CASE STUDIES

Project Name: Lotus Notes™ to Microsoft® InfoPath™ Forms Conversion

Technology: InfoPath™ 2007, SharePoint™ 2007

Problems: The Client had a large number of Lotus Notes™ forms created over the last decade. The forms were a critical part of their global business with workflow and approval process dependencies. These forms were primarily available only via the Lotus Notes client and was not available via the browser. This limited the ability of employees to access the information without the availability of Lotus Notes.

The age and the inflexibility of the forms also required the Client's technology team's constant involvement.

Additionally, the client had started migrating their email systems from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and wanted to leverage Microsoft® Active Directory™ to manage user access more efficiently.

Solution: ConvergePoint was entrusted with the task of converting the existing Lotus Notes forms to Microsoft InfoPath.

The ConvergePoint team started with a business analysis of all existing forms that were being used by the client. Meeting with key business stakeholders, the team was able to determine the business value of each of the existing forms as well as proposed workflow modifications that would be preferred in the conversion. Once the team had understood the needs of the business, the next step was to create a project plan for the conversion.

A two phased approach was planned with the most commonly used forms scheduled to be converted in the first phase. Once the plan was approved by the key stakeholders, the team got to work.

One of the areas that was given specific importance was that the InfoPath forms were all exclusively web based and could be accessed from any compatible browser. The team used a SharePoint 2007 site as a library to store all of the InfoPath forms and the resulting data. This SharePoint 2007 site was embedded right into the existing corporate intranet. This allowed for tight integration with the existing Active Directory structure that was leveraged to determine specific user access and for approval workflows. InfoPath web services were used to send email alerts to users alerting them of form changes, submissions and when further action was required.

Once the ConvergePoint team developed, converted and tested the new InfoPath forms as per the project plan, key business users were invited to beta test their individual forms and approve the converted forms.

The InfoPath forms were deployed as planned and are currently in use.