Busy Day... Week... Year...

Today, Microsoft publicly announced its new set of tools to make the transition from Lotus to Microsoft easier.  The announcement details:

• A new set of coexistence and migration tools (Microsoft's Transporter Suite 2007 for Lotus Domino)
• Role-Based Templates for SharePoint My Site: Specific application templates based on common roles like sales managers, IT engineer, etc.
• 40 Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: Providing a great starting point for many custom applications.

  (* you can read the whole Press Release here )

As part of this we are opening up a public beta for the Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino for anyone interested to download, trial and provide feedback. The beta program is being run through Microsoft Connect at http://connect.microsoft.com.  To access the Beta simply signup for Connect and select to apply for 'Microsoft Transporter Public Beta' under the programs in 'Available Connections'.

Great day for customers who are deploying Microsoft's collaboration products:

The Transporter Suite is a huge step forward at making transitions easier.  We look at this release from several points: 

• 2007 collaboration: We fully support Microsoft's 2007 product line.  All our tools are designed for Exchange 2007, Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 - enabling customers to migrate to the latest and greatest collaboration software available.
• New features: We added a ton of new features (like a unified admin GUI, PowerShell foundation, ACL migrations, User migrations, scripting, multi-threading, and more) that ease the migrations for our customers migrating accounts, mailboxes, applications and doing analysis.
• Enabling future scenarios: We built the suite as a platform that we are now using to add additional scenarios for future releases.  Including the support for custom application migration, local archive migration, encrypted mail migrations, personal address books and more.   We are also working closely with partners to extend even further...
• Endless possibilities and customization: our new tools are setting a new coexistence & migration direction for our customers and partners to expedite their migrations.  Being built on PowerShell, there is nothing they can not do!!!

Check out the cool video on Channel 9:  http://channel9.msdn.com/go/mscolab/transporter !!!

There will be lots of additional information, some Live Meeting demo's showcasing the extensibility of our tools for customers and partners & more. 

All of this starts today & will be happening later this week and more... keep on checking the CollabTools blog too!

- Erik Ashby