How to analyze designs in Migrator for Notes to SharePoint

Hi. My name is Randy Rempel. And I'm a senior product manager. Today, I'm going to demonstrate how to analyze designs in Migrator for Notes to SharePoint. I'm going to make suggestions that will fall into the scope of most application migrations. Standard Notes applications typically only require content migration. Highly complex Notes applications often require a complete rewrite after spending considerable time on capturing business requirements. In between these two extremes fall many of the Notes applications that are custom-developed but can still be migrated to SharePoint. Let's take a look at the design details that was captured for one database. I've already run the design scan on this database. Here, I can see the count of forms, views of folders, and agents in the database. This screen displays more details about the design elements. Now, it looks like there are many forms in this database. In a previous video, I explained how to look at the count of documents for each form. Thus, you may find that only some forms are used to create content. Other forms may have very few or no documents. For example, the lookup form may only be used for storing keyword values in a dropdown list. The search form and search results template do not need to be recreated in SharePoint. It already has a very powerful search engine that includes search screens. $$View template forms also do not need to be recreated. These are either configured within SharePoint and/or stylesheets can be used. Views can be migrated using the MNSP tool. But we only need to recreate the views that will have data in SharePoint. Also, Lotus Notes databases may contain hidden views. These are typically named with parentheses, like attachment lookup. These hidden views may not need to be recreated. They are often used within the code of the application. The contents and personal folders in Lotus Notes may not need to be copied over during the migration. Users may need to recreate this on their own. Many simple Notes agents do not need to be recreated in SharePoint, either. There's sometimes a similar built-in capability available in SharePoint. Other times, there is no component capable of providing the same feature. However, there are some agents that act like workflows. Normally, you can identify these as scheduled agents. Sometimes, the agents are called after a document is saved within Lotus Notes. These agents may need to be recreated as .net timer jobs. But it may be better to consider using built-in SharePoint workflows or more advanced third-party workflow solutions. These solutions need to be discussed early in a migration project. Script libraries may or may not need to be recreated in SharePoint. It depends on what they are used for. You may see the same script libraries in use across many of the custom applications in your environment. The Field section displays the list of Notes fields and the form or subform that contains each one. You may want to look at the actual form or subform design in the Notes Designer Client if you need to see a deeper level of design detail about fields. The content in the File section can vary greatly. Some of this content will now appear as CSS, JavaScript, XSL, XML, or other types of files in newer versions of Lotus Notes applications. These files may not be able to function in SharePoint the way they did on Lotus Notes. There usually is not very much code in the database script. If there is code, you probably have a more heavily customized Notes application. Pages sometimes contain content that could also appear on wiki pages. However, they often contain content used for CSS, JavaScript, XSL, or XML. You probably need to review what each page is used for to determine if it can be used in SharePoint. By now, you probably understand that only the high-level details about design elements is stored in MNSP. This information is very helpful for an initial understanding of what the Notes application does and what needs to be considered before migrating it to SharePoint. You should contact the Notes developers and/or the application owner when you believe that a Notes application appears to have a lot of customizations. This is also why computed design complexity ratings are not always accurate. Spending a small amount of time looking at the design analysis information and even looking at the application design in the Notes Designer Client will give you a much better understanding of how complex a Notes application really is.