I took the plunge. I finally did it. I moved.
As some folks read and reacted with disbelief on Twitter, I switched my email platform from Notes to Exchange.
We, at PSC, have been running both systems in parallel for quite some while: Exchange for the Microsoft team, Notes for the IBM/Lotus team. And as a Mac user, I just wanted to use Mac Mail and iCal.
Sadly, Lotus continues to take the high road when it comes to allowing people to use clients other than Notes with its Domino servers. And Exchange 2010 integrates rather nicely with Apple and its native Mac apps. I’ve been tempted to make the switch for quite some while now. End of the year, my calendar being pretty empty, seemed like the right time to do it.
I am rather impressed how simple and uneventful the move was. I had to setup some general mail settings (signature, refresh frequency), configure appearance and configuration of my BlackBerry, that was about it.
I used IMAP to download email from Domino into Mac Mail. That way I still have easy access to all my messages from Notes. Mac Mail allows me to easily move things around between accounts as does iCal and Address, making populating my newly minted Exchange account a snap.
The biggest issue I had were my contacts. For some odd reason, Mac Address would not import all contacts exported from Notes in a VCF file. Out of 300-some contacts, it would only import 13 – 15. I had to resort to the magic of Outlook 2011, which imported everything perfectly and synchronized with Mac Address.
If I think about it, I’ve never ever used anything other than Notes for email in a corporate environment. We’ll see how this experiment (pardon, “move”) works out for me. I yet might switch to Outlook 2011.
One thing I miss already is the ability to be prompted whether I want to save a copy of the message in my Sent folder. Not happy about my Sent folder filling up with silly 1-line responses. Anybody knows if Mac Mail can be configured to prompt?
Filed under: Lotus Notes | Tagged: Exchange, IBM, Lotus, Lotus Domino, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Migration | 4 Comments »