6. Improved Content Pages: In the SharePoint world, content doesn’t live only in list items and document library Office files, it also lives in pages. SharePoint 2007 included several different types of pages - basic pages, wiki pages, web part pages and publishing pages - but their capabilities were limited and end users’ editing experiences were mediocre. Content pages have been greatly improved in SharePoint 2010, and the new rich text editor sizzles. End users now can upload images and files, and even embed Web parts. These improvements make content pages a great target format for migrating certain types of Notes applications.
7. Code-Free Development Capabilities: There are good tools on the market today for migrating the content of Notes applications to SharePoint, but what about the design? A big barrier to moving large numbers of Notes applications to SharePoint is the cost of rebuilding complex applications.
Some organizations mistakenly assume a Notes application that took a certain number of hours to develop in Notes, with a certain number of lines of code, will require the same effort to rebuild on SharePoint. This is far from the truth. SharePoint is designed as a modern collaborative platform and allows you to do many things out-of-the-box or via the simple configuration that Notes developers had to build from scratch.
This list was fairly large in SharePoint 2007, but it’s expanded even more in SharePoint 2010. In addition to new “big ticket” items like the Managed Metadata feature, a number of smaller features helpful to developers will reduce the cost of building applications.
Many new capabilities are available to administrators who configure lists and libraries in a browser, including the ability to use simple input validation formulas. Now, you can specify validation for individual fields, or for the document as a whole, including messages that should be displayed if the tests fail. You also can add multi-level column indexes, specify which columns require unique values, and enforce “relational” constraints between lists.
SharePoint Designer, which facilitates deeper design of your sites without writing code, also plays a big role here. Now a free download, SharePoint Designer enables you to design declarative workflows and define external lists; perform more extensive page customizations; edit master pages; work with complex web parts; and add custom action buttons.
Another great way to further expand your code-free development options is to use third-party Web parts. Some Web part products on the market today are specifically designed to help reproduce Notes-like functionality in SharePoint at a much lower cost than if you had to develop it yourself.
8. InfoPath List Forms: Form design is one of the most important parts of a Notes-to-SharePoint migration. InfoPath, of course, is Microsoft’s primary solution for building data entry forms for complex business documents. Microsoft InfoPath 2010 is designed for both advanced business users and developers, and there are great tools available for migrating Notes form designs to InfoPath templates, as well as Notes documents to InfoPath data documents.
With SharePoint 2007, InfoPath could only be used with form libraries and brought some unfortunate limitations, but SharePoint 2010 introduces InfoPath List Forms, a feature that allows you to use InfoPath forms as your editor for list items. Now you get the best of both worlds – a lightweight method of storing documents with custom schema, and a great way to design custom forms for entering and displaying them.
9. Declarative workflow: When we think of complex custom Notes applications, we think of workflow. Notes workflows are almost always implemented as code attached to various buttons, form events, and agents. By contrast, the Microsoft platform encourages the use of declarative workflows to express your application logic as a set of rules that even a nonprogrammer can enter, modify and understand.
Declarative workflow capabilities have improved significantly in SharePoint 2010, and include a much richer set of out-of-the-box workflows to use in your applications, depending on what edition of SharePoint you install, and which SharePoint template you’re using. SharePoint Designer can address the majority of workflows in Notes applications without having to write code, eliminating the need to use Visual Studio.
Users have a much larger vocabulary of workflow “conditions” and “actions” to choose from, including such Notes-like items as changing permissions on a document after it is submitted for approval, sending mail notifications, and moving content to another location. You can now design workflows that operate at the site or list levels, reuse workflows across an entire site collection and even export them for use on a completely different SharePoint farm.
10. Business Connectivity Services and External Lists: Because Notes has many capabilities for connecting to external systems like relational databases and enterprise applications, some of the Notes applications may simply be front-ends for some backend system.
SharePoint 2010 replaces SharePoint 2007’s limited Business Data Catalog with a much more powerful external data connector called Business Connectivity Services (BCS). With this new facility, you can search, read and write content in your back-end systems and allows you to expose this content as an External List, which looks and feels like a native SharePoint list that you can easily include as part of any SharePoint page.
This opens up the very interesting possibility of migrating your Notes content to SQL Server and still keeping the main user interface in SharePoint. Many of the new capabilities mentioned above, such as InfoPath list forms, are still available when your data resides external to SharePoint.
We’ve talked about 10 aspects of SharePoint 2010 that will make life a lot easier for organizations transitioning from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. While other non-Notes features of SharePoint 2010 will appeal to administrators and developers, decisions about what can and should be migrated come down to capabilities and cost. How much will it cost to migrate content and application design? What will my applications look like and what will they be able to do when I get there?
SharePoint 2010 addresses both of these questions in a big way, and already has accelerated the rate of Notes migrations around the world.
Steve Walch has been a Lotus Notes and Microsoft technologist since 1993, and has built a number of successful products. In 2002, he founded Proposion Software, which eventually focused on Notes-to-SharePoint migration and integration tools, and became the leading vendor in the market. Quest Software acquired Proposion in 2007. Steve keeps his Notes SharePoint blog filled with postings about his favorite migration tool.
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