Microsoft Announces New Application and Messaging Migration Tools

As part of its broader strategy to make it easier for Lotus Notes/Domino organizations to move to the Microsoft collaboration platform, Microsoft Corp. today announced a suite of new and updated tools to help organizations analyze their Notes/Domino application environment and move important application data to Microsoft’s collaboration platform.

“Every year Microsoft invests more than $700 million (U.S.) on the Office system of programs, servers and services to ensure our customers get the most value possible from our integrated collaboration platform. Today we are responding to the strong demand we’re seeing from customers using Lotus Notes/Domino who are planning a transition to this platform,” said Kurt DelBene, corporate vice president of the Office Server Group at Microsoft.

These tools, which will be available for free download, include the Microsoft® Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino, Microsoft Data Migrator 2006 for Lotus Domino, and new Windows® SharePoint® Services Application Templates.

In addition, Microsoft announced the immediate availability of updated messaging and calendaring migration and coexistence tools, available now for free download, that include Exchange Connector for Lotus Notes/Domino, Exchange Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes/Domino and Migration Wizard for Lotus Notes/Domino.

Customers are making the strategic business decision to move to Microsoft’s collaboration platform to increase employee productivity, reduce IT costs and improve business processes. Arcelor, a leading player in the global steel industry, recently decided to standardize its 50,000 European users on the Microsoft collaboration platform with the majority of them moving from Lotus Notes and MEMO.

“After a thorough analysis of our environment, we recognized that we could significantly cut costs and increase productivity for our 18,400 employees by replacing it with Microsoft’s integrated collaboration solution,” said Kevin Taylor, principal architect for Internal Technology Outsourcing at Wolters Kluwer.

In addition, worldwide migration solution providers such as Casahl Technology Inc ., Quest Software Inc. and SourceCode Corp. provide complementary solutions to assist these customers in their move. “Over the past eight months we have seen a definite trend of larger organizations choosing to move from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft collaboration platform,” said David Waugh, vice president, product management, Infrastructure Management Solutions at Quest Software.

“Today we are licensing our migration software at a rate averaging 50,000 seats per month, which we see as a strong indicator of the volume of customers moving to Microsoft’s collaboration platform. Customers are looking for a way to quickly and seamlessly move to the Microsoft platform, and Quest is happy to provide solutions that help them meet that need.”