Exchange Update Aims to Simplify Notes Migrations

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Microsoft this week is updating a two-year-old toolset meant to smooth the migration for customers switching from Lotus Notes and Domino to its own competing products.

Dubbed the Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino, the free package provides tools designed to ease the transition to Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server and the Office productivity applications suite from IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, according to company statements.

Whereas the Transporter Suite previously enabled systems administrators to migrate as many as tens of thousands of users at a time, the most significant change in the update aims to greatly expand that.

“The update enhances the suite’s scalability so that organizations with hundreds of thousands of users can now easily migrate,” Clint Patterson, a director in Microsoft’s unified communications group, told InternetNews.com.

While Microsoft’s latest update may seem overly optimistic, that may not really be the case, says one analyst.

“We continue to see active migration from Domino to Exchange, and we continue to see demand for tools which expedite the process,” Matt Cain, research vice president and lead e-mail analyst at Gartner, told InternetNews.com in an e-mail interview.

Indeed, according to Microsoft, migrations have risen dramatically just recently. “The thing that’s driving us to expand Transporter Suite is we’re seeing an increased volume of companies switching,” Patterson said.

That rhetoric is echoed by his boss. “In the last six months of 2007, in the enterprise customer segment alone, more than 300 firms representing 2.8 million people began the move to Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server and the Office suite,” Chris Capossela, corporate vice president in the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement. “That’s a 164% increase over the same period in 2006 [and] we’re already on track to exceed these numbers in 2008,” he added.

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