I have a question to ask and a tip to share

Background
I want to move some information contained in an IBM Lotus Notes Notebook (notebook.nsf or journal.nsf) into a Microsoft OneNote file. The documents in my Notebook.nsf contain rich text, attachments and embedded objects -- all of which I would like to preserve in OneNote.

The Notes to Office 365/Outlook migration tools I've found migrate mail/calendar/contacts and some do tasks, but none so far migrate notebook.nsf which is separate from my Notes mail file.

Question
Are you aware of a tool or method to migrate documents from a Lotus Notes Notebook into OneNote other than using "print to OneNote" or Copy/paste for each document?

I would appreciate any tips or recommendations you can share.

Tip
You may be able to convert documents in your Notebook.nsf into emails in the mail file. I recently helped a client who was migrating from Notes to Outlook accomplish this. The client had several eProductivity Reference Databases (essentially a GTD enabled notebook.nsf) to convert. I worked with a colleague to create a program to migrate documents from that file into the user's Lotus Notes Mail file as email messages. Our program did all of the conversion, making it a one click operation. When done, the client had a single email in his mail file for each source document in his notebook.nsf. This allowed him to migrate his emails and his Notebook.nsf documents into Outlook (all as emails). From there, the client will have to find a way to move his emails from Outlook into OneNote but I assume there is a path for that.

If you can help with the question above, I would appreciate it.

Discussion/Comments (4):

Stephan H. Wissel (http://www.wissel.net): 05/03/2017 3:04:54
How to migrate IBM Notes Notebook to Microsoft OneNote

Short answer: you don't

Long answer: Notes RichText is sufficiently different from RTF that a 100% preservation will most likely not work. The main point of contention will be the embedded objects. OLE is all but dead.

What you can do:

PLAN1:

a) get Ben's RichText -> MIME enhancer

b) Use a script to extract content into MIME (works with everything short of OLE, works much better with Ben's magic, but basic works to some extend too

c) use that same script to write it into OneNote

PLAN2:

d) extend the script to activate all OLE objects, save them as files to the file system, delete the embedded object, reattach -> go back to a)

PLAN3:

Use a powershell script and automate the copy/paste operation -> wild guess what would happen to OLE objects and sprinkled in attachments


Eric Mack (www.ica.com): 05/03/2017 8:42:23
re: How to migrate IBM Notes Notebook to Microsoft OneNote

Thank you, Stephan. Good suggestions to evaluate. I appreciate the pointer to Ben as well. I'll reach out to see what his tool can do as well.


Ben Langhinrichs (http://geniisoft.com): 05/04/2017 11:26:52
How to migrate IBM Notes Notebook to Microsoft OneNote

I'm afraid that OneNote is very limited in how it takes in data. I assumed it had to be able to import something, if nothing else HTML, but it doesn't. We can generate a number of formats, but OneNote doesn't accept any of them, even their own. They use an old Word .doc format internally, but don't even offer an import for .doc files. Given all that, you may be very limited in what you can do. It sounds like your best bet may be using the OneNote print driver and creating images of your pages, but they won't be editable. I could generate them all as MHT files and you could insert them as attachments, but they still wouldn't be editable, and each would have to be launched to view.

As a caution, it doesn't look all that much easier to get anything OUT of OneNote either, so you may be moving to a fairly closed system.

Sorry I couldn't help more, Good luck!


Vitor Pereira (): 05/10/2017 11:41:57
How to migrate IBM Notes Notebook to Microsoft OneNote

If it helps there is an api for OneNote Online, you can use PowerShell to post html to it.



Discussion for this entry is now closed.