Coming together

Sunday I took the time to regale you all with the technical ins and outs of the issues I was having with moving mail servers. The pieces started to come together today and it's kind of exciting.

This morning I was searching high and low for some sort of Lotus Notes expert who could give me some help. Even if it was paid help. (Unlike MS products Lotus experts like to hide or not exist, so it's not so easy to find Lotus help.) After I found an expert and posted my question I went poking around the system and knowing full well that I could mess it up just as much as I could fix it I went carefully to places where Lotus likes to hide settings. After about ten minutes poking around in some new places and reconfiguring information around it suddenly worked.

I celebrated with a poke to twitter... as no one else was around at the time.

Then I discovered that the Google IMAP mail downloader built into the Google Mail app didn't recognize Lotus 6.5. (Big surprise... I wish I didn't recognize Lotus) So I figured out another way involving Outlook and 2 IMAP connections to get the mail to transfer. I think wrote out the process for doing this (3 pages per user) and calculated the time (30 minutes minimum) and added it all together and figured I would be looking at more than 40 hours of time for the migration. Even cutting that in half with another worker we'd be looking at 20 hours of work each. Which considering we'd be starting on Friday evening we were looking at an ALL day Saturday migration. Not how I envisioned spending my weekend.

The idea was tossed around that we hired someone to program the Google Mail API and Lotus Notes together. However that proved to be fairly expensive. (Who knew?!)

So after a bit of poking around I found a NSF (Lotus database file) to PST (Outlook mail file) converter that works REALLY well. From there I added an Outlook to Google apps uploader that takes PST files and uploads them and the whole process takes on average about 15 minutes. It's a fairly simple solution for something that could take a long time. As with anything technical there is always a more simple solution, in this case it would require programming and an almost unlimited budget, but there is a solution that would take almost no time.

This weekend is looking like it might actually only take about the span of a normal work day! And I'll treat myself to the new Star Trek movie when I'm done. Thanks for the prayers on this subject I asked for on Sunday. I know sometimes I ask for things that are maybe technically weird that aren't so easy to understand, but I think the results for our missionaries because of this are going to be pretty great!

Please continue to keep this process in your prayers. Technology is a somewhat unrecognized spiritual battle ground, and God can conquer here just as much as He can anywhere else!

~B.