Most Common Issues of Lotus Notes to Outlook Migration

MS Outlook and Lotus Notes are the names of the two most popular email clients used at an organizational level. Although Outlook serves to be an ideal client for both personal as well as business use, Lotus Notes deployment is restricted to business purposes only. This is due to the number of applications provided by Lotus Notes other than emailing and its high maintenance cost. Also its usage has decreased drastically with time, whereas MS Outlook stands to be the most popular email client in the present arena due to the upgraded set of features it offers. Thus, the users who were using Lotus Notes are now migrating to MS Outlook in order to experience its efficiency at a much-reduced investment cost. Issues Encountered During Lotus Notes to Outlook Migration #1 Error “Maximum Request Length Exceeded” This error is encountered when Transporter Suite is deployed for migrating NSF mailboxes to Exchange server. Reason: Transporter Suite imposes a size limit of 4 GB on the NSF database that needs to be migrated to Exchange server. In case the database exceeds this size limit, this error is likely to occur. Resolution: This error can be resolved by increasing the execution time-out and buffering threshold. This will enable the users to migrate entire Lotus Notes data to MS Exchange. #2 Manual Migration of Notes Contacts Exclusively Lotus Notes allows the manual migration of contacts only to MS Outlook. Reason: The reason behind this is that a user can convert contacts in the form of a CSV file. This CSV file can later on be imported in MS Outlook and NSF address book can be successfully added to it. However, this method cannot be applied for migration of Notes emails, calendars, tasks, etc., as they cannot be sent via CSV file. Hence, Lotus Notes only facilitates conversion of contacts to Outlook manually. #3 Error “The message was migrated without the attachments.” This error is encountered when the Transporter Suite does not convert the associated attachments with the emails. Reason: This error signifies that Transporter Suite only transmits Notes database that is equal to or less than 4 GB. In case the user migrates a Notes database larger than 4 GB, only the mails residing in the database will be migrated and all the attachments will be left out. Resolution: Try to make the size of your NSF database below 4 GB by deleting unwanted items residing in a folder. #4 Unavailability of Desired Output Format Lotus Notes does not offer any output file format in order to migrate its data manually. Reason: The users will not find Outlook PST option in order to perform the manual conversion. Therefore, this tends to be the biggest issue, which arises when a user tends to migrate Lotus Notes data to Outlook format. Resolution: This issue can be resolved by deploying an appropriate third party tool that facilitates the complete conversion of Lotus Notes database to Outlook PST format.