November 14, 2007 5:26 AM PST
Want to migrate from Lotus/Domino? Open-Xchange makes it easy
Open-Xchange has announced the Domino20X tool to enable easy migration from IBM's Lotus/Domino to the open-source messaging and collaboration program, Open-Xchange. With all due respect to IBM, Lotus/Domino is (or was - I haven't had to use it since 2001) a (very) heavy messaging system that feels very Big Company and 1980s. Maybe it has become better since I last used it. For anyone other than a 100,000-person enterprise, however, migration may well be on the cards:
Open-Xchange and Pavone have developed a tool, Domino20X, to make it easier for administrators to convert from IBM's Lotus/Domino to the open source Open-Xchange groupware server. The tool, which has been developed as part of a technical collaboration between the two companies, extracts user data, e-mails, contacts, calendar entries and tasks from Domino servers (from version 7) and feeds it into Open-Xchange Server 5.
This is a good move for an open-source company. Make migration simple or, at least, simpler, as enterprise software is rarely simple. Kudos to the Open-Xchange team.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmgRnk5VSO0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI-TiEtcYsw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-qK34CzKjM
Yeah... it's heavy. I'll even grant "very heavy". But even Notes 5 didn't feel at all like PROFS, All-In-One, Wang OFFICE, etc. -- which would be the software that most people who used email in business settings used in the 1980s. But why let reality get in the way of a good put-down of the software that everyone loves to hate.
It's good that there are tools that give customers choices, and there may indeed be legitimate reasons for someone to consider migrating off of Notes, but you haven't stated one.
It's interesting to note that Notes/Domino actually gained market share this year.