Enterprise deployments of products such as Lotus Notes & Domino often represent decades of investment and embody critical company knowledge. DART, as a central part of CASAHL’s lifecycle solution, is uniquely powerful for ensuring all related information and insights are accounted for when transitioning to the Microsoft platform. CASAHL DART for Lotus Notes & Domino is a robust solution for collaborative planning during application and database migration projects from Lotus Notes & Domino. CASAHL uses this in-house solution, which is not available for external customer use, to review and refine input from an enterprise’s business domain experts, business users, and application developers and provide enterprises with detailed overviews of migration priorities, project plans, and resource estimates.

DART is a secure workspace for on-premises, hybrid, or cloud-based SharePoint or Office 365 that is initially populated with the results of a deployment analysis performed with the CASAHL Analyzer for Lotus Notes & Domino Applications. The consolidated, prioritized application and database migration plan created in DART, in turn, serves as input to CASAHL ecKnowledge, the enterprise-scale middleware solution for migrating collaborative applications and content to the Microsoft SharePoint platform and related tools.

As a central component in CASAHL’s optimization and modernization system, DART provides several important benefits:

  • High-Level Project Summary: Key performance indicators presented on the DART project home page make it easy for all stakeholders to see the current status of the migration project at a glance, and to monitor for any potential obstacles to migration. In addition to the comprehensive project dashboard, the DART workspace contains separate detailed pages for every application identified by Analyzer.

  • Automation and Archival Identification: DART uses the detailed deployment information produced by the Application Analyzer, including per-application complexity ratings and usage patterns, to identify opportunities to significantly reduce the number of applications to be migrated. This is accomplished by identifying common elements, such as replicas, templates, and consolidation groups that can be easily transitioned automatically, and low-use content that can be archived. Identifying and removing these items from the migration queue makes for faster, more efficient migrations.

  • Full Fidelity of Application Content: DART captures qualitative as well as quantitative deployment and strategy details during the assessment stage, including application metadata, sharing semantics, and access control. This information is retained throughout the transition progress to ensure that migrated content retains the details and context that contribute to its value.

  • User-Based Rationalization: DART provides a collaborative forum in which it collects and prioritizes information not directly manifested in deployed applications to create a space where additional business- and application-related details and priorities can be discussed and managed. The collaborative approach embodied in DART also provides a venue for application users to share insights such as details about which portions of applications are unused or rarely used, highlighting additional consolidation opportunities and capture budget-related considerations, such as migration cost limits for a particular application.

  • Automatic Generation of Design Specifications: DART user input on which portions of applications are critical to the enterprise, such as particular forms or views, is used to automatically generate a Word document that summarizes key perspectives for each selected application and determines which of its components need to be migrated.

  • “Soft Landing” Transition to SharePoint and Office 365: DART makes it possible for users participating in migration projects to experience the environment and tools they will be routinely using when the migration project is completed before the old content system is retired. This approach helps to foster participant buy-in, even among people who have worked for many years on the previously-deployed collaboration environment and may be apprehensive about the transition to the Microsoft platform, and avoids abrupt shifts that can disrupt user productivity.

  • Ease of Customization: DART can be readily customized to address organization-specific requirements, such as having different DART sites based on geographical or business functions, or enhancing survey questions based on current company-specific goals. This unique and comprehensive approach to migration analysis and planning ensures all consolidation opportunities are considered.

  • Optional Cloud-Based DART: Since DART can be hosted in Office 365 or SharePoint private cloud, organizations do not have to install anything on-premises in order to get started. This approach means many organizations can complete enterprise content analysis and begin collaboratively working on detailed modernization plans in a matter of days. If preferred, DART can also be run on-premises within an existing SharePoint deployment.

Overall, the qualitative details and insights captured in DART extend the information repository created by Analyzer to produce a consolidated, definitive record of an organization’s migration project plan, including schedule priorities, inter-application dependencies, and resource estimates. DART for Lotus Notes & Domino makes it possible to engage all roles in the migration process: application users can share their perspectives on which applications are still useful, and which can be improved; project managers can assign budget and times parameters for specific applications; application owners and developers can share their perspectives on application complexity and migration options.

If you are interested in learning more, use the form on the right to schedule a demonstration, or feel free to contact us for more information. DART for Notes & Domino is most effective when used in concert with Analyzer for Notes & Domino.