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Lotus Notes -> Alfresco Migration

danilo

Hello,

I'm currently evaluating the migration effort from Lotus Notes to Alfresco.

I read this news article in the past where the Swansea Housing Association made this migration, but all they state is that:

We have entered the second phase of a large migration of data from Lotus Notes to an XML format, which we expect to finish by the end of next month.

I have a considerable amount of lotus notes databases not only with information created directly on lotus notes, but with attached documents and files.

Can anyone share some experience or give a few words on this? What would be the best way to migrate this data?

Thanks in advance,

Danilo

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Comments

ronnyt

Hi Danilo,

one of the reasons why Notes is a bad CMS, is that it allows to attach, and even worse, embed office documents into a Notes document. To migrate this content, you would:
- map the Notes document itself to an XML document (not too hard to do, Notes is a structured format)
- extract attachments
- extra embedded objects
- create links (URL) from the XML Notes base document to what you extracted as OLE documents
We did something similar at BASF, who built a custom DMS on Notes.

fdesrosiers

Is there a programmatically way of
doing this?

The lotus database has a gazillion documents.

Fred

ronnyt

yes there is, Notes has an API. YOu have to do it on a Windows server, as you need to extract OLE objects or attachments via the Microsoft api's and tools.

Sorry about the late reply. Did not see your remark..
Ronny.

tyve

I've started a project in the forge to develop tools for integration of Lotus Notes with Alfresco. Our first goal is to develop a tools to export Lotus Notes documents to a Alfresco Content Package (acp) that could be imported into Alfresco.

http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/notestools/

billq

I've been through conversions of millions of documents. If your focus is records management and retention (not heavily revising or creating new documents from old documents), I suggest converting Notes documents to a static, fixed content format while in the native Notes environment - like take them to PDF files. Then, extract and attach or associate typical Notes document level metadata (create dates, modified dates, creator, source database, conversions dates, etc.). Of course, add meaningful documents fields/metadata.

The goal is to end up with both a rich visual representation of the documents (rich text, etc.) as well as a rich metadata representation. If you use much Notes rich text you have no chance of ever getting visual fidelity once you leave Notes - so build the final doc in there.

After that, send the files to the appropriate Alfresco folders and let the index engine do its thing on both (fixed) content (pdf) and the structured metadata fields. This will give you rich searching by metadata and/or content.

Finally, consider exploiting the Alfresco RM features by including disposition/expiration, etc. as part of the folder/document properties. Most likely, the documents are already at different points in their retention lifecycle so that should be preserved on a per-document level.

How many docs do you have to convert?

tyve

We are talking about thousands of documents, not millions i our case. Our approach is a lot like you statesbut how did you import you convertet files and metadata into Alfresco?

If you did it with the Alfresco API, could you post some code examples?