Secure Lotus Notes Migration to SharePoint Online.
Compliance-ready PDF archive for audit and retention.
The Challenge
The client relied on a large Lotus Notes database to store critical historical records required for compliance, audit, and regulatory assurance. Over time, the platform had become increasingly difficult and costly to support, with specialist skills scarce and operational risk growing.
Accessing historical data required the legacy Domino environment to remain online, creating an ongoing dependency on ageing infrastructure purely for reference purposes. This exposed the organisation to support risk, security concerns, and unnecessary operational overhead, while limiting the ability to modernise or retire the Lotus Notes platform safely.
The challenge was to preserve the full integrity, structure, and evidential value of the data while removing the dependency on Lotus Notes entirely.
Industrial Technology Company
Global Operations
Regulated Environment
Business-Critical Systems
The Solution
Migr8IT delivered a large-scale content migration, transforming more than 345,000 Lotus Notes records into a structured, fully searchable SharePoint archive designed for long-term retention and compliance.
Using Migr8IT’s proprietary high-fidelity conversion tooling, all Lotus Notes documents were converted to PDF while preserving original layout, structure, metadata, and document fidelity. This ensured the converted records retained their evidential value, visual consistency, and audit suitability, not just their raw content.
The resulting PDFs were indexed and surfaced directly within SharePoint, enabling fast, secure search and retrieval without any reliance on the legacy Domino environment.
Users gained immediate secure access to historical records through a modern enterprise platform, while IT teams were able to eliminate the operational burden of maintaining Lotus Notes solely for archive access.
The final solution delivered a secure, tamper-resistant archive that protects historical data, simplifies compliance, and provides long-term accessibility independent of ageing systems.
Using specialist Lotus Notes conversion tooling, Migr8IT created a secure, compliance-ready archive with full fidelity, metadata preservation, and evidential integrity. This approach delivers long-term audit confidence that generic export tools simply cannot provide.
Share This Case Study:
This was a major milestone in our digital transformation, ensuring important data is protected for the long term.
Feedback from the Client's Project Manager
Strategic Benefits
LONG-TERM DATA PRESERVATION
Critical business records were retained in a stable, durable format, ensuring continued access long after Lotus Notes retirement.
DATA SECURITY, COMPLIANCE AND GOVERNANCE
The PDF archive provides secure, auditable records aligned with corporate and regulatory retention standards.
COST AND RISK REDUCTION
Decommissioning the Lotus Notes application lowered ongoing licensing, hosting, and support costs while reducing security exposure.
FUTURE SCALABILITY
The archive framework can be extended to additional Lotus Notes databases or other structured data sources, supporting future digital transformation goals.
Business Impact
IMPROVED ACCESS TO INFORMATION
Users can quickly search and retrieve historical records directly from SharePoint across a range of devices.
IMMUTABLE RECORD INTEGRITY
All documents were converted to non-editable PDFs, ensuring the authenticity and evidential integrity of archived records.
BUSINESS CONTINUITY
Key historical data remains accessible and usable even after decommissioning the Domino environment.
SIMPLIFIED USER EXPERIENCE
The archive retained the original document layout and structure, minimising training and improving user confidence.
Measureable Outcomes
345,000
Lotus Notes records securely migrated and converted to searchable PDF format
200,000
Lotus Notes file attachments securely migrated with metadata
100%
Data preserved for compliance
Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'Compliance-Ready SharePoint archive' mean in this context?
It means we migrate legacy applications, documents and attachments from your HCL Domino / IBM Lotus Notes environment into a structured, searchable archive within Microsoft SharePoint Online (or another SharePoint-based setup). The data is converted (often to PDF) with preserved metadata, formatting, and structure to ensure long-term accessibility and compliance.
Can you only convert Lotus Notes documents to PDF?
No, PDF is just one option. Our proprietary tooling can convert Lotus Notes documents into high-fidelity PDF, HTML, and Microsoft Word (DOC/DOCX) formats.
When you choose Word output, the documents remain active, meaning they can still be edited, annotated or processed by downstream systems where required. PDF and HTML versions offer fixed, tamper-resistant representations suitable for long-term retention.
Across all formats, we preserve the original Lotus Notes document layout, formatting, rich text, tables, embedded content, and metadata. That fidelity ensures your SharePoint archive remains both compliant and trustworthy, giving you a like-for-like view of the original documents without relying on the thick client.
What if I only want to migrate metadata and /or attachments?
Our tooling supports migrating just the metadata, the attachments, or both, without generating a full document rendition. In many cases, organisations only need the raw content and descriptive fields preserved in SharePoint, especially when the original Lotus Notes document layout isn’t required for compliance or operational use.
This lighter-weight approach still gives you a clean, searchable archive in SharePoint, but avoids the overhead of producing high-fidelity document versions when they aren’t needed.
Can we build Power Apps using the migrated data?
Yes. Once your data is migrated into SharePoint, it becomes fully available for use inside the Microsoft Power Platform. You can build Power Apps to view, edit, search, or report on that data, depending on whether you’ve chosen a read-only archive or a fully interactive migration.
If your goal is to modernise the original application rather than simply archive it, we can design the target structures to be Power Apps-ready from day one. That makes it straightforward to extend the data with workflows in Power Automate, dashboards in Power BI, or custom low-code applications across Microsoft 365.
Why would an organisation archive its Lotus Notes data to SharePoint rather than fully migrating the application?
Archiving to SharePoint is a strategic option when you want to retain access to historical or regulatory data without maintaining the full Lotus Notes platform. It helps decommission legacy infrastructure, reduce support/licensing costs, and ensure you still have searchable access to important records, while freeing you from the operational overhead of running Domino for archive-only purposes.
Will the archive preserve document structure, attachments, metadata and searchability?
Yes. We extract each record (including attachments), convert or transform it (e.g., to non-editable PDF) and maintain metadata and original structure. Once loaded into SharePoint, full-text search, metadata filters and indexing allow your users to locate information quickly.
How much downtime or disruption will there be during the archive migration?
Minimal to none. Because this is an archive migration (not always interactive application replacement), users often continue normal operations while extraction and conversion run in the background. Only the final hand-over/load needs to coincide with cut-over to archive access. In our referenced project we achieved 100% record migration with zero downtime.