Migrating from the IBM smartcloud to on-prem

As all involved know by now IBM will close down the IBM Smartcloud in July 2020. IBM has been buggering us with their messages that we should migrate away from their cloud for quite a while now. What is missing so far is a clear strategy of how to move away from the Smartcloud. IBM has done a couple of sessions where they basically just point you to a few partners that can help you migrate your data to another platform (IBM doesn’t care whether that’s to Domino/Connections or for example O365) for a good sum of money. HCL wants to work with a couple of designated partners who provide a partner cloud with Domino and Connections and who will get special tooling to allow them to migrate the data from the Smartcloud to their partner cloud without having to use the API’s. This tooling, however, will only be available in April 2020 leaving little time to migrate. Companies that don’t want to wait this long or would prefer to use the services of their trusted partner and the partners that are not part of the selected few are left in the cold.

I submitted a session abstract for Engage titled: Out of the cloud – Notes mail back to on prem to talk about ways to migrate your data. Regretfully, my session was not accepted. I also didn’t see any other session on the agenda covering this subject. I think that’s a bit of missed chance as it’s a subject that’s very current and could have been very interesting for smartcloud customers and their HCL partners. One problem I faced in writing my abstract was that as I was submitting a non commercial session, I couldn’t really talk about tooling. Though tooling is helpful when migrating a larger number of Notes mailboxes, I could have filled an interesting session about all the caveats you should expect to encounter when moving the mailboxes from the Smartcloud to on-prem or a partner cloud. I discussed a lot of them already in a previous article. For migrating your Connections data, you however really need a tool, which is why I didn’t include Connections in my session proposal. My employer, e-office, developed a tool in-house for migrating data from Smartcloud Connections to on-prem Connections. As it’s really targeted at this specific situation, it does a better job than the tooling that migrates on-prem or cloud Connections data to wherever. Both the tool that I built for the Domino migrations and the tool that e-office built for migrating your Connections data can be licensed to use for your migration. The offer will include some consultancy time from me, in case of a Domino migration or one of my colleagues in case of the Connections tool to help you get the most out of it. Of course if you are cloud customer yourself, we can also help you with the entire migration. If you’re interested and would like more info, please let me know. If you would like to receive a quote for the tooling, please send a mail to rene.rietveld@e-office.com.