The Lotus Notes Era
In the early days of our existence,
Binary Tree ventured into the challenging and complex world of
email migration by creating products that facilitated change. In the mid-1990s, we developed and marketed a number of separate tools for migrating mail, calendar, and contacts migrated from a source system to Lotus Notes.
This approach initially satisfied the market need; however, it also proved challenging for customers who had multiple messaging environments in place, such as Outlook Express, MS Mail, and CC:Mail. In late 1998, while migrating a customer with a myriad of different email systems to Lotus Notes, we decided that the only rational solution was to create a comprehensive migration product. The migration challenges presented by our customers paved the way for us to create the Binary Tree Common Migration Toolkit (CMT).
Over the next four years, we continued to advance the capabilities of CMT and the names Binary Tree and CMT became some of the most recognizable names in the world of messaging migration, as we became a key enabler to organizations that were transforming their messaging and collaboration capabilities. Our list of customers was rapidly growing to include the “who’s who” of the corporate world.
Evolving to Facilitate Merger & Acquisition Integrations 
In the early 2000s, we recognized that the migration trend was beginning to expand beyond just migrations to Lotus Notes. Corporate mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, re-branding, and other events created a need for an enterprise-grade migration solution within Lotus Notes. So we developed the
CMT for Domains product so that customers going through a merger, acquisition or divestiture could streamline how they migrated, consolidated, or separated diverse Domino domains. While CMT for Domains focused on
Domino-to-Domino merger integration, our product line would eventually evolve to support
Domino-to-Exchange and
Exchange-to-Exchange merger integrations as well.
The Notes Exodus Era
Also in the early 2000s, another trend was slowly emerging: migrations to Microsoft Exchange. With IBM focusing less on Notes and Domino and diluting the Lotus brand and value, and Microsoft emphasizing Exchange and Outlook more as an enterprise messaging solution, some of our Notes migration customers approached us about a migration tool from Notes and Domino to Outlook and Exchange.
In response to the market demand, we created
CMT for Exchange, an enterprise-scale migration solution that met the needs and the requirements of end users and administrators alike. The combination of fidelity, scalability, and manageability made CMT for Exchange the product of choice for the largest Domino to Exchange migration ever performed, for one the largest global financial firms, which had over 180,000 users worldwide.
As our experience with migrations to Exchange grew, we learned that as enterprises embarked on Domino-to-Exchange migrations, they required extensive interoperability (or “coexistence”) between the two diverse systems so that their end-users would experience a highly functional and seamless transition process. While there were tools available for temporary
coexistence between Domino and Exchange, we aimed our sights on creating an enterprise-class coexistence solution. The result was
CMT for Coexistence. By the mid-2000s, the CMT product suite became a true enterprise messaging migration solution suite. In recognition of that fact, the abbreviation CMT was changed to stand for Complete Migration Technology.
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Today's blog post was originally posted on June 21, 2011 on Perry Hiltz's wildly popular blog, Domino Diversions. As most of you may know, Perry is a Solutions Architect at Binary Tree and a long-time
IBM Domino solutions expert. Today, Perry is heavily involved
in the success of Binary Tree's pre-sales, technical, and support teams, and focuses primarily on educating and supporting customers during their Microsoft Exchange migrations.
The thought of renaming a Domino Server is a daunting task at best. There are innumerable considerations to address when undertaking this task. There is the server security, groups, connection documents, mail-in-databases, access control lists, and not to mention the user desktop icons. As I continue to work with various organizations, the thought of Domino server virtual clustering has proven to be a way to simplify some of these processes.
The concept entails an Enterprise version of Domino. The administrator will still need to register a new server in the Address book. This will be the new name of the server. Then the next step is to create a cluster with the old server name, then the new server name. Once the cluster directory and cluster replicator tasks are initiated, the cluster directory database will contain cluster information for only the old server. 
The next step involves the creation of agents to scan all ACL’s to add the new server entry. Beware of roles, the agents will likely not associate the new server listing with any roles the old server had. Then connection documents to and from the old server need to be copied, and modified to use the new server name. Similarly group membership of the old server will require the new server to be added. Next will be to copy and paste, then modify all of the mail-in-database names. This will need to reflect the new server name. Once all of these aspects are in place, then the server’s Notes.ini can be modified to use the new server ID file for serverid= and keyidfile= to use the new server ID file.
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As a Domino Administrator for over 13 years now, I bleed yellow through and through. Since working with Domino since release 4.1, I've seen the product mature and expand into a vast array of capabilities. During that time, however, the number of people working in Domino Administration seems to be fading. I often wonder, "where are all of these people today and what has happened to them?" In order to answer my question, I started to look into what the market is doing. I've watched a Beacon Award winning LAEC Center close business, I've watched good friends and colleagues phased out of jobs, and I've watched as job opportunities dwindle and customers of old moving their Domino messaging to Microsoft Exchange.
With an increasing number of organizations making the move away from Domino to Microsoft, what options are available for displaced Domino Administrators? It's quite obvious that with the increasing move from Domino to Microsoft, existing Domino Administrators need to get themselves up to speed on Microsoft Exchange. I'm personally in the process of starting to investigate Exchange mail retraining. Having worked both as a Developer and Administrator under Domino since 1993, I see that this particular portfolio asset is an abating opportunity. Working in the realm of messaging migrations, I get to see a lot of what corporations are doing in terms of messaging platform utilization, and, today, I see the majority migrating to Exchange.
So what can Domino Administrators do? There are a number of steps that can be taken. Here are my suggestions:
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