. There is no need to go through the problem of having users address mail in the username@domain.com@Exchange as is suggested in the M$ documentation. There is no benefit to "leveraging" the connector to transfer SMTP mail - users never get used to addressing mail this way. Simply set up the normal SMTP server documents to send to your outbound relay or ISP relay and let the Domino server send on it's own. In ND 6, you can set the server connection document on the MIME-> Advanced-> Advanced Outbound Messages Tab the Notes items to be removed from headers: field to @SMTP@Exchange and @Exchange and any outbound message will strip off this information regardless of whether the user replied to a message or forgot that they don't need the @Exchange. This forces all outbound mail to use only Domino to transfer SMTP mail. We set this up to alleviate user confusion and to take off the load of our outbound messages (some 8-10,000 per day) off of the Exchange connector. This assists the reliability of the connector significantly. Prior to this, we restarted the connector every couple of days, - now, almost never.

On the person document for the Exchange connector, change the Format preference for incoming mail: field to read "Prefers MIME Mail". This will cause Domino to format all messages that have to go through the connector to Exchange to MIME mail on the Domino end, rather than receiving RTF into Exchange and having to have the Exchange Connector make the conversion. Things like Color, font sizing, underlining, italics... start to work more reliably. If you do this though, you will have to change the Connection Document on the MIME-> Settings By Character Set Groups-> Font Options to something other than Monospace... otherwise Exchange users will get something that looks rather drab.

Of course, the best solution to the whole thing is to migrate all of the Exchange users to the Domino server and let them use the Outlook client to connect to the Domino server using the iNotes Access for Microsoft Outlook dll's. You can find a redbook for this at

http://redbooks.ibm.com.

Much more robust and reliable way of handling e-mail. Certainly a heck of a lot easier than Migrating Exchange 5.5 to 2000... But I'm not biased or anything....

Leo L'Homme, PCLP