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Introduction Please note that this post does not address the complexities of migrating entire Microsoft Exchange installations. For this there are IBM tools as well as some 3rd party solutions that I really prefer. After reading through the below example you’ll see that this approach really doesn’t work for larger migrations but might work well for migrating individual users coming into your organization with an existing Outlook Express installation. Migrate contacts from the address book by exporting them as vCards and then import these into the personal NAB of the user.

Requirements
Well for starters make sure to install the migration tools as part of the Notes Client install package. There are a couple of different mail systems you can migrate from but here I’ll focus on Microsoft Outlook Express since it is the most common scenario for single user migrations. It is also required that you run the IMAP server task on the Domino server.

From here on I’ll assume:

• That you succesfully installed the Notes client, including the migration tools, on the machine where the Outlook Express client is installed.
• That you already created the user using Domino Administrator and configured the Notes client accordingly.
• That the user mail database is using the Extended Mail Template (or above).
• That the mail server is running the IMAP server task.

This post covers Notes 6.5.x/7.x (but I assume Notes 6.0.x will work as well).

Steps to migrate Outlook Express
Open a command prompt and navigate to your Notes binary directory (e.g. C:Program FilesLotusNotes). Running the nupgrade.exe tool with the “/?” command line option will show the list of available options.

C:Program FilesLotusNotes>nupgrade.exe /?

Notes 7.x	Notes.6.5.x

As you can see from the screenshot on the left the command line option “4” means Outlook Express so we go ahead and run the command again using that option. As you can see from the screenshot on the right, the prompt from Notes 6.5.x (and probably also Notes 6.0.x) is wrong. Although the command line option “4” isn’t listed it is still available.

C:Program FilesLotusNotes>nupgrade.exe 4

After being prompted for the Notes password the following dialog box is presented. Make sure the information on the right is correct.

• User Name
  It is pretty common having to change is the specified username. The username should be a username valid for logging in using the IMAP/HTTP protocol.
• Account name
  This can be anything and is only used to create an account in Outlook Express as shown later.
• IMAP server
  Specify a DNS resolvable hostname to the Domino server containing the mail database of the specified username.

Click OK and (very) quickly hereafter the process is complete.

A common error message at this point is the “Internet Address Is Missing” dialog box. To resolve this refer to technote 1091375. The message basically means that the user doesn’t have an e-mail address specified in his Person document on the server.

Now when you open the Outlook Express client you should see something like the screenshot below. Aside from the existing account a new account has been added at the bottom (in this case called “Domino Administrator”).

Select the account on the left and click the “IMAP Folders…” button in the right pane as shown below.

You will be presented with a dialog box showing the existing folders in the Notes mail database. Select the individual folders you would like to make visible and click the “Show”-button. A little icon will indicate that the folder is visible. New folders can be created as normally in Outlook Express.

Back in Outlook Express simply drag the e-mails from the existing Outlook Express folders to the folders added from the mail database or to newly created folders. You can select multiple e-mails at once.

Once you migrating the e-mails you should see the e-mails appearing in the Notes mail database as shown below.

Technorati tag(s): Lotus Notes

A lot of web applications has a requirement to export some data to Excel spreadsheets. Whether you write the code (normally an agent) to export the data in LotusScript or Java you normally have two options: Use a HTML page Use a XML document I’m going to concentrate here on using the HTML option since it is by far the easiest and the one that produces the shortest agent. However using the XML option affords you a number of other advanced options such as creating named cells and creating multiple worksheets in a workbook. I really suggest looking into this option if you need more specialized formatting. To do this the easiest approach is creating the spreadsheet in Excel, saving is as XML and then using the generated XML document as a “template”.

Anyways – on with the export. To export from the web to Excel using a HTML document is mind numbingly easy. Simply create a HTML document with a HTML table and set the Content-type to application/vnd.ms-excel. Exporting a static spreadsheet with two columns and two rows is as simple as the following:

Sub Initialize
   Dim session As New NotesSession
   Dim docContext As NotesDocument
   Set docContext = session.DocumentContext

   'set content-type
   Print "Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel"

   'start table
   Print |<HTML>|
   Print |<body><table border="1">|

   'output table
   Print |<tr><td>|
   Print |1-1|
   Print |</td><td>|
   Print |1-2|
   Print |</td></tr>|
   Print |<tr><td>|
   Print |2-1|
   Print |</td><td>|
   Print |2-2|
   Print |</td></tr>|

   'stop table and document
   Print |</table></body></html>|

End Sub

The trick is however to set the page title and page orientation for print. To do this you use can use some Microsoft proprietary CSS extensions. The changes from the above code is highlighted in bold.

Sub Initialize
   Dim session As New NotesSession
   Dim docContext As NotesDocument
   Set docContext = session.DocumentContext

   'set content-type
   Print "Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel"

   'start table
   Print |<html xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel">|
   Print |<head>|
   Print |
<style>
  <!--table
  @page
   {mso-header-data:"&CMultiplication Table00ADate: &D00APage &P";
   mso-page-orientation:landscape;}
   br
     {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}

  -->
</style>
  <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
   <x:ExcelWorkbook>
    <x:ExcelWorksheets>
     <x:ExcelWorksheet>
      <x:Name>Sample Workbook</x:Name>
      <x:WorksheetOptions>
       <x:Print>
        <x:ValidPrinterInfo/>
       </x:Print>
      </x:WorksheetOptions>
     </x:ExcelWorksheet>
    </x:ExcelWorksheets>
   </x:ExcelWorkbook>
  </xml><![endif]-->|

   'start body and table
   Print |</head><body><table border="1">|

   'output table
   Print |<tr><td>|
   Print |1-1|
   Print |</td><td>|
   Print |1-2|
   Print |</td></tr>|
   Print |<tr><td>|
   Print |2-1|
   Print |</td><td>|
   Print |2-2|
   Print |</td></tr>|

   'stop table and document
   Print |</table></body></html>|

End Sub

It is as simple as that. The trick is of cause in the CSS extensions to control the page setup. The ones used here should be pretty self-explainatory. There are numerous other CSS extensions you can use – see the link at the bottom for more information.

Hope it helps someone. Happy Thursday.

Further reading:

• Microsoft Office HTML and XML Reference

Technorati tags: Show-n-tell Thursday, SnTT