Showing posts with label Migration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Migration. Show all posts

Friday, September 5, 2008

The woes of registering users with a text file

Had another one of those moments today that I wished Notes could do something the way I want it to be done, rather then the way it does it. Here's the scenario.

Recently, our company has entered into an agreement to purchase another company. If you know where I work and you follow the business news, you know what I'm talking about. As part of our normal migration of users from a new company, we set up the users in Domino as if they were already on our mail system, but, we add in their current companies internet email address in the "Forwarding address" field in the Person Document so that any mail that is addressed to them at our domain get sent to there's. Not a big deal. It's nice to have that in place so that when I migrate them from Exchange to Domino, the mail file and everything else is in place and all we need to do is remove the forward and migrate their stuff. But, it became a big deal when I was told the amount of users that are involved in this migration. Well over 1000. So I started looking into using the "Import text file" option available in the user registration screen. Really nice feature if you have uber amounts of people to add into Domino and you get a text file export from HR of usernames. But, it's not so nice if you have to do what I was describing above. There is a limitation to what the import can do. As I had found out through searching the web and talking with support, even though you enter in a forwarding address in the text document, when you register them in Domino it will not populate that field in their Person Document. The only way that field will get populated is if you select "Other Internet" or "Other" for Mail system. Only then will you see on the address tab the users other internet email address, but then you do not have any Lotus Notes information for the user available. So, this means that I will have to do one of two things.
1. Register everyone normally, then go in and cut and paste in the other internet email address to the Forwarding address field.
2. Register the user twice. Once with the Mail system set to Lotus Notes, and then a second time with Other Internet selected. Then when I register them for a second time, tell the registration process to update the person record for each user. Once that's done, go into each person document and switch the mail system back to Lotus Notes so that it shows all of the information.
Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? I'm sure that there is some code that could be written to help with this process, but then that involves adding more people to the mix and making the process harder than I think it should be. It would be nice if that in the Domino Admistrator when you import that text file, it will register the user as a Lotus Notes user with the Forwarding address information added.

I've placed this issue up on IdeaJam as well in hopes to get as much feedback as possible

If anyone has some suggestions, please share them!