A Central Texas industrial manufacturer retired IBM Lotus Notes in favor of Hosted Microsoft Exchange when CMIT Solutions of Austin Central managed an 18-hour legacy email platform migration, moving every mailbox, calendar, and contact with zero data loss and connecting the company to modern productivity, mobility, and security tooling for the first time in years.
For organizations that built their IT infrastructure in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lotus Notes was the backbone of internal communications, workflow automation, and document collaboration. By 2019 it had become an anchor: expensive to maintain, incompatible with mainstream productivity tools, and increasingly difficult to integrate with the cloud platforms the rest of the industry had standardized on.
Project Snapshot
- Client: Industrial manufacturer
- Location: Central Texas
- Service: Productivity Applications
- Scope: 18 hours — phased Lotus Notes to Hosted Exchange migration, from assessment through post-migration support
- Outcome: All mailboxes, calendars, and contacts migrated with zero data loss and rapid staff adoption
The Challenge
Lotus Notes to Exchange migrations have a reputation for difficulty, and it is deserved. Notes stores data in a proprietary NSF database format that ordinary migration tools cannot read, so the project required specialized tooling, in this case BitTitan MigrationWiz, to extract, transform, and import the data into Exchange.
Calendar entries, recurring appointments, contact databases, and archived email each behave differently and each require individual handling. A poorly executed migration produces lost messages, corrupted recurring meetings, or broken shared mailboxes, and in a manufacturing business every one of those translates directly into missed commitments and disrupted operations.
The Solution
Jorge Velasquez and his team treated the migration as a sequence of verified steps rather than a single cutover event. Work began with a pre-migration assessment covering mailbox inventory, data volume analysis, and compatibility review, so the scope was understood before anything moved.
BitTitan MigrationWiz was then configured and validated specifically for the Notes to Exchange path, and mailboxes were migrated in phases with per-user validation at each stage. Calendar and contact data were verified separately, and users received Outlook client setup and training so the new platform felt familiar on day one.
What We Delivered
- Pre-migration assessment: mailbox inventory, data volume analysis, and compatibility review
- BitTitan MigrationWiz configured and validated for Lotus Notes to Exchange migration
- Phased mailbox migration with per-user validation at each stage
- Calendar and contact data migrated and verified
- Outlook client setup and training for all affected users
- Post-migration support and issue resolution
The Results
The move to Hosted Exchange unlocked capabilities the manufacturer had been living without for years: native integration with Microsoft productivity tools, mobile device synchronization, shared calendar management, and modern spam and malware filtering that a legacy Notes environment could not provide.
Adoption was fast because the migration was phased and the training happened alongside it. Staff moved onto Outlook with minimal disruption, which is what allowed an 18-hour project to start returning value from the first week rather than after months of workaround and complaint.
Key Takeaways
- Proprietary platforms quietly raise costs; the longer a legacy email system stays in place, the more the business pays to work around it.
- Specialized data formats need specialized tooling, and per-user validation at each phase is what keeps a complex migration at zero data loss.
- Training delivered alongside the migration is what converts a technical success into a productivity gain.
Still running legacy email at your Austin business? Speak with CMIT Solutions of Austin Central about Productivity Applications and a clean migration path.
