Lotus notes application access to microsoft exchange server

Question

We have Lotus Notes based application, which is accessed by several users. We communicate with our users by using mailboxes which reside on Domino server. With mailboxes migrating from Lotus notes to Microsoft exchange. What are possible ways to continue communications categories mentioned below:

1) Send normal email containing attachment to users. - Is it possible to send email from lotusscript when mailbox resides on microsoft exchange server? Any other solution.

2) Send email with buttons to approve or reject - How will it be done through Lotus notes when mailbox is microsoft exchange? In case we do not migrate mailbox however our clients access outlook mailbox is it still possible to send email containing approval buttons etc?

3) Agents look up mailbox regularly to receive communication from backend - Is it possible to access Microsoft exchange mailbox from Lotus notes so that we can process incoming emails? Any other solution?

Answer 1

1) You first need to setup your Notes Domain to be able to forward to an Exchange domain. Microsoft provides some help here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff597984(EXCHG.80).aspx

As you migrate users, you'll change their person documents to point to "Other Internet Mail", and include their Exchange email address, so the Notes environment knows how to reach them. Up to this point, this is something a Notes Administrator would handle if you have one at your company.

After that, you can send to any Notes user normally from LotusScript. Attachments go through fine.

2) Approval buttons are not feasible because they require some level of interactivity to be sent back to Notes. When you send an email from Notes to Exchange, you're sending it over SMTP and usually in an HTML format. It's the same as if you send an email from Notes to someone across the globe - as soon as it leaves the Notes domain, the email is converted to a MIME-based email and Notes-specific buttons, embedded objects, etc won't be converted.

As an alternative, you could send a link to the Notes database and have the users click that first, then open up the database to approve. That's very easy if your Notes database is on Domino and accessible via a browser. If it's a database that requires the Notes client, and you're on Windows, you can programmatically create links to the documents using the Notes:// URL scheme, which can easily be sent in an email.

3) This is a "it depends" answer. What are you trying to accomplish? If you're reacting to emails sent from an application, you could perhaps send two emails - one to a user, one to the database within Lotus Notes that needs to run an action. Or, you can set up rules from Exchange that send emails to Notes to trigger actions. If you absolutely must react to emails sent to Exchange, you should look into using Rules in Outlook/Exchange, and perhaps VBA to gain finer control of what actions occur.