Which is the better enterprise email platform - Notes or Exchange? Enough organisations are seeing reasons to switch sides to create a thriving market for tools to assist with migration in both directions.

Quest has released a new version of Quest Notes Migrator for Exchange 4.2, with support for Exchange 2010. The company claims it simplifies the migration process, increasing predictability, mitigating the risks and reducing the costs associated with Notes migrations.

“The current economic climate has produced an increase in Lotus-to-Microsoft migrations, as many organisations simplify their enterprise to cut costs, or streamline after company mergers or acquisitions,” said Bill Evans, vice president, SharePoint and Notes Transition business unit, Quest Software.

“To meet this demand, Quest has developed analysis, migration and coexistence tools to help customers mitigate risk throughout the transition. Through our partnership with Microsoft and our mutual certified partners, customers can purchase these solutions and execute a predictable and affordable migration with a trusted migration expert.”

Spanish developer SysTools Group thinks there is money to be made betting on the other horse.

It claims mail routing and easily routed workflow make Notes a better email client than Outlook for large deployments, which is coaxing many enterprises to switch from Outlook to Notes.

It offers its SysTools Outlook to Notes tool as a third-party PST to NSF software to help to convert Outlook emails to Notes.

The latest version 6.0 now facilitates easier batch conversion to Convert Outlook Emails in multiple numbers at a time to NSF. 

Transend, a provider of email migration and conversion offerings, has launched Migrator for IBM Lotus Foundations, an edition of its email conversion utility. It is a client application for converting email data from any non-IBM email server or client to IBM Lotus Foundations Start and IBM Lotus Domino server.

According to Transend, the email conversion utility includes batch templates, which allow new Lotus Foundations customers to migrate mailboxes from products like Microsoft Exchange/Outlook or Novell GroupWise to Lotus Foundations one-by-one, or in bulk.

In addition, the new offering also provides both graphical user interface and a command line batch processor for automating the migration of multiple mailboxes from a central location. The new client application is licensed solely for the conversion of email data to Lotus Foundations.

Joshua Krefetz, VP of business development at Transend, said: “Transend understands that IBM Lotus Foundations Business Partners need to deliver reliable and cost-effective IT solutions to their SMB customers.

“To enhance efficiency, we included 'batch templates' that simplify the overall migration experience, while maintaining the same level of reliability and affordability that has helped Transend successfully migrate more than 10-million mailboxes over the last 10+ years.”