Hugo van Keulen of BM, Netherlands writes about the challenges faced and the solutions implemented during a migration from Lotus Domino to Sharepoint, especially with Domino rich text fields.
BM is a consultancy firm in the field of project management, contract management and building costs management. BM is one of the top 30 consultancy firms in the Netherlands in terms of turnover. BM specialises in the areas of healthcare, infrastructure and commercial and industrial building. BM has 72 employees with offices in Hoofddorp, Zwolle, Dordrecht and Eindhoven.
Since august last year BM is merged with another company which uses Microsoft Sharepoint. BM has all knowledge and project data in Lotus Notes databases and these have to be migrated to Sharepoint.
The “non richtext” fields and the attachments can easily be transferred from Lotus notes to sharepoint lists. However the rich text fields are harder to transfer without loosing the formatting. We prefer to keep the lotus notes layout and this can be achieved by making a PDF file of a lotus notes document and transfer this PDF together with the other attachments and fields to a sharepoint list.
The problem was to make a PDF file of the lotus notes documents. We tried several PDF writers, but this solutions were too slow to export all the documents in a reasonably amount of time. DominoPDF is a very fast solution and therefore the one for this task. Sample code was available along with the product for our specific need and we were able to implement a solution very fast.
About the author
Hugo van Keulen, system administrator and Lotus Notes developer. He is at BM Managers van het bouwproces since 1998.