Skip to main content

Getting Contacts (Not Users) out of Your Notes/Domino NAB and into Office 365 Contacts

Recently we've been undertaking a task to move from IBM Domino to Office 365 with particular emphasis on the mail system. One of the first big tasks is to move all of our corporate contacts from the Domino NAB over to the Contacts area of office 365.

Corporate Contacts

Corporate contacts, in this sense are contacts which are shared by the entire organisation. I'm not talking about actual users who will have an Office 365 licence with your company or about personal contacts, who would normally reside in the personal address book.

In our case, we had about 6500 corporate contacts who needed to be migrated.

There's a contacts screen in Office 365 which is accessible from the Admin portal. It's under users, then contacts.

Exporting from Domino

In IBM Notes, open your company's address book and press Ctrl+A on people. If you have your staff and non-staff in the same address book, you'll probably want to sort by company and deselect all the staff.

Next, click File, Export Contacts. You'll want to choose either "All contacts in this view" or "only the contacts you selected" depending upon your circumstances.

I'd recommend exporting all fields. It's a little messier but it means that you get your contacts address information (if you have it in Domino already).

Choose a place to save the file and make sure that you've used CSV.

Excel Stuff in the Middle

Open the file in EXCEL,
Create a new file in excel with these fields as specified in this document.
  • ExternalEmailAddress
  • Name
  • FirstName
  • LastName
  • StreetAddress
  • City
  • StateorProvince
  • PostalCode
  • Phone
  • MobilePhone
  • Pager
  • HomePhone
  • Company
  • Title
  • OtherTelephone
  • Department
  • CountryOrRegion
  • Fax
  • Initials
  • Notes
  • Office
  • Manager
Search and Replace commas. Commas (and rabbit ears "" aka inverted commas) can really upset CSV imports. I just replaced all ours with nothing.

You may have to create the Name column out of formula ... ie: Assuming that first name is in cell C2 and last name is in cell D2, you'd use =CONCATENATE(C2, " ", D2). Then Autofill the column and then copy and paste it into another blank column (so you could paste (special) as values.

Importing to Office 365

The import to Office 365 is an entirely command line driven via PowerShell and these instructions helped enormously.  Make sure that you connect to your exchange online service first.  There's a link in step 1 but in case you can't find it, it's here.

I wish I could say that I completely understood the process I ran but I didn't.

It worked though, so I'm happy about that.

Now I just have to figure out groups.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher